How to Fix Pre-School 
By Martin Harris

For reasons too space-consuming to relate here, I recently took down from my little five-foot-shelf my 1994 copy of The Bell Curve, that Murray-and-Herrnstein mega-book which introduced the phrase "cognitive elite" to a broad readership, along with a subordinate argument that the three major human races are marginally different, on average, in IQ, as shown graphically on a --what else?-- bell curve. Along with it I took down my copies of two rebuttal-books, each an anthology of essays by outraged critics.

One is the 1995 The Bell Curve Wars, edited by Steven Fraser, and the other is the 1999 Race and IQ, edited by Ashley Montagu. The rather remarkably non-analytical arguments range from "race doesn’t exist" (Race, p. 79) to "The Bell Curve is hate literature with footnotes" (Wars. p. 93) but the really interesting part pops up on p.355 of Race, where author Urie Bronfenbrenner opens a different line of thinking and starts by conceding that "long-term effects of pre-school programs…significant differences between experimental and control groups…were no longer visible at the end of second grade". By the mid-90’s, it turns out, experts in the pre-school education field were aware that it wasn’t working, something that contemporary advocates of public school expansion still refuse to recognize.

The same conclusion came from a February 2006 U-Cal/Santa Barbara study: "any advantage from pre-school in kindergarten performance had faded away by third grade". Chris Braunlich of the Thomas Jefferson Institute has written a two-page summary of that and multiple similar findings. The title is "Arguments for Universal Pre-School Don’t Add Up". 

On p. 358 of Race, therefore, Urie Bronfenbrenner proposes a fix: home-based intervention, to replace or supplement group-based (public school, Head Start, et al) programs. In subsequent pages he focuses on the students’ mothers, describing not only mother-child-tutor home visits but mother-classes in some sort of classroom. By p. 363 he’s writing that "the generalization that parent intervention has more lasting effects the earlier it is begun can now be extended into the first year of life", because (p.365) "a parent education component is important", and that is because "…it appears to enhance the mothers’ perception of themselves [as] capable of independent thought". But then, a page later he recognizes that many such parents "are neither willing nor able to participate in the activities required by a parent-intervention program", so he goes on to discuss the Milwaukee Project, designed to "remove the child from his home for most of his waking hours…and entrusting primary responsibility for his development to persons specifically trained for the job". This level of governmental intervention works, he happily writes: "the program has been astoundingly successful" but then he adds the same caution which came out of Head Start failure findings, "and will probably continue to be so long as intervention lasts". A page later he concedes the obvious: "the costs are prohibitive in terms of large scale applicability" but doesn’t go anywhere near the question of the right of a supposedly limited constitutional government to depopulate households, no matter how abysmal their adults have made them, of their own children when no recognizable abuse is taking place. Maybe there will be a new crime on the books: willful failure to read to your kids. Failure-to-read would then lead to child removal and growth in government employment in the "persons specifically trained for the job" category. 

Alternatively, Bronfenbrenner has a lower-cost solution: on p.370 he writes glowingly of such kids "placed in foster families who were above average in economic security and educational and cultural status…the average IQ of the children's true mothers was 86; by the age of 13, the mean IQ of their children placed in foster homes was 106…those who made the greatest sustained gains were those who had experienced maximal stimulation in infancy with optimum security and affection following placement at an average of three months of age", and not a word about Head Start or any other pre-school equivalent. I won’t even mention the use of IQ as a success-measure by folks who angrily rebutted The Bell Curve by denying the validity of IQ measurements. 

Today’s pre-school advocates know all of this long-documented background, of course. They just choose not to talk about it. 
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights