Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst writes,

Unfortunately, supporters of Preschool for All, including some academics who are way out in front of what the evidence says and know it, have turned a blind eye to the mixed and conflicting nature of research findings on the impact of pre-k for four-year-olds. Instead, they highlight positive long term outcomes of two boutique programs from 40-50 years ago that served a couple of hundred children.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I take the first sentence to be a swipe at James Heckman.

Whitehurst summarizes the results of a larger, more recent study, and concludes

This is the first large scale randomized trial of a present-day state pre-k program. Its methodology soundly trumps the quasi-experimental approaches that have heretofore been the only source of data on which to infer the impact of these programs. And its results align almost perfectly with those of the Head Start Impact Study, the only other large randomized trial that examines the longitudinal effects of having attended a public pre-k program. Based on what we have learned from these studies, the most defensible conclusion is that these statewide programs are not working to meaningfully increase the academic achievement or social/emotional skills and dispositions of children from low-income families.

I received a review copy of The Smart Society, by Peter D. Salinas, a former provost for the State University of New York. Unlike me, he takes a fairly optimistic view that school reform can have a big effect on outcomes.

He writes,

we found a near perfect correlation of graduation rates with the quality of a student’s high school preparation

This suggests that until we find a way to graduate more students who are prepared for college, sending more students to college is not going to work out well.

Fair enough, but can we improve K-12 performance? He writes,

Countless studies refute the notion that just because upper-middle-class adults engage in “assortative” (i.e., class-based) mating, their children have any genetic advantage in intelligence. Yet, despite not being necessarily “smarter” than the general population–or even than the majority of disadvantaged children–nearly all upper-middle-class children graduate from high school and most go on to and graduate from college–mainly because their well-educated parents see to it.

His assertion that the children of upper-middle-class parents are not necessarily smarter than the general population is one that I find unconvincing. The only citation in the paragraph leads to single paper, which only deals with assortative mating and as far as I can tell reaches a different conclusion than what Salins suggests.

Later, he writes

France’s preschool initiative has been remarkably successful in raising later academic achievement and high school graduation levels, especially among disadvantaged children. A 1992 French government survey of children entering preschool in 1980 found that preschool attendance significantly reduced the school retention (i.e., non-dropout) rate disparity between the children of privileged and disadvantaged families.

This time, the citation seems to be mis-typed, because it leads to a paper that has nothing to do with pre-school or France. In any case, I wonder what the disparity between privileged and disadvantaged children in terms of educational attainment looks like today in France.

There is much to like in the book. However, when I find statements that go against my own views of the effects of education, I want better evidence behind them.