Advocates calling for universal pre-K despite costs and questionable results

Michael Bielawski/TNR

EARLY EDUCATION: Sherry Carlson, senior director of Vermont Birth to Five, spoke to the House Education Committee on Thursday morning and said early education needs to be more accessible and adequate.

MONTPELIER, Vt. — The House Education Committee is hearing what’s working and what’s not with the state’s pre-K education law, which enables families to seek state payment for 10 hours of pre-K funding for 35 weeks in a year.

A report last fall by the Agency of Education and the Agency of Human Services found that more children are attending pre-K since its implementation, but still some low-income families are not taking advantage, and other families don’t always qualify. The situation has resulted in lawmakers hearing multiple testimonies for either maintaining or expanding funding.

Friday afternoon, Paul Behrman, director of the Champlain Valley Head Start, told committee members that programs use a combination of federal funds from Head Start and support from Act 166, but he would like to see more.

“Generally speaking, I am in favor of universality,” Behrman said. “Ideally, I would like to see birth to 5 completely publicly funded, that is my ideal. I think a lot of the challenges that we face, not just in Vermont but across the nation, are by virtue of this patchwork of funding.”

The committee didn’t hear much criticism about the expansion of pre-K in Vermont, but the idea of the state educating children under the age of 5 is controversial. Critics say it takes the parenting of tots away from parents and is expensive for taxpayers.

Rob Roper, president of the Ethan Allen Institute, says Vermont should not be pursuing pre-K expansion.

“If you look at the programs that have been implemented on the same kind of scale that the state is trying to implement them on, places like Georgia and Tennessee, these programs are very expensive and they really show absolutely no benefit,” Roper told True North.

Critics point to a 2016 study by Vanderbilt University that found no benefit for kids who went through Tennessee’s pre-K program.

“On measures such as state test scores, attendance, behavioral infractions and grade retention, preliminary results show that children who attended the Tennessee pre-K program were performing the same as, or worse than, children who had not enrolled in the program,” according to an analysis on edweekly.org.

Roper said Vermont has had pre-K for many years now and yet K-12 scores are not showing improvement.

“We’ve been expanding this program since 2007, and test scores are going down. For the grades of kids who matriculate through the fourth grade, a number of those classes who have had access to the pre-K, those scores are going down,” he said.

Data on the 2017 Smarter Balanced Proficiency Tests show Vermont’s third- and fourth-graders as the lowest performing in the total number of students who qualify as proficient.

But the committee’s focus has not been whether to expand pre-K, but how.

Rep. Alice Miller, D-Shaftsbury, says some of her constituents who work in the field have indicated that the lack of collaboration between the private and public sector is one barrier that needs to be addressed.

“Instead of working together with the public school systems, in most instances there’s competition, there’s fighting and there’s fear of not being able to function without this funding,” she said.

Behrman said that in order to get that funding, schools must compete for teachers and students alike.

“For example, if we don’t have a licensed teacher with an early ed endorsement then we might not be pre-qualified in some instances,” he said. “And as you likely know, there’s quite a workforce issue we are contending with across the state in early education.”

Sherry Carlson, senior director of Vermont Birth to Five, spoke to the committee Thursday morning and urged more pre-K accessibility and high quality standards. She said while the 10 hours of state-supported pre-K is a start, there needs to be more study of its impact in relation to demand.

“We understand that the implementation of Act 166 had spurred growth in pre-K capacity throughout the state, but to the best of our knowledge, there really hasn’t been a full assessment of whether pre-K capacity is meeting the needs of the children and families of communities.

Michael Bielawski/TNR

Amanda Gilman-Bogie, of Berlin, is a parent who has a child in Vermont’s pre-K program.

“And additionally given that Act 166 funding is only for 10 hours a week, 35 weeks of the year, many families are making additional arrangements for care beyond that 10 hours.”

At least in some cases, families do not feel it’s meeting their needs. On Wednesday, two parents of children with specific needs shared their experiences with Act 166 funding. Amanda Gilman-Bogie, of Berlin, has her son in a pre-K program that is working, and she decided another year of pre-K was preferable.

“It was our consensus both as parents and the educators who know him best, that it would be best for him to enroll in another year of preschool to continue to build upon his core skills and allow him the time and space to really thrive at his own pace,” she said.

However, she was denied the Act 166 funding. She suggested the state is not being consistent and “that it is currently reinterpreting the statute to exclude otherwise eligible 5-year-old children.”

She reached out to the Agency of Education to inquire about an appeals process. Even with the support of state Sen. Anthony Pollina, D/P-Washington, she did not get the response she wanted.

“This is really hard for me as a mom — I feel like I’m trying to do the right thing and nobody is helping me,” she said.

She started a petition with 192 signatures to ensure that all Vermont 5-year-old children have access to Act 166 pre-K funding.

“I really think of this as people who may not be here today but are really trying to let you know that this is a decision that they are not supportive of either,” she said. “The desire to retain access for preschool programs for 5-year-old children is not only the opinion of a small minority of parents raising children with late summer birthdays.”

Michael Bielawski is a reporter for True North Reports. Send him news tips at bielawski82@yahoo.com and follow him on Twitter @TrueNorthMikeB.

Image courtesy of Michael Bielawski/TNR

8 thoughts on “Advocates calling for universal pre-K despite costs and questionable results

  1. More tax payer funded programs, I’m 80 years old, why should I help pay for a professional baby sitting service?

    • You are paying for a jobs program,as well as a babysitter.We have more college grads than jobs,so we create jobs.
      We stopped making things to sell the rest of the country and world so we have had to resort to manufacturing jobs through social engineering.The climate change renewable jobs and enforcement,as well as carbon taxes will further expand these”busy work” jobs that have no business existing in the real world.

    • Note how Sherry Carlson’s testimony gave away the fact that public proponents are not interested in education but are merely looking for free baby-sitting as noted by Mr. Sulham. She says “…families are making additional arrangements for CARE beyond that 10 hours” (my emphasis).
      Politicians have a different motivation, brain-washing, which they call “education”. Very few escape the 17 years of it already available. Do they really need more?

  2. In order to have good Global citizens, one must begin the indoctrination as early as possible and minimize the influence of the parent(s). Forcing taxpayers to pay ever rising taxes to cover this scheme and others, necessarily makes them poorer and less able to resist and more willing to take advantage of “free” services.

  3. A main reason why Vermont got UpreK was the chair of the special study committee of 2006, Sen. Jim Condos, who refused to allow anyone to testify against it. EAI published half a dozen hard nosed critiques of this scam, but it was well designed to win support of a wide range of interests, and no legislator spoke against it.

  4. A public school (with union teachers) has a much easier time meeting state installed requirements and being reimbursed than independent schools, just another way the public school monopoly forces kids to attend union staffed schools. The Vermont education board and most Vermont democrats, wholly owned by the big public education monopoly.

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