Grover (Russ) Whitehurst,who served as director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences during the administration of George W. Bush, testified before a Congressional committee in opposition to federal support for universal pre-kindergarten, except as a voucher for families to use for the setting of their choice. Whitehurst is now at the Brookings Institution, once considered a liberal think-tank in D.C.

Whitehurst looked skeptically on plans to create a federally funded preschool program. He said that the federal programs like Headstart and Even Start had failed, and that the “gold standard” programs like the Perry Preschool Project and the Abecedarian Project were outdated and “slender reeds” on which to base federal policy. He questioned the value and necessity of early childhood education, pointing out that back in the good old days, not many children were enrolled in pre-kindergarten:

He said:

So far as my staff has been able to determine by reading published biographies, none of the 44 presidents of the United States attended a pre-K or nursery school program. I’m sure many people in this room did not have pre-K. This is not to say that children can’t derive some benefit from being in organized pre-K setting. And who can say that presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Carter wouldn’t have been better presidents if only they had gone to preschool. But somehow we’ve gotten to the point as a society of thinking that pre-K is essential to normal child development and should be universal. That’s bunk.

I was reminded of something that the famous psychologist G. Stanley Hall wrote. He said that it was not necessary for all children to learn to read. After all, he wrote, “Very many men have lived and died and been great, even the leaders of their age, without any acquaintance with letters.” He was not concerned at all about illiteracy, because after all, the great men of the world could “neither read nor write,” and “even the blessed mother of our Lord knew nothing of letters.” (See my book Left Back, pp. 73, 358.) Whitehurst might also have pointed out that many of our presidents did not graduate from high school or college; think Abraham Lincoln!

It would have been worthwhile for Whitehurst to refer to the 2012 study reported by The Economist about preschool education. It ranked 45 nations according to availability, affordability, and quality. The U.S. ranked 24th of 45 nations, tied with the United Arab Emirates. The top-ranked nations were Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Part of the quality issue had to do with high standards for teachers, which of course would be difficult to assure if families chose a low-quality program conducted in a church basement with untrained teachers or a home-school run by a neighborhood mom with no particular training.

The 2012 study gave these rationales for investing in early childhood education:

“…preschools can help ensure that all children get a strong start in life, especially those from low-income or disadvantaged households. “The data are really incontrovertible,” explains Sharon Kagan, a professor of early childhood and family policy at Columbia University in the US. “Three strands of research combine to support the importance of the early years. From neuro-scientific research, we understand the criticality of early brain development; from social science research, we know that high quality programmes improve children’s readiness for school and life; and from econometric research, we know that high quality programs save society significant amounts of money over time. Early childhood contributes to creating the kinds of workforces that are going to be needed in the twenty-first century.”

There are also broader reasons to invest in preschool. At one level, it helps facilitate greater female participation in the workforce, which bolsters economic growth. Early childhood development is also a major force in helping overcome issues relating to child poverty and educational disadvantage. “It is about those very young children who are going to grow up as successful lifelong learners and citizens making an economic contribution to society,” says Christine Pascal, director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood (CREC), an independent research organisation. “This is especially so in very unequal societies where you get generational and cyclical repetition of poverty and low achievement.”