Today, Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, a veteran of the Brookings Institution, delivered his latest round of at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The irony, apparently, whizzed right by him.
Ever since Obama announced his intention to “make available to every child in America,” almost a year ago, Whitehurst’s been chafing at the bit. He’s put on quite a show, getting under the skin of even those known for their equanimity (present company excluded).
Now that I’ve stopped hyper-ventilating, I’m ready to shoot back.
Let’s start at the beginning. In the preface to his brief, breezily entitled “Things we know (or should know),” Whitehurst fills us in on his first career as a developmental psychologist and research scientist with an interest in language and cognitive development. He offers up a vignette of a young Head Start mother, to whom he offers a ride home, a good two miles from the center, to which she had walked for a meeting. “That’s a long way to walk with two young children,” he said. “Why did you do it?” Her answer: “I just want to do what’s best for my babies.”
“We all should want a system of funding that would allow her and millions of parents like her to do just that—what’s best for babies,” Whitehurst told the committee. Such impressive early childhood creds. Why, he even invented dialogic reading, which promotes interactions between kids and adults that enhance oral language and vocabulary skills. And he’s concluded that the “current system, a mishmash of 45 separate, incoherent, and largely ineffective programs, fails to serve the broader public and certainly is less than optimal for the children and families to which it is directed.”
But wait. Whitehurst could not be less interested in systems change—or, heaven help us—the resources that might promote integration, cohesion, and innovation. He’s interested in doing away with big, bad, top-down government—public good be damned—and providing means-tested vouchers, similar to Pell grants, for families, the better for them to choose from all the splendid options out there for child care.
Now, let’s tackle a few of Whitehurst’s bullet points:
- The federal government spends disproportionately on early childhood programs relative to its expenditures at other levels of learning.
For a dedicated empiricist, who loves nothing more than an , Whitehurst has taken major liberties here, resorting to his own “back-of-the-envelope” calculations to estimate federal expenditures. He ends up with $20 billion, including “$10,000 per child per year on early learning and childcare for every child in poverty below school age in America.” Last I heard, the federal government had allocated nearly $138 billion in fiscal year 2013 for —including 8 billion for Head Start. Still, he calls this disproportionate? “Billions here, billions there–we’re talking real money,” he told the policymakers. “I don’t think the problems we have with early childhood programs in this country are about underfunding.”
Whitehurst should stick his empiricist’s nose into the research of . He’s been making the case ad nauseam for the benefits of investing in the earlier end of the developmental spectrum. And while he’s at it, Whitehurst should refresh his recollection of U.S. global standing with a look at Starting Well, a report issued by the a couple of years ago. Benchmarking early education across the world, the EIU placed the U.S. in the lower half of the index for preschool provision across 45 countries.
- We are not getting our money’s worth from present federal expenditures on early childhood services.
Whitehurst predictably recycles the prevailing narrative that Head Start has produced no lasting educational gains for participants. His critique, in the manner of all market-based aficionados, is short-sighted, and narrow, homing in on ECE’s Achilles heel: 3rd grade fade-out. How about looking at children’s experiences in kindergarten through third grade—critical to sustaining gains? They’re not so great, it turns out. And what about long-term outcomes? As an all-star group of ECE researchers declared last fall, in : Despite the convergence of test scores between those who received preschool and those who did not, evidence from long-term evaluations, including those of Head Start, points to “the long-term effects on important societal outcomes such as high-school graduation, years of education completed, earnings, and reduced crime and teen pregnancy.” Salient information for those taxpayers, on whom Whitehurst seems to lavish so much attention.
- Only some children need pre-K services to be ready for school and life.
Is he kidding? Here, I’ll let the man speak for himself. His cluelessness is breathtaking:
Most young children do not need to experience organized center-based care in order to develop normally, profit from later educational opportunities, and live happy and productive lives. 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. This is not to say that children can’t derive some benefit from being in organized pre-K settings…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 don’t know what universe he’s living in, but it’s not the United States in 2014. And presidential biographies? I wonder what Doris Kearns Goodwin would say. I guess Whitehurst’s back in the era. A place we need to leave—for the good of our children and families—as our President reminded everyone in his State of the Union address last week. A clever strategy, that pop culture reference, making light, for a moment, of our country’s failures, and backwardness, and bridging the distance between nostalgia and a viable future for all.
Our man Russ, and Brookings, need a major reality check.
