Let's Do Something Good for Decatur and End DPS District 61 Run Pre-School

This proposal will help our community, help our high school graduates, and certainly help our district deal with our teacher shortage problem.

Re-examining Pre-K Education: What the Data Actually Shows

In recent years, expanding access to pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education has become a major policy priority across the United States. The conventional wisdom holds that early childhood education provides critical academic and developmental foundations that benefit children throughout their educational careers. School districts have invested heavily in these programs, often employing credentialed teachers at full salary scales and implementing structured curricula designed to prepare children for kindergarten and beyond.

But what if this conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the substantial resources we're investing in pre-K education aren't yielding the benefits we expect? Recent research, including a landmark longitudinal study from Tennessee and my own analysis of Illinois school district data, raises profound questions about the effectiveness of current pre-K models and suggests we may need to rethink our approach.

The Set-Up: A Wake-Up Call from the Tennessee Pre-K Study

In 2022, researchers published the results of one of the most rigorous evaluations of pre-K education ever conducted. "Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children's achievement and behavior through sixth grade" (Durkin, Lipsey, Farran, & Wiesen, 2022) tracked the outcomes of nearly 3,000 children from low-income families who applied to oversubscribed pre-K program sites across Tennessee. Using a randomized controlled trial design - the gold standard for education research - children were randomly assigned either to attend the state's pre-K program or to a waitlist control group.

The findings were striking and, for many early childhood education advocates, deeply troubling:

• Initially, children who attended pre-K showed better academic readiness at kindergarten entry than those in the control group

• However, these advantages faded by the end of kindergarten

• By third grade, the children who had not attended pre-K began outperforming those who had

• By sixth grade, children who had attended pre-K had significantly lower state achievement test scores than the control group

• Children who attended pre-K also had more disciplinary infractions, worse attendance records, and higher rates of special education placements

These results directly contradict the narrative that pre-K provides lasting educational benefits. In fact, they suggest that attending pre-K might actually harm children's long-term academic performance and behavioral outcomes.

Some have questioned whether the Tennessee program was simply of poor quality. However, Tennessee's Voluntary Pre-K Program (TN-VPK) was not an outlier; it featured many elements considered essential to quality pre-K, including licensed teachers, small class sizes, and approved curricula. While classroom quality varied, as it does in all real-world educational settings, this variation doesn't explain the consistent negative trend observed across the entire treatment group.

My Analysis - New Evidence from Illinois and the Minimal Impact of Pre-K

Because the Tennessee findings made me question what we’re doing in Decatur, I conducted my own analysis using publicly available data from the Illinois Board of Education (https://www.isbe.net/pages/illinois-state-report-card-data.aspx and look for 2024 Report Card Public Data Set​). My goal was to examine whether pre-K attendance in Illinois correlates with kindergarten readiness, a relationship that should be strong if pre-K effectively prepares children for school.

I analyzed data from 611 Illinois school districts that reported kindergarten and pre-K students, focusing only on districts that tested more than 50% of their kindergartners on readiness measures (this only eliminated 16 districts from my analysis). My approach was straightforward:

• Independent variable: The ratio of pre-K enrollment to kindergarten enrollment in each district (a proxy for the extent of pre-K participation)

• Dependent variables: The percentage of kindergartners demonstrating readiness in math, language/literacy, and social-emotional development

If pre-K effectively prepares children for kindergarten, we would expect districts with higher pre-K participation to show higher kindergarten readiness rates. The results, however, revealed virtually no relationship¹ (see this footnote for a little more in depth explanation of the charts, and footnote² for an explanation of R-Squared). Below are the three tests - you can see the correlations inside the charts.

These extraordinarily low correlations suggest that the extent of pre-K participation in an Illinois school district has essentially no relationship with kindergarten readiness outcomes. Virtually zero! Even in the domain of social-emotional development, often cited as a key benefit of pre-K, the relationship was negligible.

While this analysis has limitations - it doesn't account for program quality differences or demographic variations between districts –I was shocked at the complete absence of a meaningful correlation. If pre-K were having its intended effect, we would expect to see at least some relationship between participation rates and kindergarten readiness.

Reconsidering Our Approach to Early Childhood Education

The combined evidence from the Tennessee longitudinal study and my Illinois kindergarten readiness analysis raises fundamental questions about how we approach early childhood education. If current pre-K programs aren't delivering the expected benefits - and may even be causing harm - we must consider alternative approaches.

One possibility is that the problem lies in how we've structured pre-K programs within school districts. By placing them under the administration of K-12 education systems, we may have inadvertently pushed academic content and structured learning approaches downward into developmental stages where they're inappropriate. The pressure to prepare children for increasingly academic kindergarten programs might be leading to educational approaches that don't align with how young children actually learn.

It's worth noting that the few pre-K programs that have shown positive long-term effects in randomized trials - such as the Perry Preschool Project and the Abecedarian Project - were small-scale, are highly resource-intensive interventions that bear little resemblance to typical state pre-K programs. Scaling these specialized approaches while maintaining their effectiveness has proven extremely difficult.

My Proposal - A Community-Based Alternative

Given these findings, I propose we consider a fundamentally different approach to early childhood education in Decatur - one that moves pre-K out of school district control and into community hands. Here's what this might look like:

1. Community-staffed early learning centers: Instead of requiring pre-K teachers to have bachelor's degrees and teaching certifications, we could create opportunities for high school graduates from the community to work in early childhood settings under appropriate supervision. This would both create employment opportunities for our DPS high school graduates and potentially provide care that's more culturally responsive.

2. Developmental focus rather than academic preparation: These centers would prioritize play, social interaction, and developmental growth rather than academic preparation. The evidence suggests that pushing academic content earlier does not lead to better long-term outcomes.

3. Resource reallocation: The substantial savings from lower staffing costs could be redirected to other educational priorities or to expanding access to early childhood programs.

This approach would be particularly valuable in Decatur where graduates struggle to find good jobs and where our teacher shortage is chronic (we currently have 81 openings out of approximately 500 teaching positions). Creating meaningful employment opportunities for recent graduates while providing nurturing environments for young children could benefit the entire community.

As we’ve mentioned before, only about 25 out of 400 high school graduates (and 25 of the 500 incoming high school freshman!) complete four-year college degrees, which is necessary to become certified teachers. Yet many of our graduates have the potential to be caring, effective caregivers for young children with appropriate training and support. Why not create a pathway for them to serve their community while gaining valuable work experience?

Moving Forward: Evidence-Based Policy

To be clear, I'm not suggesting we abandon support for early childhood development. Rather, I'm arguing that we should align our policies and investments with what the evidence actually shows, not what we wish it showed.

If traditional pre-K programs don’t deliver educational benefits - either short-term (as my study shows) or long-term (as the Tennessee study shows) - we should be honest about that and explore alternatives. Perhaps the goals of early childhood programs should focus more on providing safe, nurturing environments and supporting working families, rather than promising academic advantages that research suggests aren't materializing.

For communities facing both economic challenges and teacher shortages, community-based early childhood programs could represent a win-win solution - providing employment opportunities for young adults, care options for families, and developmentally appropriate environments for children.

The Tennessee study and Illinois data force us to confront uncomfortable questions about the effectiveness of our current approach to pre-K education. Rather than doubling down on a model that isn't working, let's have the courage to explore alternatives that might better serve our children, families, and community.

References

Durkin, K., Lipsey, M. W., Farran, D. C., & Wiesen, S. E. (2022). Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children's achievement and behavior through sixth grade. Developmental Psychology, 58(3), 470–484. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001301

1. The scatterplots show the relationship between the ratio of pre-K enrollment to kindergarten enrollment in each district (a proxy for the extent of pre-K participation) in Illinois plotted against the percentage of kindergartners demonstrating readiness in the three areas.

2. R-squared represents the proportion of variance in the dependent variable that is explained by the independent variable(s), essentially indicating how well the regression model fits the data; a higher R-squared value signifies a better fit, with a value of 1 meaning the model perfectly explains all the variance and a value of 0 meaning the model explains none of the variance. For example, if your R-squared is 0.55, it means that 55% of the variation in the dependent variable is explained by the independent variable(s) in the model.

R Squared in everyday terms: Imagine you're trying to predict house prices based on their size. R-squared tells you what percentage of the differences in house prices can be explained by differences in house size. So if R-squared is 0.7 or 70%, it means that 70% of the variation in house prices can be explained by the house size. The remaining 30% is due to other factors your model doesn't account for (like location, age of the house, etc.)

Think of it like this: If you guessed house prices completely randomly, you'd be very inaccurate. If you used the average house price for all your guesses, you'd be somewhat better. R-squared measures how much better your line-based predictions are compared to just using the average.

It's one way to answer the question: "How useful is my model for making predictions?" Here’s an example of a Scatter Plot with a 94% correlation.

And to reiterate, the highest R-Squared I found was only 1% for the percentage of Kindergartners Demonstrating Readiness in Language and Literacy Development. That was the highest! So, more Pre-K did not make any difference for the three “readiness” tests.