Study of the Week: We'll Only Scale Up the Good Ones
When it comes to education research and public policy, scale is the name of the game.
Does pre-K work? Left-leaning people (that is, people who generally share my politics) tend to be strong advocates of these programs. It's true that generically, it's easier to get meaningful educational benefits from interventions in early childhood than later in life. And pre-K proponents tend to cite some solid studies that show some gains relative to peer groups, though these gains are generally modest and tend to fade out over time. Unfortunately, while some of these studies have responsible designs, many that are still cited are old, from small programs, or both.
Today's Study of the Week, by Mark W. Lipsey, Dale C. Farran, and Kerry G. Hofer, is a much-discussed, controversial study from Tennessee's Voluntary Prekindergarten Program. The Vanderbilt University researchers investigated the academic and social impacts of the state's pre-K programs on student outcomes. The study we're looking at is a randomized experimental design, which was pulled from a larger observational study. The Tennessee program, in some locales, had more applicants than available seats. These seats are filled by a random lottery, creating a natural control and experimental group.
There is one important caveat here: the students examined in the intensive portion of the research had to be selected from those whose parents gave consent. That's about a third of the potential students. This is a potential source of bias. While the randomized design will help, what we can responsibly say is that we have random selection within the group of students whose parents opted in, but with a nonrandom distribution relative to the overall group of students attending this program. I don't think that's a particularly serious problem, but it's a source of potential selection bias and something to be aware of. There's also my persistent question about the degree to which school selection lotteries can be gamed by parents and administrators. There are lots of examples of this happening. (Here's one at a much-lauded magnet school in Connecticut.) Most people in the research field seem not to see this as a big concern. I don't know.
In any event, the results of the research were not encouraging. Researchers examined six identified subtests (two language, two literacy, two math) from the Woodcock-Johnson tests of cognitive ability, a well-validated and widely-used battery of tests of student academic and intellectual skills. They also looked at a set of non-cognitive abilities related to behavior, socialization, and enthusiasm for school. A predictable pattern played out. Students who attended the Tennessee pre-K program saw short-term significant gains relative to their peers who did not attend the program. But over time, the peer group caught up, and in fact in this study, exceeded the test group. That is, students who attended Tennessee's pre-K program ended up actually underperforming those who were not selected into it.
By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN‐VPK children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures. In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures.... In terms of behavioral effects, in the spring the first grade teachers reversed the fall kindergarten teacher ratings. First grade teachers rated the TN‐ VPK children as less well prepared for school, having poorer work skills in the classrooms, and feeling more negative about school.
This dispiriting outcome mimics that of the Head Start study, another much-discussed, controversial study that found similar outcomes: initial advantages for Head Start students that are lost entirely by 3rd grade.
Further study is needed[note]further study is always needed[/note] but it seems that the larger and more representative the study, the less impressive - and the less persistent - the gains from pre-K. There's a bit of uncertainty here about whether the differences in outcomes are really the product of differences in programs or due to differences in the research itself. And I don't pretend that this is a settled question. But it is important to recognize that the positive evidence for pre-K comes from smaller, higher-resource, more-intensive programs. Larger programs have far less encouraging outcomes.
The best guess, it seems to me, is that at scale universal pre-K programs would function more like the Tennessee system and less like the small, higher-performing programs. That's because scaling up any major institutional venture, in a country the size of the United States, is going to entail the inevitable moderating effects of many repetitions. That is, you can build one school or one program and invest a lot of time, effort, and resources into making it as effective as possible, and potentially see significant gains relative to other schools. But it strikes me as a simple statement of the nature of reality that this intensity of effort and attention can't scale. As Farran and Lipsey say in a Brookings Institution essay, "To assert that these same outcomes can be achieved at scale by pre-K programs that cost less and don’t look the same is unsupported by any available evidence."
Some will immediately say, well, let's just pay as much for large-scale pre-K as they do in the other programs and model their techniques. The $26 billion question is, can you actually do that? Can what makes these programs special actually be scaled? Is there hidden bias here that will wash out as we expand the programs? I confess I'm skeptical that we'll see these quantitative gains under even the best scenario. I think we need to understand the inevitability of mediocrity and regression to the mean. That doesn't mean I don't support universal pre-kindergarten childcare. As with after school programs, I do for social and political reasons, though, not out of the conviction much that they'll change test scores much. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Now I don't mean to extrapolate irresponsibly. But allow me to extrapolate irresponsibly: isn't this precisely what we should expect with charter schools, too? We tend to see, survivorship-bias heavy CREDO studies aside, that at scale the median charter school does little or nothing to improve on traditional public schools. We also see a number of idiosyncratic, high-intensity, high-attention charters that report better outcomes. The question you have to ask, based on how the world works, is which is more likely to be replicated at scale - the median, or the exceptions?
I've made this point before about Donald Trump's favorite charter schools, Success Academy here in New York. Let's set aside questions of the abusive nature of the teaching that goes on in these schools. The basic charter proponent argument is that these schools succeed because they can fire bad teachers and replace them with good. Success Academy schools are notoriously high stress, long-hour, low pay affairs. This leads naturally to high teacher attrition. Luckily for the NYC-based Success Academy, New York is filled with lots of eager young people who want to get a foothold in the city, do some do-goodering, then bail for their "real" careers later on - essentially replicating the Teach for America model. So: even if we take all of the results from such programs at face value, do you think this is a situation that can be scaled up in places that are far less attractive to well-educated, striving young workers? Can you get that kind of churn and get the more talented candidates you say you need, at no higher cost, to come to the Ozarks or Flint, Michigan or the Native American reservations? Can you nationally have a profession of 3 million people, already caught in a teacher shortage, and then replicate conditions that lead to somewhere between 35%-50% annual turnover, depending on whose numbers you trust?
And am I really being too skeptical if my assumption is to say no, you can't?