Oklahoma: High Marks for Pre-K Spending, Low Marks for Reading Achievement
Posted April 16th, 2009 at 9.01am in Education.
This week, the Tulsa World proudly proclaimed:
Finally, along comes a set of national rankings which ought to make Oklahomans especially proud. The latest annual survey by the National Institute for Early Education Research shows Oklahoma leading the nation in prekindergarten enrollment. The State of Preschool 2008 showed Oklahoma in first place with 71 percent of its 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool education. This is not the first time the state has ranked first in this survey.
This clearly begs the question: Are all of those kids enrolled in Oklahoma’s prekindergarten program benefiting academically?
Since Oklahoma started its universal preschool program in 1998, children have actually experienced declines in their fourth grade reading scores. In fact, Oklahoma was the only state to see a significant score decrease in fourth grade reading since 1992. Last year, Oklahoma spent more than $118 million dollars on preschool, yet children in that state are still below the national average in reading.
Since the introduction of universal preschool in Oklahoma, the gap between low-performing students and their peers has not been reduced. The students the program was intended to help have not gained ground.
The World Concluded:
Suffice to say Tulsa and Oklahoma get A’s for effort and for achievement.
It is unclear what metric the authors are using to define the word “achievement”, but if we look to fourth grade reading abilities for a clue to the effects universal preschool is having on student learning, it’s obvious the results are less than “A” material. With early education quickly becoming a buzz word in Washington, Oklahoma serves as a good example of how not to improve student achievement.
- Author: Lindsey Burke
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April 16, 2009 Shad, Washington, DC writes:
Lindsey,
There are multiple problems with using this data to disparage Oklahoma’s pre-k program. For instance, you note that, “Since Oklahoma started its universal preschool program in 1998, children have actually experienced declines in their fourth grade reading scores.” Please think temporally. The first students who participated in pre-k in 1998 would be taking their 4th grade NAEP exam in 2005. NAEP scores between 1998 and 2005 are irrelevant to measuring the effectiveness in pre-k. The only relevant scores would compare 2003 NAEP scores to 2005 scores. In that comparison, students made statistically significant gains in math scores. This aside, overall NAEP scores for an entire state do very little to indicate how much students enrolled in pre-k are learning and achieving, since not all students in Oklahoma attend pre-k. In fact, less than half of Oklahoma four year olds were enrolled in pre-k in its first year, 1998. A more accurate measure of pre-k’s effect on NAEP scores can be found in a RAND study by David Grissmer, where students who attended pre-k were compared to students who did not. This study found that high-quality, state-funded pre-k programs have a positive effect on NAEP scores. In addition, an ongoing study by Georgetown University has found that students that attended pre-k in Tulsa, Oklahoma, particularly low-income students, made gains in early reading and problem solving skills compared to their peers that did not attend pre-k. These methods of measuring gains are far more rigorous than the method of simply reading a state’s overall NAEP scores (in years that are largely irrelevant).