President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, otherwise known as the education czar, is canvassing the South to take stock of how federal education programs and initiatives are faring in several states. Among Duncan’s visits was a stop at Chattanooga, Tennessee’s Chambliss Center for Children, where he encouraged Gov. Bill Haslam to continue embracing Obama’s education agenda with the same enthusiasm that Haslam exhibited with the President’s “Race to the Top” program.
It seems that Duncan believes Haslam has drank the Obama education reform kool-aid and is ready for another glass. This time, Duncan hopes that Tennessee will compete for a portion of the $250 million in federal Pre-K grants available for select states. As TN Report’s Alex Harris explains, “The feds are holding [these] out as an incentive to encourage states to sign more kids up for early education programs.”
Translation: The feds are bribing state governments with taxpayer dollars to push Obama’s agenda. As with many other agenda’s the President deploys, this Pre-K scheme is both costly and ineffective. Here are the facts:
- Vanderbilt University evaluated 1,000 Pre-K students across the state and found that the slight benefits these students had in math and language over peers not enrolled in Pre-K barely lasted past kindergarten and were completely gone by 2nd grade.
- According to findings published in the Journal Science, the highest-rated publicly funded Pre-K classrooms’ results are no better than lower-rated classrooms.
- Yet, Tennessee spent over $85 million on Pre-K in 2013, and the feds want us taxpayers to pony up even more.
Perhaps Duncan missed our Dr. Seuss-inspired poligraphic, “Pre-K Sham, Uncle Sam” in January. In any event, we hope he enjoys his time in the South, but suggest Duncan keeps his Washington-grown “solutions” where they belong. Between Obamacare that isn’t, and the so-called stimulus package that wasn’t, Tennessee will be seeking solutions elsewhere. -Lindsay Boyd