Better Than Nothing

What is a school for?

When I was a kid, I went to a preschool in some lady’s garage. I have no idea what credentials she held, although I’m sure my mom did. There were probably 10 or 15 of us kids in that garage, doing whatever kids do in preschool. Mostly what I remember was playing at a big sand table. (It seemed huge to me, although it was probably, in fact, regular sand-table size.) Among the many objects in the sand table was a small plastic knife — the kind you would get with your take-out. I decided, for some reason, that I was going to try to saw all the way through the sand table with this plastic knife, just to see what would happen. I was delighted when I applied the knife to the wood and found that it actually left a small impression. I worked away assiduously at my task for some amount of time before, no doubt, getting distracted (or caught). 

I don’t know what the stated or desired outcomes of that preschool program were — of how explicitly they may have been stated to anyone. Play was certainly at the forefront. I am sure we learned quite a bit — including how to wait our turn, keep our hands to ourselves and sit quietly, skills that would serve us all well in kindergarten if we managed to develop them. I do not know how much anyone expected us to achieve academically during or after our time in that garage. 

Child care for working mothers and families, Oak Ridge, Tenn., 1947

I wonder if sometimes we ask too much of preschool before we are willing to consider it as worthy of being a public good. I am thinking about this today as I read about recent research that evaluated the impact of a state-run preschool program on students in Tennessee. The research is sobering, suggesting that students who did participate in Tennessee’s publicly funded prekindergarten program experienced negative outcomes that other students did not. In other words, as one of the study’s authors observed, “At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing.” 

The report joins a body of research that has tried to answer the question, “Is preschool worth investing public dollars?” The answer remains a resounding “maybe,” and this research only amplifies that uncertainty. 

While efforts such as the Perry Preschool Project offer evidence for the long-term impacts of a high-quality early childhood education program, research into the impacts of Head Start has been harder to parse. Part of the problem of evaluating early childhood education comes from the very problem of evaluating education itself. These conversations often founder, because the fundamental question at the root of them remains unanswered. What is education for? 

We see glimpses of answers everywhere — in the mission statements of our schools, in the statements of policymakers, and in the questions researchers choose to investigate — but the deep disagreements this question engenders make consensus impossible. Is the goal of education to prepare children to become critical thinkers, or effective laborers? Can education do both? Should school focus on preparing students to live in the world, or should its task only be to impart specific knowledge? As a nation, we have grappled with these questions for as long as there have been schools, and the fight is not yet over. 

The sociologist Tony Waters, in his excellent book “Schooling, Childhood, and Bureaucracy,” argues that, regardless of the stated goal, schools can be relied upon to “take dependent, impulsive, illiterate, and stubborn five-year-old children, and create predictable, compliant, literate, and docile adults.” But rarely do we measure these outcomes when considering whether an educational program is effective — in part because “docile and compliant” is rarely the stated goal. Instead, we talk about “21st-century readiness” or “developing student capacity to the fullest.” We talk about standardized test results and proficiency and graduation rates. And when we try to evaluate a preschool program, we look even beyond these outcomes. The Tennessee program was shown to have a negative impact on things like discipline issues and referrals to special education services, even when controlling for other factors. 

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The idea that schools are either the cause of our woes, or a way to fix them — which Nick Hanauer calls “educationism” — falls apart under even the lightest scrutiny, and yet it persists. 

“Whenever I talk with my wealthy friends about the dangers of rising economic inequality, those who don’t stare down at their shoes invariably push back with something about the woeful state of our public schools,” Hanauer wrote in The Atlantic in 2019. “This belief is so entrenched among the philanthropic elite that of America’s 50 largest family foundations — a clique that manages $144 billion in tax-exempt charitable assets — 40 declare education as a key issue. Only one mentions anything about the plight of working people, economic inequality, or wages. And because the richest Americans are so politically powerful, the consequences of their beliefs go far beyond philanthropy.” 

Further, Hanauer writes, “Multiple studies have found that only about 20 percent of student outcomes can be attributed to schooling, whereas about 60 percent are explained by family circumstances—most significantly, income.” 

But we have a long history of looking to schools to fix myriad problems — including the problems of parents themselves. In her 1995 book, “Preschool Education in America,” historian Barbara Beatty writes that preschools proliferated, in part, due to some level of “distrust in mothers’ abilities to do what was right for their children.” 

This belief has colored our approach to early childhood education for more than a century. In the mid-1960s, when the federally funded Head Start program for preschool children got its start, it was based on a deficit model, and aimed to correct what was wrong with disadvantaged children. 

Lady Bird Johnson attends the ceremony for National Head Start Day, June 30, 1965.

“The notion of a critical period for optimal stimulation and early learning led to the concept of cultural deprivation, in which lower-class and poor families were considered deficient, harmful, and in need of remediation,” Beatty writes about this era. In this model, it is the families themselves that are wrong, that need to be fixed. And it is the state — through programs such as Head Start, or the public school — that will do the fixing. 

This is educationism at its finest — the idea that we can simply educate our way out of the problems caused by poverty, institutional racism and other deeply entrenched social issues. When this magic doesn’t happen, it’s characterized as a failed waste of taxpayer dollars, and held up as evidence that programs such as Head Start don’t work. 

Since reading Heather McGhee’s incredible book “The Sum of Us,” I also can’t help but note that the quality of Tennessee’s preschool program seemed to decline at around the same time that it began enrolling higher numbers of children of color. This is the tragically American cycle McGhee outlines in her book, whereby any public good that can be readily accessed by people of color gets depleted, destroyed or otherwise drained of life. (If you haven’t already heard it, go listen to McGhee being interviewed by Ezra Klein.) 

If we are to fight for universal high-quality early childhood education in this country — which I believe is worth fighting for — it will mean asking this country to actually invest in children of color, something we have historically and abysmally failed to do. It should also mean a frank and honest reckoning with what schools are actually capable of doing for the students in their care. We can do better than “better than nothing,” but we have to start with “something.”