The jury is in: after five years and $6 million spent studying the effectiveness of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K Program for low-income kids, research shows kids in that program eventually do worse on most academic measures than their peers who skipped it.
The results come after years of discussion nationally about pre-K, but more targeted debate inside the Legislative Plaza about whether to take to scale the state-specific $85 million plan currently serving 18,000 students — or wipe it totally from the books.
“If kids are doing worse, then why in the heck are they going to spend millions of dollars on it,” said Rep. Bill Dunn, a state representative from Knoxville who has argued for years against state-funded pre-K. “Anybody who really studied the issue would have seen that the emperor had no clothes.”
The study comes from a joint effort between Vanderbilt's Peabody College of Education and Human Development and the Tennessee Department of Education. Limited to low income students, the study finds that children in the pre-K program show initial gains over students who did not attend pre-K and are better prepared for kindergarten. But kids who skipped pre-K caught up by the end of kindergarten, the study, found. By second grade, results between the two groups of kids were flat and beginning to trail national benchmarks. And by third grade, children who did not attend pre-K were outperforming their peers.
The study follows past research on Tennessee’s pre-K program, including a study released by the state Comptroller’s office, finding the differences between kids who took or skipped pre-K are “negligible” by the time they reach third grade or higher. Other studies have praised the long-term benefits of pre-K, like higher graduation rates or a greater likelihood to own a home by his or her mid-twenties. However, the Vanderbilt research argues these were of complex programs unlike today’s pre-K.
“These programs are necessary, and if they’re not doing what we need them to do, we need to fix them. But we certainly need to keep them and we do need to expand them,” said Lisa Wiltshire, executive director of the Tennessee Department of Education’s Office of Early Learning at a panel discussion with Vanderbilt University researchers and early education experts last week.
Gov. Bill Haslam has spent much of his tenure putting off a decision about expanding pre-K until the final results of the study. He told reporters Monday his read of the results is “quality pre-K with good follow-up can have an impact,” but said he’ll have to weigh the middling research results with spending money on other areas of K-12 education.
“We’ll take this as data to evaluate its effectiveness versus other things that we might do, again, increasing technology, paying teachers more, other investments we want to make in K-12 education," said the governor, who has been named in two lawsuits challenging whether the state puts enough money into K-12 school districts state wide. "I would like for us to put more dollars into [K-12]. We have to do that in context of the budget and in the context of where we’ll get the best results,” Haslam said.
Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Candice McQueen has stressed the importance in early education prior to her appointment earlier this year, adding the DOE is and will continue work on ways to improve the quality of existing pre-K programs.
“This is why the department is anchoring our work on establishing early foundations for our students and monitoring and emphasizing high-quality pre-K instruction. We also believe that it is important that the Vanderbilt study continues to follow student gains over time to better understand long-term outcomes,” she said in a statement.
The key in the study was the focus on high quality, with researchers saying the work happening in pre-K classrooms across the state often varies widely and is not well linked with K-3 to create continuity. Poverty is also a major indicator of academic disadvantage, according to the study, and more work should be done to improve the quality of program “before reaching any final conclusions about the benefits” of the state’s pre-K program.
Metro Schools, which serves 3,081 students in pre-K, spun the results into a positive, announcing it already is in the midst of a plan to “rebuild” pre-K, and is expanding its “high-quality, play-based curriculum” used in its three pre-K centers to 174 existing pre-K classrooms in 60 schools this year — with plans to open its fourth pre-K center next fall.
The beneficiary of up to $33 million federal pre-K dollars, MNPS says it is expanding it’s “creative curriculum” using structured play as a first step to improve the quality and longevity of preK’s effects. Vanderbilt’s research team is working alongside the MNPS program, conducting a separate research project focused on Nashville’s pre-K. MNPS officials say the district is taking up recommendations on the research that identified eight practices critical to student gains.
Recently elected Mayor Megan Barry ran on a platform that included universal pre-K and high quality early education. Despite the results, Barry believes that Metro School's specialty program is improving results and outcomes for kids, said her spokesman, Sean Braisted.
"We need to ensure that every child who wants a pre-K seat can have one, and that gains experienced in pre-K are expanded upon in elementary and beyond. She looks forward to working with MNPS to make sure that happens," he said.
While Metro Schools has classrooms funded by the state Volunteer PreK Program, the school district's pre-K centers are separate and operated as hubs for innovation to spread best practices to the rest of the district.
Dunn, the state representative who sits on the Education Instruction & Programs Committee, stopped short of saying he would bring legislation to end the state’s pre-K program, saying several conversations about pre-K and education funding will have to happen between now and when the legislature returns in January.
“Once you start a program, you suddenly have people who don’t want you to take it away,” said Dunn.
