Obama follows Oklahoma with preschool proposal
Published: 2/14/2013 12:21 AM
Last Modified: 2/13/2013 5:29 PM
Bringing back an old campaign promise from 2008, President Obama used this week’s State of the Union to push the idea of making public preschool available to kids nationwide.
For once, Oklahoma’s actually ahead of him, since we introduced public 4-year-old programs in 1998, when Obama was still an obscure legislator in Illinois.
By the time he started his first presidential run, more than 70 percent of Oklahoma 4-year-olds were going to state-funded preschools.
But reading scores have fallen for elementary school students since the preschool effort started, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And while math scores have improved, they haven’t kept up with national averages.
That doesn’t mean public preschool isn’t worthwhile. It might, of course, have social benefits not measured by test scores.
But it’s not a miracle cure.
And it won’t come cheap. Officials estimate it would cost American taxpayers $10 billion a year.
We’re already so far in the hole that we have to borrow roughly $10 billion every two days.
Written by
Michael Overall
Staff Writer
