One state-funded pre-K program led to ‘significantly negative’ results for kids

Children who attended Tennessee’s state-funded voluntary pre-kindergarten program during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years were doing worse than their peers by the end of sixth grade in academic achievement, discipline issues and special education referrals, as Hechinger reported.

These are the findings of a multiyear study that followed 2,990 children in Tennessee schools to look at the long-term impact of the state’s public pre-K program. The results may bring more scrutiny to public pre-kindergarten programs, now a large part of the national conversation, and raise the question of whether they adequately set low-income children up for success.

“At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” said Dale Farran, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, director of its Peabody Research Institute and one of the authors of the study. “The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”

The study is part of a series of reports by Farran and fellow researchers at Vanderbilt about Tennessee’s voluntary pre-K program. The team’s findings surprised many early childhood advocates who widely herald high-quality pre-K as a necessity to help prepare children, especially those from low-income families, for kindergarten.

The quality of the state’s pre-K program could be partly responsible for the negative results, as Hechinger reported. Although Tennessee technically meets 9 out of 10 quality benchmarks set by the National Institute of Early Education Research, Steven Barnett, director of the institute, has previously said those standards are just minimum guidelines; in practice, all classrooms may not be meeting those standards. A 2014 study found that when classrooms across the state were evaluated using a widely accepted research tool, there was “great variation” in their quality scores. The vast majority, 85% of the classrooms studied, scored below the level of “good” quality, as Hechinger noted.