Obama to unveil universal preschool plan

In this 2011 file photo, President Obama helps children place a block while touring a classroom in the Yeadon Regional Head Start Center in Yeadon, Pa. / MANDEL NGAN / AFP / Getty Images

President Obama continues his post-State of the Union road show today in Decatur, Ga., where he will unveil details of his plan to expand preschool programs, which he mentioned during his address Tuesday night.

"I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America," Mr. Obama said Tuesday.

"In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job and form more stable families of their own. So let's do what works, and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let's give our kids that chance," he added.

• Obama's State of the Union wish list
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The president is set to visit the College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center in Decatur, to make a case for the benefits of universal pre-K and lay out more details of his plan.

Among the proposals Mr. Obama will announce, according to the White House, include:

Meantime, the president's ambitious plan could be in jeopardy if lawmakers don't avert the so-called sequester - billions in automatic budget cuts set to kick in on March 1. With the cuts looming, the administration has increased its pressure on lawmakers, and Mr. Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday made clear he was not looking for compromise as he began his second term.

The president isn't expected to get into the details about how much his new proposal will cost but his aides stressed that the new programs would not add to the nation's nearly $16.5 trillion debt.

"The last budget had over $1.5 trillion of mandatory and revenue savings, things like reductions in entitlements, closing loopholes," Jason Furman, a deputy director at the National Economic Council, told reporters Wednesday.

Furman said the new initiatives would be smaller and promised Mr. Obama would outline the details when he sends his 2014 budget proposal to Congress next month.

Ahead of that, the White House and Congress are weighing whether to let the deep automatic spending cuts to take hold on March 1. If that happens, some 10,000 teachers could be out of work and 70,000 students could be kicked out of Head Start programs, the White House has warned.

The cuts would also force an additional 14,000 Head Start workers to be laid off and would mean 1.2 million students from low-income families would have their schools' funding cut. Washington also would stop paying its share of 7,200 special needs educators' salaries.

The federal government doesn't directly pay the salaries of those workers but sends money to states based on the number of students in specific categories, such as those with learning disabilities or from at-risk communities. The states generally dole out those dollars to the individual districts based on the schools' share of those students.

The automatic, across-the-board budget cuts were designed to kick in only if lawmakers failed to reach a broad agreement to reduce the nation's debt.

"Should these cuts occur, they would be harmful not only to our agency, but to critical domestic and defense priorities across the government and across the country," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told department employees last week, warning they might be forced to take unpaid leave to deal with the budget crunch.

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[Suesmith1979]

Studies such as the Perry Preschool Program and the Adecedarian Project clearly demonstrate that these types of preschool programs work. The real challenge becomes prioritizing the funding to reach those who need it the most. First Five Santa Clara has a great blog post on the subject: http://*******.com/b2kf5u8

[Suesmith1979]

Studies such as the Perry Preschool Program and the Adecedarian Project clearly demonstrate that these types of preschool programs work. The real challenge becomes prioritizing the funding to reach those who need it the most. First Five Santa Clara has a great blog post on the subject: http://*******.com/bfxej2u

[whaas2]

I guess the President just likes to take trips at the tax payers expense. There in no reason for him to go to Georgia and visit preschoolers. They have no say in federal spending. It is congress and they are located in Washington. The President needs to stay in Washington to present and try to sell his ideas to congress. It is congress who will make the decission and not a group of Georgia preschoolers. Apparently the President does not know anything as to how the federal government works. So no wonder we are going broke. If the President wants to convey a message to the American people there is already more than sufficient media in Washington to get the story out.

[Augy-Doggie]

From the New York Times
Head Start: A tragic waste of money
By ANDREW J. COULSON
Head Start, the most sacrosanct federal education program, doesn't work.
That's the finding of a sophisticated study just released by President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services.
Created in 1965, the comprehensive preschool program for 3- and 4-year olds and their parents is meant to narrow the education gap between low-income students and their middle- and upper-income peers. Forty-five years and $166 billion later, it has been proven a failure.
The bad news came in the study released this month: It found that, by the end of the first grade, children who attended Head Start are essentially indistinguishable from a control group of students who didn't.
UPIDuncan: Trying to boost funding for the proven failure.What's so damning is that this study used the best possible method to review the program: It looked at a nationally representative sample of 5,000 children who were randomly assigned to either the Head Start ("treatment") group or to the non-Head Start ("control") group.
Random assignment is the "gold standard" of medical and social-science research: It gives investigators confidence that the treatment and control groups are essentially identical in every respect except their access to Head Start. So if eventual test performances differ, we can be pretty sure that the difference was caused by the program. No previous study of Head Start used this approach on a nationally representative sample of children.
When the researchers gave both groups of students 44 different academic tests at the end of the first grade, only two seemed to show even marginally significant advantages for the Head Start group. And even those apparent advantages vanished after standard statistical controls were applied.
In fact, not a single one of the 114 tests administered to first graders -- of academics, socio-emotional development, health care/health status and parenting practice -- showed a reliable, statistically significant effect from participating in Head Start.

[Augy-Doggie]

Continued
Some advocates of the program have acknowledged these dramatic results, but suggest that it's not necessarily Head Start's fault if its effects vanish during kindergarten and the first grade -- perhaps our K-12 schools are to blame.
But that's beside the point. Even if it's true, it means that Head Start will be of no lasting value to children until we fix our elementary and secondary schools. Until then, money spent on Head Start will continue to be wasted.
Yet the Obama administration remains enthusiastic. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius and Education Secretary Arne Duncan both want to boost funding for Head Start -- that is, to spend more on a program that's sure to fail. That's after the president already raised spending on the program from $6.8 billion to $9.2 billion last year.
Instead of throwing more dollars at this proven failure, President Obama might consider throwing his weight behind proven successes. A federal program that pays private-school tuition for poor DC families, for instance, has been shown to raise students' reading performance by more than two grade levels after just three years, compared to a control group of students who stayed in public schools. And it does so at about a quarter the cost to taxpayers of DC's public schools.
Sadly, Obama and Duncan have ignored the DC program's proven success. Neither lifted a finger to save it when Democrats in Congress pulled the plug on its funding last year.
Perhaps it's unrealistic to expect national Democrats to end a Great Society program, even when it's a proven failure. Perhaps it's unrealistic to expect them to stand up to teachers' union opposition and support private-school-choice programs that are proven successes.
Of course, until last week, it seemed unrealistic to expect a Republican to win the Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy. If voters get angry enough with federal education politics, national Democrats may start learning from their state-level colleagues who are starting to support effective policies like school choice. Or they may just lose their seats, too.
Andrew J. Coulson directs the Cato Insti tute's Center for Educational Freedom.

[Augy-Doggie]

dionysusBeer replies:
Why should you work? Hopefully to make a better standard of living for yourself and your family. I sincerely doubt you'll drop out of work just because you have to pay a little more for a service that kids could really use. You're just being a drama queen.
___________________________________________
How am I going to do that when I have to pay supposedly a "little" more for other's kids?
That's their responsibility.
A little here and a little more there adds up for the money I need to maintain my family's financial well being.
It's you who are the melodamatic socialist Diva and Queen like Moochelle Obama.
You socialists sure are free with other peoples money.

[PSOPO]

President Obama is the only one in Washington who cares about kids and their future.

[empirebuilder]

Heard Obama is going to appoint Menendez to run the program and Bill Clinton as an advisor...the official name will be called The Pipeline For The Future

[stoutwing]

Would it be asking too much just to have the current schools structure tied to actual teaching and learning? There are magnet schools that are highly successful. Why not take the teaching and curriculum ideas that make these high achievements and use them in less successful schools. By the way just throwing more money at the problem is not the solution, nor is creating public daycare under the guise of universal preschool.

[highlndr55]

Here in Virginia, we would be able to teach for learning if we did not have the ridiculous Federally mandated tests to give. It would also be nice if teachers were paid what they are worth. But, that is tied to tax dollars and they are scarce. Charter/Magnet schools are an interesting concept. But most of them do not last long. The results, which are about what public schools get, they get are a direct result of not having to follow the rules that the Commonwealth's Public School have to.

[Augy-Doggie]

If this keeps up Obama is going to turn me into a freeloading moocher like his supporters and apologists posting on here with all these government freebies and hand outs.
I will let the govenment take care of my kids and wife and myself.
Obama is starting to gine me the attitude of why should I work and take care of my famiy when others in the Democratic party are being taken care of from my hard work.
If you can't beat em, join them!

[Augy-Doggie]

"Give" me the attitude'

[dionysusBeer]

Why should you work? Hopefully to make a better standard of living for yourself and your family. I sincerely doubt you'll drop out of work just because you have to pay a little more for a service that kids could really use. You're just being a drama queen.

[easymoola]

Man I love all this universal free stuff. Just keep popping the children out and uncle sam will do the rest. Yes, I know we are behind all those other socialist nations like finland where apparently they pay heir debts and don't owe every Tom, Dick and Harry but hey we can print money and we are damned good at it.

[dionysusBeer]

Just because a service exists doesn't mean you have to intentionally milk it dry. I pay for my fire department but that doesn't mean I light my house on fire every day.