Senator says we need to be discussing return on investment, and YEAH!

by Rob Roper

Durning testimony in the Senate Education Committee regarding Vermont’s taxpayer funded universal preschool program (Act 76), Senator David Weeks (R-Rutland) challenged advocates with some stunning numbers. Vermonters gasp when learning our K-12 system spends around $30,000 per student on average (second highest per pupil spending in the country). But what about Pre-K? That gasp may escalate to heart attack.

Let’s Grow Kids, the NGO that lobbies for taxpayer funded universal preschool programs (with, adding injury to insult, about $20 million in taxpayer funded grants over the years), was touting as a great success story that since passage of Act 76 1700 new childcare slots have opened throughout the state. Sounds great! We need more childcare availability in Vermont. But at what cost?

According to Weeks, that cost breaks down to $157,000 per new childcare slot based on an assumption that we are spending $265 million on the program. I’m comin’ to you, Elizabeth! (Sanford and Son fans will get the reference!) These numbers were challenged by Ally Richards of Let’s Grow Kids, who insisted that the new payroll tax implemented in Act 76 only (“only” LOL) raises $100 million. However, the payroll tax is not the only revenue source feeding into the Universal Pre-K program; it also gets money from the Education Fund. This dispute was not resolved during the discussion, but even if Richards $100 million is correct, that’s still nearly $59,000 on average per new childcare slot created by the program.

Putting that into perspective, the in-state tuition at UVM – including housing and a meal plan – is about $34,000 per year.

Weeks also pointed out that the “growth” in taxpayer funded pre-k slots isn’t growth so much as a massively expensive partial cleanup of a government created crisis that regulated hundreds of independent childcare providers out of business.

As an alumni of the Health and Welfare Committee while [Act 76] was being debated,… one thing I did walk away from that experience was to recognize that the first thing we did is we over regulated childcare. We wounded the industry, and then we had a crisis. And then we responded to the crisis.

It’s a crisis the Let’s Grow Government tax and spenders haven’t let go to waste!

And Weeks’ final point is one we should be hearing a lot more of from our elected officials: what is the return on investment (ROI) for these taxpayer funded expenditures. “Return on investment is huge. We should be having that discussion.” Yes, we should! And, of course, as soon as Weeks put that marker down, the Chair of the committee abruptly changed the subject.

But the question of ROI brings up another important question regarding the role of early childcare and its value to our society: is it for the kids, for the parents, for the public education system, or for the business community? Spoiler alert: It’s not for the kids.

Of course, all the public facing propaganda is that this is “for the children,” but everybody knows that the best thing for any child barring extreme circumstances is to be at home bonding with a parent throughout the first five years of life. If you really cared about the children, and wanted to spend $100 million, you’d do it incentivizing parents to stay home and parent. A program that is specifically designed to incentivize both parents to drop their baby/toddler off with a stranger for a huge, anxiety filled chunk of the day is not in any way, shape or form in the best interests of the child. It is, significant research suggests, contributing to the rising rates of mental health problems in young people.

What taxpayer funded Pre-K is in practice is corporate welfare for the benefit of employers. As Richards admits at one point: “We need to support these working families and make sure they have what they need, especially to get into work on behalf of our economy.” In other words, it’s more important for society that mom and dad both work outside the home than it is for one of them to stay home and raise their children. Is it? I love employers and I’m a big proponent of economic growth, but at the cost of a generation, or multiple generations, of mal-adjusted individuals suffering from mental illness? That’s not a solid overall ROI.

The other beneficiary of Universal Pre-K is the public school bureaucracy, which in Vermont has lost around 30,000 K-12 students since the turn of the 21^st century, and they have been working feverishly to execute this hostile take-over – with all this taxpayer money — of the birth to five childcare industry since at least 2005. The result of this “investment” is we’ve make childcare more expensive, less available, and less effective for children. Again, terrible ROI.

To that last point, the other supposed benefit of Universal Pre-K is that it better prepares children for kindergarten. This is questionable, and, even if it were true, so what? Since people began studying the impacts of Pre-K programs, the data shows over and over that the Pre-K kids do slightly better than their peers in kindergarten, but by the third grade or so, the non-Pre-K kids are doing as well or, in many cases, better. The phenomenon even has a name: “fade out.” So, as an investment in public education – which is not supposed to turn out kindergarteners but rather high school graduates – this $100 million or more that we’re spending for “fade out” is a TOTAL waste.

And, as I pointed out in a recent article, the more kids who matriculate through Vermont’s ostensibly “high quality” Pre-K program, the worse they do on national testing by the time they reach elementary school and beyond. This repersents a NEGATIVE return on investment.

So, many thanks to Senator Weeks for asking the right questions regarding this massively expensive, misguided, and ineffective program. I hope he gets some answers, because we all deserve to hear them! Not to mention our money back.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 25 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years’ service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.