Sohn: Newest finding says early learning undone by K-3 classrooms

Buried on an inside page of the region/state section of the newspaper last week was the story of a startling Vanderbilt study. The five-year examination found that the positive effects of Tennessee’s pre-K program for economically disadvantaged children were significant at first, but faded out in early elementary grades.

The study flew in the face of most everything else we’ve heard about pre-K and early childhood education in recent years. And on face value, at least, it flies in the face of common sense.

But that first, grabber paragraph – and the one most picked up (and poorly explained) in many news stories – doesn’t tell us everything about what might have happened to the youngsters with the early bright start who at the end of their actual kindergarten year were indistinguishable from their peers who didn’t have the same start but caught up.

Consider these first sentences from the fifth paragraph of the Vanderbilt study synopsis:

“By second grade, the academic performance of both groups of children had flattened out and began to lag below national norms.”

Then that report’s cruel fifth paragraph goes on to deliver a gut punch:

“Moreover, by the end of second grade and continuing in third, the children who attended TN-VPK [Voluntary Pre-K] are not performing as well on many of the achievement measures as the comparable children who did not attend VPK.”

Both groups of children had flattened out and began to lag below national norms. And that trend continued into the third grade. So an $85 million-plus-a-year statewide investment targeting the 18,000 at-risk preschoolers – about $4,700 a student – cannot overcome a mediocre and declining state K-3 public school system.

Those children did not suddenly learn only to suddenly become dumb.

They may have suddenly become under-challenged. Or they may have become suddenly ignored among a more diverse group of public school students. Or perhaps they simply suffered the spears and arrows of ordinarily underfunded regular school – as opposed to a pre-K investment that was suddenly overexpanded in 2005 from a pilot to an underfunded statewide program.

“TN-VPK was rolled out very quickly and not all pre-K classrooms in Tennessee are alike,” said Dale Farran, co-principal investigator and the Antonio M. and Anita S. Gotto Professor of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt’s Peabody Research Institute. “What might you get from the same pre-K program if you had a common vision and could push the quality up? These are among the questions we are raising in light of the findings of our study.”

To NPR, Farron explained the effect of the underfunded expansion this way: “It’s like saying spinach is really good for you, but we can’t afford spinach. But here, I’ve got this Easter grass. Maybe that will be just as good.”

Any of those “whys” above are possible. What isn’t possible is that these youngsters stopped learning in following years simply because they got a handful of years older.

Farran’s co-researcher on the study and director of Peabody, Mark Lipsey, didn’t point any fingers, but he didn’t offer much illumination, either.

“I want to emphasize this,” Lipsey said. “This is not just pre-K works or doesn’t work, but this is a pre-K through thirdgrade story. There is a lot we don’t know yet.

“Two big questions are: If you want the pre-K effects to persist, is there something that could have been done in pre-K that would have changed the trajectory of those students going forward? And the other big question is what happens when those students got into kindergarten that did not continue their momentum?” Lipsey said.

If anything, the study seems to show that learning begins amazingly early, but our educational system is incapable of sustaining learning over numerous grades.

Farran put it this way: “Even more concerning is that grades K-3 is not benefiting the kids that need it.”

It seems as though our state’s five-year, $425 million investment didn’t just prove something we already knew anyway – that early childhood education is important. It actually proved something much more important and valuable, yet harder to fix. It proved that our shamefully poor elementary education system can actually undo that all-important pre-K work.

It seems a good assumption that if it can undo educators’ pre-K work, it can undo parental early education as well.

Woe is us.