PROTECT OUR KIDS FROM PRESCHOOL

Is strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool good for them? Not according to available evidence, say Shikha Dalmia, a senior analyst, and Lisa Snell, director of education policy at the Reason Foundation.

• In the last half-century, U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70 percent from 16 percent.
• But fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- the nation's report card -- have remained virtually stagnant since the early 1970s.

The results from Oklahoma and Georgia -- both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago -- paint an equally dismal picture.

• A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class.
• Likewise, Canada's C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children, say Dalmia and Snell...

[yeah but social indoctrination takes root just fine (think: global warming, 'alternative' families - ad nauseam]

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