Meathead Economics Part 2

From SHIKHA DALMIA AND LISA SNELL regarding the California Preschool For All initiative:

"... Yet even the Reiner folks don't expect to enroll all four-year-olds in the program--just 70% of them. However, 66% of California's four-year-olds already attend some form of preschool. This means that $2.4 billion will fund 22,000 new kids--about $109,000 per new preschooler, according to a recent analysis by the Reason Foundation. For this kind of money, a lot of poor parents could put their kids through a good state college and graduate school and still have some change left for a family field trip to the Galapagos."

".... and what's coming out of Oklahoma and Georgia, two states that implemented universal preschool over a decade ago--is not particularly appetizing. Last year, the gains in reading scores of fourth graders in both states ranked among the bottom 10 on the National Assessment of Education Progress tests--the premier benchmark for comparing student performance across states. Even more stunning, not one of the 10 best performing states had universal preschool programs."

Read the whole article here.