Universal preschool means that all kids whose parents want it, will be able to go to preschool. It will target the urban poor, who can make the most gains from it.

Speaking as a teacher, when I taught kindergarten to disadvantaged kids, it was extremely difficult to get them caught up to where they needed to be at the start of K, let alone get them through the year’s curriculum and ready for first grade. They started really far behind because of their lack of experiences in the preschool years, and making up for what they had missed in their first five years of life was a huge task.

Once I started teaching that same demographic group in preK, suddenly things became more possible. I could take kids who were behind where they needed to be at age 4, get them caught up, and get them ready for kindergarten, or even ahead a little.

See Finland cited in the WSJ – the best results come from a later start, not pushing children to be academics when their main job should be learning from real life & play.

The situation of those not socioeconomically advantaged is quite different than the yuppies in NYC trying to get their children into elite pre-schools. Those with a disavantage socio-economically do benefit.

It’s not always about the “have’s” it is sometimes about the “have not’s”.

I understand how the WSJ would miss that though.

And it might be educational to see how many hours a day those kids spend in school in first, second, and third grades.

You will see that the countries that have the best educational systems in the world have the lowest requirements and expectations on young children.

Richard Whitmire

In the study linked to by the USA Today editorial, you use the findings of a study whose statistics are invalidated by not choosing participants in either the preschool or “control” group at random. I could cherry-pick results to show that the sky is pink with those statistical methods.