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School districts across California are on a recruitment spree, doing what they can to enroll the state’s 4-year-olds into their year-old pre-K or “transitional kindergarten” (TK) program. Districts are trying to sell parents on TK by using school banners, bus bench ads, billboards, and texting and robocall campaigns. The $2.7 billion plan aims to have 400,000 4-year-olds enrolled by 2025, but it has been off to a sluggish start. Estimates from the Legislative Analyst’s Office put average daily attendance for the 2022-2023 school year at about 91,000, well short of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s estimates.
The idea of having the government in charge of educating 4-year-olds has been promoted for years. Most recently, in his State of the Union speech in February, Joe Biden asserted that “children who go to preschool are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree.”
Right before he became governor in 2019, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom told supporters in San Francisco, “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb, and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career.”
President Obama touted the preschool idea in his 2014 State of the Union address, claiming research has shown that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is “high-quality early education.”
The National Education Association extols the virtues of TK on its website, claiming that children in early childhood education programs are less likely to repeat a grade, less likely to be identified as having special needs, more prepared academically for later grades, more likely to graduate from high school, and be higher earners in the workforce.
But all the rah-rah talk falls apart when the data are examined.
The U.S. has a near 60-year history of funding early childhood programs in the form of Head Start. The federal government released the last of a three-part longitudinal study of the $8 billion-a-year program in 2012, and the results offered scant cause for jubilation. According to the report’s executive summary: “…there was little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group.”
The 2012 report reinforced some disappointing findings from the study’s second phase, which showed that any gains “had faded considerably by the end of 1st grade, with Head Start children showing an edge only in learning vocabulary over their peers in the control group who had not participated in Head Start.”
Other studies purporting to show preschool’s benefits also have failed to prove that spending billions on pre-k is money well spent. Two often cited studies, the Abecedarian and Perry Preschool projects, for example, are now over 50 years old, and involved no more than 60 children. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray wrote in 2013, both studies “were overseen by the same committed, well-intentioned people who conducted the demonstration projects. Evaluations of social programs are built around lots of judgment calls—from deciding how the research is designed to figuring out how to analyze the data. People with a vested interest in the results shouldn’t be put in the position of making those judgments.”
Also in 2013, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Grover J. Whitehurst wrote that the group that went through the Tennessee Voluntary State Pre-K Program, a full-day program for 4‐year‐olds from low-income families, “performed somewhat less well on cognitive tasks at the end of first grade than the control group, even though of the children in the control group had no experience as 4-year-olds in a center-based early childhood program.” Whitehurst concluded, “Until the field of early education becomes evidence-based, it will be doomed to cycles of fad and fancy.”
Also, regarding the Tennessee Voluntary State Pre-K Program, Vanderbilt University research professors Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey found that by second and third grade, “the academic performance of children in the Tennessee Pre-K program lagged the control group of children who did not participate in the program.”
And now, there is most definitely a risk in allowing the government to help raise young children. A 4-year-old these days may be getting an education about gender identity. The Kaplan Early Learning Center, a widely used international educational services company that provides education and training services to schools at all levels, has lessons on “Gender Identity in Preschool Children,” “Confronting My -isms,” etc., ad nauseam. Along those lines, the Evanston-Skokie school district in Illinois has adopted a curriculum that teaches pre-K through third-grade students to “break the binary” of gender. And they are hardly a one-off.
In Los Angeles, the school district hosted a 10-week online Rainbow Club for children as young as four in 2021. Still in existence, the club “is an online meeting for parents and their elementary school-aged children to meet, connect, and talk about topics related to their identities. The goal of the club is to support families of elementary-aged children. The meeting is led by clinicians. Participants talk and do art projects.”
The same office that created the Rainbow Club also created several presentations that push extreme gender theories onto young children. Some even encourage the exploration of the “two-spirit” Native American sexuality, and criticize European settlers who, they claim, “imposed homophobia, rigid binary gender roles, and misogyny” due to their Christian faith.
TK is a bad idea. Parents should not succumb to the temptation to dump their 4-year-olds into a government-run school. It may or may not do damage, but the touted educational benefits of doing so are non-existent. And should a parent run the risk that their little Johnny might come home one day and insist that he be called “Joannie?”
With the program’s slow enrollment, perhaps parents in California are beginning to see through TK.
* * *
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
Half a century ago there was a movement to close state mental hospitals.
It succeeded.
I remember that. Over the years I have observed the heartbreaking consequences of that.
Government preschool is just free child care for 70% of blacks born out of wedlock, 42% of Hispanics born out of wedlock, and 24% of white children born out of wedlock. Get it?
America is under God’s judgement for gross sexual immorality. God handed down his laws to Moses making it very clear that sexual intercourse is to be ONLY between a married man and woman. Period.
I admire your principles but I’m single and I cant live without sex. I love it and I won’t give it up.
Jeff you choose to insist on sex and if you wanted to live without it, you could.
Then you will pay the penalty. (I hope you don’t get a serious veneral disease). The greatest gift that God gave man is the freedom to CHOOSE. Anyone can choose to accept or deny God and His free offer of salvation, but, like breaking man’s rules (driving 80 in a 40 mph zone is gonna get you a big fine and maybe loss of driving priveleges) breaking God’s rules is gonna get you an eternity in hell instead of paradise.
But that’s OK man. It is your choice. (And you have an eternity to wonder how you could have been so dumb). By the way, ‘principles’ don’t count for anything in God’s economy.
Rev. Roy………..<
That is an excellent, concise reply.
I forgot to add that God’s greatest gift to man is Jesus Christ and He takes away our sins. People are free to believe or not believe. The Holy Spirit offers His Bible for all to read. He grants faith at the time of Baptism. This is what I was taught and believe by the Lutheran Church.
Find a woman to marry.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use birth control.
Sounds like you belong in a commune with like minded egomaniacs who lack self control. Remember Jonestown?
They’re here, they’re queer and they’re coming for your children.
The sad/infuriating thing is you’re quoting a scumbag groomer.
These perverted fools just can’t help it, and say their intentions out loud. (They don’t expect any consequences, as they’re coddled & praised for being “victims”.)
Muslims groom little girls = rape
Homosexuals groom little boys = rape
Grooming my dog = a haircut
The language needs to change.
It certainly looks that way. If it looks like a queer, if it talks like a queer, it’s a queer. Our children deserve to know the truth about God’s binary plan, there are men and there are women. Trans this or trans that are neither male or female, most of them are playing. There are very few that are truly trans.
Ohio LGB Youth Center, Colors+, has Drag Queen classes for kids as young as 11 years old.
We’ve always been told that there is nothing a person can do about their sexual identity. That they are born that way amongst other excuses to pervert what nature intended.
So to have classes on any of these different identities proves we’ve been lied to and we should forbid and outlaw these terrible practices which are tearing down our society and confusing the children.
The Drag pictures I’ve seen are grossly insulting to woman and are nothing but men dressed as clowns. They are grown men playing dress-up. They should be ashamed of themselves for cavorting in such a manner. Then, they act “normal” at work because they know it’s a shameful thing they are doing.
“break the binary” is a faith-based program. Insane rot, but you can be sure their have plans for development…
It’s all an effort by the Left to get its ideological hooks into children even earlier than they currently do.
It has long been noted that the Educational Industrial Complex is heavily feminized and highly gynocentric. 80% of “educators” are female and in the early 1990s (when girls were already graduating from high school and going on to universities at higher rates than boys), feminist educator Carol Gilligan invented a fictive “girl crisis”. In response, school curricula and teaching methods were revised to become more “girl friendly” (and boy adverse). Boys were drugged with Adderal and Ritalin to turn boys (seen as “defective girls”) into more tractable automata. Studies have also shown that female teachers (probably imbued with feminism) give boys lower grades than their performance on achievement tests would indicate. Indeed, in tests in which they were unable to discern the sex of the student (because the name was left off the paper) the grades received boys improved dramtically. So it’s unsurprising the next step is now being taken. Why not simply turn them into girls via puberty blockers, estrogen and ultimately surgical emasculation? The fact that there’s a dark side to this brave new world (Jazz Jennings, who began this feminizing odyssey at age 3 is now morbidly obese and permanently anorgasmic, but hey, she got into Harvard, probably by checking a box).
Interestingly, what little pushback there is against this Orwellian Frankenstein-like mutilation comes because “transwomen” are dominating female sports (male sports, except for lucrative football and basketball programs, were enervated by Title IX) and because a smaller number of girls are being mutilated in a ludicrous attempt to virilize them (all of the victims of childhood transgender transitioning who testified at a recent Congressional hearing were biological females, even though 80% of so called gender affirmation surgery is male to female).
Maybe the only way to stop this madness is to make suing castrating surgeons attractive to trial lawyers.
Yes, why isn’t it illegal to castrate boys, cut off the breasts of girls, and take a scalpel to their genitals? Where are the lawyers, prosecutors and district attorneys who should be going after these so called doctors that would be right at home in Nazi Germany experimenting on Jews?
Transgender surgery was first done in Weimar Germany and continued during the Third Reich. grotesque medical experiments involving castration were done by the Nazis.
I think charges of child abuse should be brought against the so-called educators who introduce children to these destructive ideas. Gender identity is known to be foundational in human psychological development. Stripping the process of normal development away from a child is a good way to shatter the ego and make them susceptible to the larger transhumanist agenda. This is a serious crime.
Absolutely!
It’s child abuse even if the parent wants it.
Imagine if you discovered a parent had cut off her daughter’s breasts.
Our public school system is pushing these ideas of sex changes onto children who believe their parents know what they’re doing in trusting their teachers. The children try to learn and make good grades so their parents can be proud of them. They soak up everything taught to them as if it’s the gods-honest-truth.
No theory should be taught as Truth to kids no matter what. No Theory of Evolution, no Critical Race Theory, no unproven revised history etc.
Governments, at all levels, are pure political bureaucracies that cannot be relied on to do the right thing. Their primary objective is survival and they will do anything necessary to not only survive but grow as well. They’ll mow down anyone in the way.
Until “we the people” act to stop them.
“Our role begins when babies are still in the womb, and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career.”
Assuming you don’t kill them while they’re still in the womb.
Oops, a little slip there on gavin’s part. He acknowledged they are babies in the womb, not just a glob of cells, or a tumor.
Welcome to Pedophile Kindergarten.
Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Pedophiles, Transvestites, and other assorted sexual deviants and criminals.
It’s in our DNA, baby. And we do mean baby.
This ad brought to you by The Democrat Party
Government-run education is largely built on Progressive (read socialist) ideas and is just as destructive as the rest of leftist ideology. A fraud—indoctrination masked as education.
Can one imagine what beautiful, wholesome, intelligent, loving, kind people this nation/world could turn out if the same efforts were directed at teaching the Truths of the Bible, like the Ten Commandments!
I wouldn’t be surprised if that increase in vocabulary is limited to sexual or socialist terms. That would explain why their advantage is minimal, and fades quickly. They just want to start the indoctrination earlier, and education is the last thing they want for children. That undermines indoctrination.
My mom was a Sunday School teacher from the age of 16, she and dad, who was also a reader, had me reading and doing simple math before I started formal school at 6. Part of it was me, I wanted to know what “i-c-e c-r-e-a-m” meant(IKnew it was important, somehow, and grown ups could hide something out loud), and my older cousins and friends teaching me card games. By the time I started school, I knew the mentality behind socialism and was immunized against it, no matter how it was disguised.
One other thing, give children science and history books before they can read. My parents always had history books and magazines around the house. I got an excellent 60s Time-Life nature, human physiology, astronomy, and geology series, at three, and not only did it help me learn to read, I got interested in, and learned a lot about the subjects before I could even read. Young children can understand a lot more than adults realize, it’s mostly getting them interested.
At a party an old high school buddy who had become a marine biologist thought I was just nodding and smiling as he explained plate tectonics and the mid Atlantic rift. I pulled out the relavent T-L book and he was so fascinated he spent the rest of the party going through it and some of the other books in the series. It’s still out there, I recently bought the series in good shape for $150 on online auction.
I’ve collected a lot of older texts, dictionaries, and encyclopeidias, because the new ones are leftist ideologically driven and suck.
True, and besides they are literally re-writing the classic literature of western civilization, just like they are rescripting classic movies, casting blacks as whites etc. They are re-writing history and indoctrinating our children to hate their country, their race, their religion. Yes they are democrat party communist tyrants. They need to be physically deported.
When they have the kids thinking that the World is doomed unless we obey Gaia and Return to a Stoneage way of living that’s not Education its Brainwashing/Indoctrination by Big Green Brother
You’ve said more than most will realize. Global Warming is another disputed theory.
Paganism is on the rise.
UN Agenda 21 and their SDGs are being implemented everywhere and are restricting us of energy and resources for daily living.
ICLEI – International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (now called Local Governments for Sustainability) is in almost every city and town guiding local governments with free templates on legislation for everything to go green and smart growth. This Indoctrination of youth stems from the UN. Yet they still can’t carry out their Primary function to end wars and bring peace to the world. In fact they support the hate-education Palestinians pump into their children with billions of dollars.
This world is sick and judgment day can’t come quick enough in my humble opinion.
Good that one poster got near the truth re the PROMOTERS of these ideas and plans THEMSELVES need to be investigated.
The notorious Enviromental Defense Fund(EDF)exploited kids over this Global Warming/Climate Change Scam even before with ever heard like that Climate Brat Thunberg