"Conservative" NC GOP Wants More Taxpayer-Subsidized Free Child Care

Hold on to your hat. The NC House GOP majority is apparently getting ready to expand free, taxpayer-subsidized child care, thus fulfilling one of Roy Cooper's campaign promises. The Raleigh News and Observer has the details. David Lewis is apparently the ring-leader of this effort.

Government child care for toddlers and pre-schoolers has long been a media/left priority. It is apparently thought to be critical to shape the kids' worldview from nearly the moment they pop out of their mothers' respective wombs. We have heard about Head Start, Smart Start, Pre-K and other such creatures ad nauseum. K-12, of course, was no longer felt to be sufficient.

Straight moral sense would dictate that our government should expect mothers and fathers to unite and work together to assure that their preschool kids can be raised properly-- with care provided ideally and primarily by mom, if possible. It is, after all, a natural role for mothers to nurture their kids.

But instead, we have North Carolina Republicans insisting that the government ought to provide preschool care to increasing numbers of children. These politicians should instead be getting state government out of this business completely, and insist that mothers and fathers jointly provide for their kids' care.

Sometimes one cannot help but shake one's head at some of the antics from our "conservative" party.

Comments

[Fred Gregory]

TC: Sad indeed. I am getting nauseous from shaking my head at the mischief of our GOP

Head Start Programs Are Setting Kids Up for Failure

In recent years, support for preschool education has grown by leaps and bounds. After all, who wouldn’t want to help adorable little kids get an early jump on success?

But the enthusiasm for Pre-K dampened a bit with the release of two studies, one from 2012 which studied children in a Head Start program and another from 2016 which studied children in Tennessee’s statewide preschool program. The Head Start study found that its children were more inclined to behavioral problems than those who did not participate. The Tennessee study, on the other hand, found that participants did worse academically several years into school than those who had not participated. We need to study the effects of preschool education more before we wholeheartedly commit to public Pre-K programs.

The news that these Pre-K programs may hurt rather than help was not received favorably by preschool advocates. And according to a recent Brookings Institute article by scholars Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey, Pre-K advocates have done their best to discredit these studies.

But as Farran and Lipsey explain, the attempts to dismiss these findings “are based on incorrect and misleading characterizations of each study.”

For starters, the Head Start study is dismissed on the grounds that some participants ended up in the wrong study group. But according to Farran and Lipsey, such occurrences happen in many scientific studies, and as such, are controlled for in the final statistics. The authors caution that this does not change the fact that children who participated in the Head Start program exhibited more aggressive behavior, the most concerning factor of the study.

Secondly, Farran and Lipsey explain that the Tennessee study is dismissed on the grounds that it is not a “high-quality” program such as those in major cities like Boston and Tulsa. However, when sample sizes are taken from each of these programs, Farran and Lipsey note that there is no major difference between the academic outcomes of each program. In other words, because of the similarity in the outcomes, those who dismiss the Tennessee preschool program as being low quality must also dismiss the programs they hold up as models.

Given this information, does it seem we need to study the effects of preschool education more before we wholeheartedly commit to public Pre-K programs? Is it possible that young children would learn more and have greater long-term success if they weren’t subjected to the classroom at such early ages?

[Fred Gregory]

Here is the link to the above article

https://fee.org/articles/head-start-programs-are-setting-kids-up-for-failure/

It was republished from Intellectual Takeout.

[Triad Conservative]

Fred, you are right. It is getting downright sickening.

[Billy Jones]

Don't you get it? This is yet another form of CORPORATE WELFARE.

Corporations don't want to pay workers enough to afford these types of services so in order to entice workers to work for the lowest wages possible, the taxpayers must pay the price by paying for government funded services and government waste.

And you know how both political parties love to give away corporate welfare.

[Triad Conservative]

I think that is part of the picture, Billy. Also, the corporate community undoubtedly likes to keep women in the workforce, even when they have young kids.