President Obama's call for expanded Pre-K education has drawn a widespread, but factually challenged, retort from the radical right. Rich Lowry wrote about it for National Review; Charles Murray at Bloomberg. Brad Jackson chatted about it on redstate.com. Our own Greg Johnson this week parroted the claims in a News Sentinel column.

In one form or another they mention a recent government report and claim it shows pre-K a failure. So I tracked down the report, and give its full citation below. In short, the report reveals nothing like the cherry-picked sentences Johnson and others cited.

The research compares Head Start to non-Head Start pre-K options. The introduction (p. xvii) makes it clear that the study looked at three- and four-year-olds randomly assigned to Head Start "or to a control group that could receive any other non-Head Start services chosen by their parents." In short, this was a comparison of the benefits of one type of pre-K to other types of pre-K. The authors themselves, if one reads to the discussion section at the end of the document (p. 152), do not doubt the long-term benefits of early childhood education.

Let's hope this factual correction somehow can keep pace with the widespread falsehood replicated this week in our own News Sentinel.

Full cite:
Mike Puma, Stephen Bell, Ronna Cook, Camilla Heid, Pam Broene, Frank Jenkins, Andrew Mashburn, and Jason Downer (2012). Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study Final Report, OPRE Report # 2012-45, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children
and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.