Craig Ladwig is editor of the quarterly Indiana Policy Review. His column appears in Indiana newspapers.
To watch the Pence campaign is to watch a lab experiment in biological tropism. That is bad news for those few Republicans still hoping for a mandate for systemic change in a second term. The word picture is a group of amoebas on a microscope slide reflexively retreating this way and that as someone (we suspect Matt Tulley, the Star columnist) threatens them with a pencil tip.
First there was the about-face on protecting Christian merchants against a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender power play. Now comes an about-face on a promise to eschew Washington-defined pre-school education.
That promise, it turns out, also was qualified. The governor is said to have been honoring an understanding with key legislative leaders that the program would not be expanded unless it could be shown to “work.”
Guess what? As the election nears, the campaign declared last week that government pre-school education does, indeed, “work” and federal aid can now pour in — and, coincidentally, the punch can be taken out of opposition advertising implying that the governor hates little children.
But others, operating independent of electoral cycles, are not so sure.
Our friend, Dr. Cecil Bohanon, for one, has made a complicating observation. It is that any benefits of pre-school seem to be in the parental realm of teaching self-control rather than in achieving the central goal of the Obama administration’s $75-billion program.
That is, government-mandated pre-school, independent of parental involvement or social background, will not narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor students.
“It seems ironic, then, to use the coercive mechanism of government (yes, taxes are coercion) to set up programs to teach self-control to groups that social scientists tell us lack self-control,” Bohanon concluded. His article was followed two years later by our researcher, Hang La, who surveyed other studies raising the same doubt.
Most recently, the American Interest magazine reported that a British study followed up work in Tennessee and Quebec to find that the primary if not the only benefit of government pre-school was that it saved childcare costs for certain parents.
“The better course of action is to offer those parents a tax break — that is, to give money back to them directly to spend as they see fit, rather than grafting it on to an expensive and probably ineffective new federal program,” argued the magazine
A promising idea, especially in an election year. It would require a campaign team, however, willing to think outside the amoebic.