This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 29th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Biden wants states to opt into a federalized system of universal preschool.

Is it a good idea? Do parents even want it? And what about the

preschools that already exist? What would it mean for them? Cato policy analyst

Colleen Ronsich suggests caution and offers some reasons why federalized pre-K might cause more

problems than it would solve. Her new paper is available today. What experience

do states have with a universal, a state-run universal pre-kindergarten program?

A lot of states have some form of state funding for preschool.

Only four have universal preschool for four-year-olds and

that would be Florida, Oklahoma, Vermont, and West Virginia, and then a lot of other states have just varying

degrees of them.

None have it for three-year-olds.

Okay, so what has been the experience?

It's really, it's mixed results and it's something that's hard to study because to really

get a good understanding you need to have a randomized controlled study so you would have to have some kids that got in and some who tried and didn't.

So it's a hard thing to study. There was, Tennessee's program isn't quite universal, but it is very widespread and there was a study that came out from Tennessee from Vanderbilt University researchers just earlier this year on Tennessee's program, which is not quite universal, but pretty

widespread and the program meets nine out of ten of the benchmarks set by the National Institute for Early Education Research.

And the program found actually harmful impacts from the pre-K program in Tennessee and that was both in

academics and behavioral when they were looking at randomized kids who have

participated looking through sixth grade so a few years ago they looked at the kids in third grade,

found some negative impacts, and then this year they released the study through

...