The job of a statistical agency is to provide people with data by which they can judge these things for themselves. On the preschool front, the National Center for Education Statistics has let the country down.

In the preschool realm, the U.S. Department of Education has it outsourced the number-gathering to a prominent interest group in the field and it has allowed that interest group to add its own spin.

Because half of 3 and 4 year olds are not enrolled in pre-K today, we have an opportunity to foster disruptive innovations that could change the way we think about childcare, parenting, and education.

How is it that different individuals could look at the same research and come to such different conclusions?

What should we be talking about when we talk about universal pre-K?

It turns out that preschool programs are hard to replicate with fidelity or in such a way that each additional preschool student gets the anticipated benefit.

But first clean up Head Start

The Head Start program has needed a radical overhaul for the past 45 years, i.e. ever since its founding and its near-immediate demonstration that it doesn’t do much lasting good by way of readying poor kids to succeed in school. But Head Start’s iconic status, powerful lobby and influential friends have stymied every effort to turn it into a proper school-readiness program and to purge it of its many shoddy operators.

In "Early Childhood Misstep" over at Forbes.com, Chester E. Finn, Jr. dissects the “Early...

The campaign for universal preschool has gained great momentum, but a troubling contradiction casts...