Rockford Register Star, March 5, 2006

Letter to the Editor

Gov. Blagojevich is awfully quick to pick taxpayers’ pockets before checking out the real results regarding statewide preschool. He should be checking the facts about statewide programs that already have been instituted.

In the San Francisco Examiner June 15, 2005, Lance T. Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute wrote that, “the evidence from Georgia, one of only two states with a statewide preschool, is not encouraging. In 2003, Georgia State University researchers found that after tracking students for five years, any test score gains from preschool were not sustained in later years.”

Preschool boosters point to France, which has universal pre-kindergarten. Yet the truth, according to Izumi, is that U.S. fourth-graders outscore their French counterparts in international reading tests. “Only in later grades do U.S. students fall behind their foreign peers, which indicates that the U.S. problem isn’t lack of preschool, but lack of quality education in post-elementary grades.”

If the governor really were interested in improving education, he would put that money toward highly qualified teachers in the later grades rather than using the hard-earned money of taxpayers to pay for what essentially will be day care.

Illinois taxpayers have enough of a burden without paying for more entitlement programs.

— Jenny Turner, Poplar Grove