In a recent speech on education, President Obama re-asserted his promise of “cradle to career education for all Americans” by offering 55,000 first-time parents, “regular visits from trained nurses to help make sure their children are healthy and prepare them for school and life.” He also added 5 billion dollars in additional funding for Head Start in the last stimulus bill, echoed Al Gore’s desire for universal pre-school, and proposed lengthening the school year.

At first glance, any intention to improve our failing public school system seems laudable, but the sad fact of recent history is that government-run early childhood educational programs have been an abysmal failure.

Numerous studies of Head Start reveal that by grade school there is no difference academically in children who participated in the program and those who didn’t. Georgia and Oklahoma have spent billions implementing universal pre-school, but after fifteen years of effort have seen elementary reading and math scores actually drop slightly below where they were before universal pre-school began.

Nonetheless, those who want the government to take an increasingly bigger role in childhood development insist that the answer to our educational underachievement is more, not less federal involvement beginning even earlier in a child’s life. I can’t help but wonder though, is the problem really not enough hours, years, or dollars spent on education, or something else?

Over the past 40 years, beginning with LBJ’s Head Start program, federal educational spending in real dollars has increased dramatically while by all accounts academic performance has steadily declined. Ironically, politicians and educational bureaucrats insist that the only way to reverse the downward trajectory is not only to spend more money, but for children to spend a greater percentage of their young lives in these failing institutions via longer school years.

Since there’s no data validating the academic benefits of universal pre-school, many of its supporters claim that its ancillary benefits of health, nutrition, and social services make the idea worthwhile regardless. In other words, the government needs to institutionalize children from the cradle (to borrow President Obama’s terminology) in order to take care of their basic needs.

Let me suggest something radical: It is the God-given responsibility of the parent, not the government, to feed, clothe, educate, protect, and raise their children. Barring criminal neglect or abuse, the government has neither the constitutional right nor authority to intervene in the lives of children. This isn’t North Korea, and our children aren’t wards of the State.

If the President’s goal really is to improve education, why not allow private schools to compete for students and the tax dollars that should follow them to the school of their parents’ choosing? Let me guess…because public schools are too big to fail? We’ve heard that before.

But the bigger issue at stake is the fact that when the government begins to usurp the responsibilities of parents, it creates a mentality of dependency that eventually leads to servitude among a whole class of parents who abdicate their proper role in exchange for government assistance. The hand that rocks the cradle really does rule the world, and anyone who values their freedom will think twice before turning their pre-school children over to someone else.



Craig Ziemba is a military pilot who lives in Meridian. To have him speak at your event, email craigziemba@aol.com.