Del Varane has taught early childhood education for half a century. However, her most recent scientific publication had her question everything she thought she knew.

Varane, a senior researcher, says it is time to rethink the whole approach to preschool.
“It really took a lot of soul-searching, a lot of reading the literature to try and think of plausible reasons why that might be so”; Thus, Faran commented on her shocking study with its results.
This means the result of a study that lasted more than a decade. It included 2,990 low-income children in Tennessee whose parents applied for free public pre-kindergarten programs. Some were accepted, others were rejected. This randomness is the gold standard for showing causation in science.

Study details
Farran and her colleagues at Vanderbilt University followed both groups of children through sixth grade, those who had been to preschool and those who were rejected. At the end of their first year, children who went to pre-K scored higher in school readiness, as expected.

But after the third grade, they performed worse than the control group. At the end of the sixth grade, their performance had an even greater decline. Their test scores were poor, they were more likely to be in special education, and they were more likely to get into trouble at school, including serious problems that led to expulsion.

“Whereas in third grade we saw negative effects on one of the state’s math, science, and reading tests, we saw it in sixth grade on all the tests,” Varane says. “In the third grade, where we saw traces of one type of expulsion due to minor infractions, we noticed that in the sixth grade, the expulsion was due to minor and major infractions.”

A statewide public pre-kindergarten program taught by licensed teachers and based in public schools had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study.

Varane wasn’t expecting it. She did not like the result. But her study design was unusually robust, so she couldn’t easily explain it.
“This is still the only randomized controlled pre-kindergarten trial at the state level,” Varane says. “And I know people are going to be upset about this and not want it to be true.”