Is the government manipulating education research?
Is the government manipulating education research again? President Obama wants to spend another $10 billion on early childhood programs like Head Start - a preschool program for low-income students. However, the U.S. government has yet to release a report highlighting the results of this program. The results are worth knowing; after all, $10 billion is a lot of money.
Since the data collection on Head Start was completed about four years ago, Dr. Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas believes that burying or manipulating education data might be one reason why we haven't seen the study.
According to Dan Lips of the Heritage Foundation, since the program's inception in 1965, the U.S. has spent over $100 billion providing pre-school for low-income students. But according to briefs and political insiders related to the buried and unreleased federal report, the program has no lasting gains for students. The data collection for the federally mandated report was completed in 2006 and the report itself was supposed to be released in March of 2009.
This seems very similar to last year's education fiasco as the Obama administration attempted to secretly leak the promising results of the D.C. voucher program on a Friday afternoon - months AFTER Democrats had voted to all but kill the program.
