To: National Desk

Contact: Denise Kanter, Morningstar Educational Network, 714-633-8074

ORANGE, Calif., June 5 /Christian Newswire/ -- A child’s brain develops very rapidly during the first five years, so it is no wonder one might think these years are a great time for children to start structured schooling. Parents eagerly drop their children off at preschool hoping that their child will be reading by age 4 or 5 and will become polite and social butterflies. But is institutionalized preschooling producing well-behaved and academically superior children? Studies show that preschool attendance is not producing the results some had hoped for. In May 2006, the Reason Foundation, in its study ‘Is Universal Preschool Beneficial?’ found while preschool enrollment increased from 16 to 66 percent since 1965, preschool attendance has not resulted in increased student achievement, with U.S. test scores rising only very slightly since 1970.

Denise Kanter of Morningstar Educational Network commented, “It’s not just academic scores that are not meeting expectations, preschools are turning out children with serious emotional and behavioral problems.” In November 2005, the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford studied 14,000 preschoolers and kindergarteners and found that children who attended preschool had more social, emotional and behavioral problems than children who had stayed home.

Yielding similar results as the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford, C.D. Howe Institute released a study in February 2006 that reviewed 33,000 children who attended Quebec’s universal preschool program between 1994 and 2002. The Institute commented, "Several measures we looked at suggest that children were worse off in the years following the introduction of the universal childcare program. We studied a wide range of measures of child well-being from anxiety and hyperactivity to social and motor skills. For almost every measure, we find that the increased use of childcare was associated with a decrease in their well-being relative to other children." The study found that the aggression scores of the preschoolers increased 24 per cent after the program was introduced.

In the 1990’s, the state of Georgia implemented a universal preschool program at a cost of $1.15 billion only to find that it did not produce lasting academic gains. Despite universal preschool, Georgia continues to rank in the bottom 10 of states for increasing fourth-grade reading scores from 1992 to 2005.

“There is just too much research showing the negative effects of daycare and preschool for the government to be promoting universal programs. I fear they think it is a quick-fix to the disaster public schools have become. Sending young children off to kindergarten with preschool acquired problems is only going to make matters for them and schools worse. Our goal is to turn the tide, and provide parents with the tools and resources to just say no to institutionalized daycare and preschool. Parents should be thinking about how they can nurture their young children at home. And they should be considering homeschooling,” Kanter said.

For more information on preschooling at home and homeschooling, visit Considering Homeschooling Ministry at http://www.consideringhomeschooling.org, a Christian ministry sponsored by Morningstar Educational Network, a 501 (c) non-profit organization dedicated to helping parents discover the blessings of homeschooling their children.