Bright Beginnings: Where's the data?

I felt a flash of deja vu this week when school board member Trent Merchant pressed CMS officials for data on the kids who pioneered the district's prekindergarten program in 1998.

Two years ago, I asked similar questions for an article on the costs and results of Bright Beginnings. The biggest thing that has changed since then is the money. At the time, Bright Beginnings was costing Mecklenburg County more than $11 million a year.

An influx of federal stimulus money dropped the county's tab to about $2.6 million in the current budget year. That money goes away in 2011, reviving the debate over long-term benefits.

The first Bright Beginnings tots will graduate from high school next year, if they've stayed on track and been promoted every year. Thing is, no one seems to know if they have, or how they've fared.

It's worth noting that neither Peter Gorman nor any of the current board was running CMS when then-Superintendent Eric Smith launched Bright Beginnings.

I was covering children's issues for the Observer, so I remember the back-and-forth with child-care providers, who said they could provide good pre-K services for less money. Smith insisted that CMS could do it best, maintaining the quality to produce long-term results and monitoring to prove it.

Smith left Charlotte in 2002, and the monitoring faded away. That may or may not have had anything to do with the fact that the edge the Bright Beginnings kids showed when they entered kindergarten was also fading as they moved through elementary school.

Gorman told Merchant and the board that it's difficult to prove or disprove any benefits from pre-K so many years down the road, with so many other factors shaping each student's academic path.

Fair enough.

But it's also worth noting that the very first document posted for the CMS review of pre-K is a national projection saying each dollar spent on high-quality pre-K nets $7 in savings, based on better results that run through adulthood.

And that CMS has run similar cost-benefit saying each Bright Beginnings dollar saves taxpayers $2 to $3 in long-term costs, based on the assumption they're more likely to graduate and get jobs. A CMS projection that included reduced crime shot the savings to $15 for every dollar spent.

Which raises a question: If officials say a year of good prekindergarten produces adults who stay off welfare and out of jail, shouldn't those officials track whether it produces successful middle- and high-school students?