November 22, 2005

"First 5 California": Yet another illegal immigration magnet

The Meathead, aka Rob Reiner, wants to give preschool to every child in California. Needless to say, illegal aliens won't be excluded from this program, making this yet another flashing neon sign encouraging people to immigrate here illegally.

And, he claims he's got 1,000,000 signatures on a petition to get it on the June 2006 ballot.

Their homepage is here and more info here.

Here are the downsides of Rob Reiner and his plan.

They have some relationship with this, which has a SF chapter. From that chapter's site comes a .doc file cached here or here, which contains this from early 2004:

EXTERNAL FACTORS/TRENDS THAT WILL/MIGHT HAVE A POSITIVE IMPACT ON PRUSUING PRESCHOO FOR ALL IN SAN FRANCISCO

Brainstormed List:

* Geographic location
* Current fiscal crisis
* CTA/Reiner Initiative is already finalized without input from
anybody else
* Preschool for All vs. the school district
* Investing more in families that already have instead of focusing on
the disadvantaged
* Head Start ? difficulty dealing and planning with them
* Preschool is being defined outside of us
* Could be stuck with funding and policies (e.g. half day only,
whether it starts out universal or phases in) that have been
predetermined for us
* Confusing where Reiner and State Prop 10 are together
* Problem with sustainability
* Focus on assessment and testing of 4 year olds
* Availability of facilities
* Structure, time-wise, of the program ? could have negative
consequences e.g. family vacations
* Difficulty leveraging the money
* Declining family and child population in the city
* High cost of housing
* Difficulty with transportation

Posted to California at November 22, 2005 12:13 AM

Comments

Probably the most revealing parts of the critique of the "Reiner Plan":
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/cap/2005/cap_05-06-15.html
(...)
Further, the evidence from Georgia, one of only two states with a statewide preschool, is not encouraging. In 2003, Georgia State University researchers found that after tracking students for five years, any test score gains from preschool “are not sustained in later years.”

RAND and other preschool boosters point to France, which has a universal pre-K program. Yet, the truth is that U.S. fourth graders outscore their French counterparts in international reading tests. Only in later grades do U.S. students fall behind their foreign peers, which indicates that the U.S. problem isn’t lack of preschool, but lack of quality education in post-elementary grades.

Posted by: perroazul del norte at November 22, 2005 01:42 PM