Preschool for All: When Command and Control can Kill a Policy

By Eric Shierman
In: Education
Friday October 25, 2024

Multnomah County is offering policymakers a master class in bad education policy design. They’ve packed so much prescriptive coercion into a universal preschool program that providers are balking at participating.

Preschool is expensive. Let me tell you; I cut a check each month to a very nice one in South Salem named Buttercup Hill.

It’s sufficiently expensive that the cost tempts one to imagine how nice it would be if the government paid for it. That’s what Multnomah County is trying to do. Voters succumbed to that temptation in 2020.

Four years later, despite feeling the burden of the associated local income tax to support the policy, parents of preschoolers have little opportunity in Multnomah County to send their kids to government-funded preschools.

Why? The progressives running Multnomah County just couldn’t help themselves in imposing so many requirements on preschools, that many are choosing not to join the program. Multnomah County requires these schools:

  • make it easier for their employees to unionize
  • run their school the way the County tells them via a contractual requirement to follow a program guide that the County can change over time (and make worse than it already is).
  • cede all intellectual property to the County government
  • provide required raises for teachers
  • enroll whatever child the County tells them to enroll
  • install a commercial-grade kitchen

It also mandates what the participating preschools cannot do:

  • charge fees for late pickup of child
  • expulse a child
  • provide 1-on-1 care for a special needs child

It was not enough to provide funding at a considerable expense. Multnomah County feels the need to turn fine preschools into Portland Public Schools.

This might provide a cautionary tale of how school choice could be poorly administered. Imagine a voucher program with so many harmful strings attached that few private schools participate.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.

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