Last week, Providence Mayor and candidate for Rhode Island governor Angel Taveras grabbed some Providence Journal attention for a pre-proposal announcement and a next-day proposal of a universal pre-K program for the state. The timing could have been better.

The week before, Grover Whitehurst (no anti-government extremist) published a brief review of universal pre-K research via the Brookings Institution (no haven for free marketers). The upshot is that Taveras’s “first major policy announcement” declares an intention to leap into a policy whose value is increasingly coming into question. Per Whitehurst:

Based on what we have learned from these studies, the most defensible conclusion is that these statewide programs are not working to meaningfully increase the academic achievement or social/emotional skills and dispositions of children from low-income families. I wish this weren’t so, but facts are stubborn things. Maybe we should figure out how to deliver effective programs before the federal government funds preschool for all.

The charts within the article show that the preschool population under review skewed on the “the same or worse” side of the line, versus the control group. Those who start with the assumption that directing more resources through government to education must wonder: How could this be? What about Mayor Taveras, who touts himself as evidence of the value of the government Head Start program?

Well, kids and families are different and need different things. It would be a reasonable wager to suggest that’s even more true at earlier ages, when children are less autonomous from their parents. It can’t be questioned that early childhood programs help some people in some circumstances, but pushing all children into them could overall do nothing, or it could even make things worse.

Given their specific circumstances, some children no doubt benefit from time with their parents more than they would from time with a short-term guardian in a classroom with a dozen or so other children who are owed attention and tangible benefit. And some parents would not use the additional time freed from parental responsibilities to maximize the well-being of their households.

We’ve had too much of government’s insisting that its programs should always be expanded and applied universally. It really isn’t well positioned to declare that some tens of millions of dollars out of the economy are best spent in that way.

Rhode Islanders need to stop encouraging those who want to define the state by its government and start encouraging those who want to return to them the freedom to determine what their own families need.