This electronically published book, published by the Hoover Institution and authored by Fordham Foundation president and Hoover Senior Fellow Checker Finn, joins the ranks of our dubious honorees. Misdirecting readers from a mountain of empirical, peer reviewed and widely accepted evidence, Finn cherry-picks a few weak studies to criticize proposals for universal preschool. Our third-party expert reviewer summed up Finn’s work as “errors, exaggerations, misrepresentation and logical inconsistency.” Among the reviewer’s catalog of fourteen major errors, he notes that actual costs are exaggerated by a factor of two while immediate and long-term well-documented effects are under-reported or not reported accurately. The book also ignores numerous meta-analyses of preschool research and cost-benefit studies that have found a clear social and financial benefit for early education, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars per child.

Finn also praises the Florida program as a model even though there are no accountability data available from that program, and the program is structurally inequitable. In the push for a non-universal program, “The book proposes a vague, targeted alternative that is entirely fictional, but which, like the mythical gryphon, is especially powerful and majestic.”