The Tennessee Center for Policy Research can be justified in saying "I told you so," though that won't do much good for taxpayers, who have had hundreds of millions of their hard-earned dollars wasted.

In 2005, the center warned that a plan for taxpayer-funded pre-K programs was of dubious merit. The State of Tennessee went ahead anyway with what the center called "a jobs program for the teachers union."

Now the state has hired an outside party to evaluate its pre-K program. The verdict: The center was correct, more or less.

The study, performed by the Ohio-based Strategic Research Group, found that “by the Second Grade there was no statistically significant difference [in educational performance] attributable to Pre-K participation.” Initial gains in student achievement associated with Pre-K fade away within three years, leaving no lasting impact for students,

Having failed to see the desired results in public schools despite one change after another, the trend in public policy has been to let those schools take control of children's lives even sooner.