Over the past few years University of California Prof. Bruce Fuller has become the "bete noir" of the national movement pushing universally available, voluntary, publicly funded preschool. (Full disclosure: One of the major forces behind the movement is the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is an underwriter of this blog, although my ideas are my own. Full-full disclosure: Bruce is a friend from my California days.) Fuller was the go-to guy for reporters in California looking for someone to criticize the California Preschool for All initiative, which voters defeated last June. His op-eds were near-ubiquitous as well and many in the UPK movement heap a good part of the blame for the measure's defeat on Fuller, as well as on the press, which spilled a lot more words covering an alleged scandal with initiative-backer and actor Rob Reiner than they did on the substance of the measure.

Fuller is just coming out with a book from Stanford University Press called "Standardized Childhood" in which he develops more fully his arguments against universal pre-kindergarten. He says public money is better spent on services for the poor, preschool teachers don't need to have college degrees, universal pre-school advocates are in bed with the teachers unions and that state-funded preschools "corral" toddlers into "standardized preschools" and subject them to "stultifying drill-and-kill" lessons that destroy their childhoods. On the one hand, he says that preschool won't close race-and-class-based achievement gaps. On the other, he says preschools don't benefit the middle-class. I'm confused.

What's so curious to me is that the rhetoric of Fuller, who is himself politically progressive, is almost indistinguishable from that of such far-right voices as the John Birch Society, which says here that pre-k will "gobble" up children; the "free-market" oriented Heartland Institute, the Pacific Research Institute, the Goldwater Institute, the Cato Institute and others. Fuller is worried about what he calls the "brave new world" of child-rearing, conjuring up an image of government bureaucrats marching kids into school not long after they're out of diapers to drill them on the ABCs. That's not much different from the Connecticut blog called "Red Notes from a Blue State" that referred to pre-schools as "pedagogical holding pens." Or the anti-preschool crowd in Idaho that fears some government “nanny state.” Oddly, Fuller also sounds a lot like the "unschooling" crowd, that says children should be allowed to develop at their own pace and time, freed from annoying school work.

The other part of Fuller's argument that mystifies me is his apparent antipathy toward placing pre-kindergartens in the public schools. Fuller's always been a skeptic about school choice and charter schools, saying that the marketplace doesn't always serve the needs of poor families who do not have sufficient information to make good choices. Here, though, he argues that families make good informed judgments when they put their children in the preschool in the local community center or the church down the street or even to leave the children with an aunt or grandmother.

I confess I haven't read the book. But I've heard Fuller speak about these issues a number of times. And, from the publicity materials, it seems that he's repeating his views here.