Our friends at Douglas Gould and Company, a pr firm for progressive causes, said we could share their case study of why the Prop 82 preschool for all initiative failed at the polls last week in California:

There used to be an aging wooden sign outside my kids' elementary school. It identified the school as an "Early Primary School, Pre-K through Grade 3". Since the school actually goes through Grade 5, and had done so for years before my eldest enrolled, I saw the sign as one of the more benign examples of a school district not quite up to its task. Since then, the sign has rotted away and been removed.

Every day, it seems, technology opens up a fertile new market that never existed before. Take online gamers. Certainly a diverse crew, weighted a bit towards the male, but representing a wide range of ages and interests. But three-year-olds? Just never occured to me. That's one of the many ways that I am not like Disney, which is launching a new $50-a-year subscription service for preschoolers.

I hold on to only a few intense memories from my preschool days (back then, we called it nursery school). One is of making brownies. We stood around a long table, and passed a big bowl down the line, each child carrying out the next step in the recipe, whether it was to break an egg into the bowl, measure the flour, add the melted chocolate...by the time the bowl made it down to me, we were down to the boring part -- three stirs with a wooden spoon, then pass it on.