This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

"If it can't be expressed in figures, it's not science, it's opinion." — Robert A. Heinlein

The scheme to turn preschool programs for at-risk populations from a publicly funded good to a privately funded investment was always going to be an inexact instrument.

A Utah plan to graft bank thinking onto public school operations has drawn some very skeptical reviews from some far-away experts. We should stick with the plan anyway.

Frustrated by the eternal unwillingness of the Utah Legislature to properly fund K-12 education, let alone preschool, the United Way, Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and other education advocates joined forces with the bankers at Goldman Sachs and the philanthropists of the J.B. Pritzker Foundation to create the School Readiness Initiative.

Investors put $7 million into "high-quality pre-school" programs, in this case one invented in the Granite School District and those modeled after it. These programs go far beyond day care and begin the educational process for young at-risk children in ways that wealthier households — with more books, more reading, more native English speakers — supposedly accomplish on their own.

But reducing the complex early-childhood development process to a bank-friendly profit and loss statement is being viewed very skeptically by a panel of experts assembled by The New York Times.

Investors last week got $267,000 back. That's 95 percent of what is calculated to be the first year of savings realized by the schools because only one of the 600 children in the first cohort needed any high-cost special education services.

The first dividend was contributed by the United Way and Salt Lake County. The state has pledged to keep up those payments in future until the investors get back, with interest, whatever money has been tied to avoided public costs. McAdams, a Democrat, and Republicans such as Gov. Gary Herbert and Sen. Orrin Hatch are counted as believers.

The sticking point, according to the Times' analysis, is that it is impossible to prove that any or all of those students would have needed the special ed services if the "Pay For Success" preschool program hadn't intervened.

Measuring the pre-school readiness of any one child is indeed difficult. There are so many individual variables that go into their impenetrable psyches, and so many unique things that happen to them along the way, that establishing a cause-and-effect relationship is problematic at best.

But the program should go forward, with other jurisdictions chiming in at their own risk. If it even seems to have succeeded, it will have been worth the effort. If it can be shown to have failed, Goldman Sachs doesn't get all its money back.

Either way, the rest of us should have learned something about how well preschool preparation really works over a 13-year public school career. And that's data, however imprecise, that we really need.