The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare.

On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5." It's a retread of President Obama's 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program.

Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such as former Vice President Al Gore's push to fund preschool for all 3-year-olds at a cost to taxpayers of at least $50 billion over 10 years, left-wing actor/director Rob Reiner'shad access to the federal Head Start program, concluded that "at the end of kindergarten and first grade ... the Head Start children and the control group children were at the same level on many of the measures studied."

In 2012, government researchers reported "little evidence of systematic differences in children's elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group." The federal investments in early childhood programs keep ballooning, yet the educational impacts are dubious at best.

Then there's the alarming encroachment of data miners into the lives of parents and their young children. As I've reported previously, Common Core-aligned assessment systems such as Teaching Strategies Gold in Colorado and California's "Desired Results Developmental Profile" are stockpiling massive amounts