Supplementary Materials
Unlock the Pre-K Door
Get poor and moderate-income kids off to a good start by giving them access to high-quality pre kindergarten.
The Problem
Half of the achievement gap between rich and poor and white and minority students exists before they even walk into school for the first time. Low-income youngsters have fewer learning opportunities than their more affluent peers and suffer from poorer health care, nutrition, and childcare. As a result, they start school with a big disadvantage.
Research shows that high-quality preschool programs designed to foster young children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development can help reduce this deficit. Such programs in Chicago, North Carolina, and Michigan have yielded long-term positive effects that last well into adulthood. They are also linked to reductions in crime and special education. One study estimates that every dollar spent on high-quality preschool saves the public seven dollars down the line.
Many states have created or expanded publicly-funded preschools. Even though quite a few of them focus on disadvantaged children, fewer than half of the nation’s poor 3- and 4-year-olds attend preschool. Those who do often attend programs lacking features necessary to produce strong educational benefits. Worse yet, far too many families of modest means do not qualify for subsidized preschool yet are too poor to pay for preschool themselves. As a result, these children caught in the middle often begin their formal education without the advantages of early learning.
The Plan
To address the problem, the federal government should create a Pre-K Incentive Fund that gives states matching grants to provide free, high-quality preschool to 4-year-olds from families with incomes below $50,000 (for a family with two children). Studies by the National Institute for Early Education Research suggest that parents can afford to pay for preschool themselves once they reach the $50,000 threshold. Setting the income test at this level would maximize preschool attendance rates and target those who would benefit from it most.
To receive the grants, states would have to:
- Adopt school-readiness standards that are aligned with K–12 education standards and specify what children entering kindergarten should know and be able to do in the verbal, pre-academic, and social and emotional realms.
- Provide a 20 percent match and maintain current levels of preschool funding for the next five years.
- Establish an early childhood accountability system that uses developmentally appropriate tools to measure preschool programs’ impact on children’s learning and ensures they meet high-quality standards. The system should include:
- Clear, coherent, scientifically based, developmentally appropriate curricula designed to develop children’s verbal, cognitive, social, and emotional skills.
- A requirement that lead teachers have a bachelor’s degree or can pass a rigorous, federally-approved test of verbal skills,and who have training, education, and/or experience in child development or early childhood education.
- State licensure and compliance with state health and safety rules.
Beyond these standards, states should have considerable flexibility to build on their existing preschool programs and use a variety of providers to deliver preschool. Once they ensure that all poor and low-income children have access to high-quality preschool, they could use federal and state funds in a variety of ways to expand access to early childhood education.
The new federal fund would complement Washington’s investments in Head Start by allowing Head Start to maintain its focus on comprehensive services while expanding preschool access for children who would benefit from preschool but do not need Head Start’s comprehensive services. States would be encouraged to work collaboratively with existing Head Start providers, incorporating them into state preschool systems, using new preschool funds to improve Head Start programs’ quality or extend services, and allowing disadvantaged families to combine Head Start and preschool services. Ultimately, states, individual Head Start grantees, and families would choose how to coordinate and combine programs to meet individual and local needs.
We estimate that the Pre-K Incentive Fund would cost $18.4 billion annually, with $14.7 billion borne by Washington. That is what it would take to provide high-quality preschool to 56 percent, or 2.2 million, of the nation’s 4-year-olds at an estimated per-pupil cost of $8,287, the current national average per-pupil cost for elementary and secondary education. Funding preschool programs at the same level as K–12 schools will allow them to hire qualified teachers and provide full school day services. That is a lot of money, but as noted above, research shows that dollars invested in students early on pay sevenfold dividends later.
The Politics
Many governors from both parties, philanthropies, teachers unions, childadvocacy groups, and some business lobbies have rallied around the cause of public preschool expansion. Social conservatives, on the other hand, oppose such expansion, arguing that youngsters are best cared for by their mothers at home. Community-based and for-profit childcare providers may also oppose the plan, fearing that they could lose market share to expanded public programs.
In addition, many Americans seem wary of demands by some for universal access to preschool for all 4-years-olds regardless of income, as evidenced by the June 2006 defeat in California of a universal preschool initiative backed by actor Rob Reiner.
The biggest barrier to preschool expansion, however, is the simple fact that voters without young children far outnumber those with them.
Advocates of a universal approach draw an analogy to Social Security. Virtually all Americans—rich, poor, and in-between—treasure Social Security because virtually all Americans get something from it. Universality, they say, is the key to creating strong political cover for preschool over the long haul.
The recent California setback, however, illustrates the weaknesses of this argument. Although many Californians voted for universal preschool, many more were concerned about the program’s projected costs and were skeptical about using public funds to finance preschool for children whose parents could afford to pay for it themselves.
Our idea, which would target services to the poor and nearly poor children, voids the universal approach’s biggest political vulnerabilities: it is far cheaper and far more efficient than universal preschool; and it recognizes that voters without young children may be willing to support preschool programs to help the disadvantaged but do not want to pay for the education of rich people’s children.
