The Preschool Wars

Zaire Hines is standing in front of a pint-size table, building a castle out of red and blue plastic cups. He stacks them into a tower and then, in his excitement (“Look what I did!”), accidentally knocks them to the floor. If he were at day care or in his bedroom, Zaire, 4, might have shrugged and moved on to another set of toys. But he’s at Project Enlightenment, a publicly funded preschool in Raleigh, N.C., where his teacher, Kim Jackson, is using the cups to help Zaire work on counting and other premath skills as well as underlying ones like being patient and listening to directions. Together they start the castle again.

It’s strange to think that such seemingly simple exercises can help make or break a child’s future. Sitting on the floor during circle time, forming a line to go outside and play, performing a good deed–these activities don’t seem transformative, but they get kids ready to learn academic skills later on. Long-term studies show high-quality early-childhood education is particularly beneficial to low-income kids, helping them avoid repeating grades in elementary school, stay on track to graduate from high school, earn more money as adults and spend less time in jail or on welfare. And yet, because of the way early-learning programs are financed and administered, they are not part of the traditional educational system. Only nine states and the District of Columbia are even trying to offer preschool to all children who want to attend. Ten states have no state-funded pre-K programs at all. The rest restrict access on the basis of income or delayed development, and many are enrolling fewer kids in response to budget shortfalls.

For the first two years of the recession, state governments tried to leave preschool budgets intact, a fiscally prudent move given that each dollar spent on preschoolers pays back $60 to $300 over their lifetime in terms of increased earnings, crime reduction and other benefits to society. But total state spending on pre-K fell in the 2009–10 school year, the first decrease in a decade. The cuts are particularly troubling considering that the national poverty rate increased last year to 15%, a 52-year high. The rate is even higher among children: more than 1 in 5 now live below the poverty line.

Since 2010, Arizona has cut its entire pre-K program, and Iowa narrowly averted a total wipeout this summer–thanks in part to a personal plea to the governor by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “States waited as long as they could,” says Ron Haskins, a senior fellow in the economic-studies program at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Center on Children and Families. “But after three or four years of serious cuts, they couldn’t hold off any longer. Honestly, I’m impressed they waited this long.”

The Right to Go to Preschool

Of all the state battles currently raging over pre-K funding, none is fiercer than the one in North Carolina, which is considered a national leader in preschool reform and effectiveness and which has some 13,500 kids on a waitlist to get into classrooms like Jackson’s. The state’s child-poverty rate has risen 21% over the past decade.

The budget battle began in June when the general assembly slashed $32 million–a cut of 20%–from the state’s preschool program for at-risk 4-year-olds, 95% of whom qualify on the basis of income. Governor Beverly Perdue, a first-term Democrat, blasted the Republican-controlled legislature for “turning its back on our schools, our children, our long-standing investments in education and our future economic prospects.” On June 12, she issued the first budget veto in state history. But that was just Round 1.

A few days later, the legislature overrode her veto. Then the fight shifted to the courts as a handful of low-income school districts sued the state, claiming the budget cuts denied children their constitutional rights. Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning agreed with the districts, ruling in July that the state cannot put up any barriers that prevent eligible at-risk children from enrolling in preschool. “This case is about the individual right of every child to have the equal opportunity to obtain a sound basic education,” Manning declared, adding that each 4-year-old who qualifies for North Carolina’s state program “is a defenseless, fragile child whose background of poverty or disability places the child at risk of subsequent academic failure.”

The ruling that some children have a constitutional right to attend preschool is not without precedent. In 1998, New Jersey was ordered by its supreme court to provide high-quality pre-K programs to all 3- and 4-year-old children in dozens of low-income districts. The state responded by putting in place a research-based, data-driven program considered one of the most rigorous in the nation.

But judicial decree isn’t the optimal way to get states to expand their preschool programs. The Pew Charitable Trusts just finished spending 10 years and some $100 million coaxing states into growing and reforming pre-K. As a result, an additional 600,000 kids are attending preschool, and some 40% of 4-year-olds in the U.S. are enrolled in state or federally funded programs. Meanwhile, early-childhood education is getting its own celebrity advocate (actress Jennifer Garner has taken up the cause) and its own Race to the Top Initiative (states have to submit applications for $500 million in federal grants by Oct. 19). The Obama Administration is also preparing to launch a three-year plan to improve quality control at the country’s 1,600 or so Head Start centers and make low performers recompete for federal dollars; if a different program can prove it gets better results than a local Head Start center, the rival program will get the money and the Head Start center will be closed. But states can’t bank on getting any outside revenue for pre-K for a while. And in the immediacy of a budget crisis, the one thing legislators can’t ignore is a judge’s gavel.

To comply with Manning’s ruling in North Carolina, Perdue issued an executive order instructing state agencies to come up with a plan to serve all eligible children who apply to the program, which currently is capped at roughly 24,700 students. Perdue says the expansion is well worth the expense. “Preschool can totally change the outcome of a child’s entire life,” she says. “It’s rare in public service that you can make such a cost-effective investment.”

That isn’t just political rhetoric. Child-development researchers at the University of North Carolina published a study last fall that found that low-income students who participated in the state’s More at Four pre-K program had higher math and reading scores in third grade than their low-income peers who did not attend preschool. This finding is especially important, as recent studies point to third grade as a critical benchmark: if children are not performing at grade level by then, they may never catch up. According to an April study led by Donald Hernandez, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, 1 in 6 students who can’t read at grade level by third grade will not finish high school by age 19, four times the rate of proficient readers. Hernandez also parsed the data based on household income and found that 26% of third-graders who have lived in poverty and aren’t reading at grade level will drop out or fail to graduate on time, more than six times the rate for proficient readers.

Further evidence of early learning’s long-term benefits comes from a study begun in 1962 in Ypsilanti, Mich., that tracked two groups of low-income students–those who attended preschool and those who did not. Researchers found that at age 40, the participants who attended preschool had attained higher levels of education, earned higher wages, were more likely to own a home and were less likely to have been incarcerated than those who did not attend preschool, even though as a group they had IQs no higher than the other group’s.

Perhaps preschool’s biggest contribution to students’ future success comes in the form of so-called soft skills like learning how to pay attention and stay on task. Stephanie Plafker, who teaches kindergarten at Raleigh’s Lynn Road Elementary School, says she can tell within the first hour of the first day of school which students have attended a high-quality preschool. “When they first come in, they know how to sit down and put their eyes on the adult who is speaking. They are expectant. They know something good is going to happen, and they are excited to learn,” Plafker says. “The others come in fast and furious. They don’t know where to start. They are like deer in headlights.”

Alida Niemeyer is worried her son will be one of them. She applied for a spot in the state pre-K program for her 4-year-old, who qualifies on the basis of income but is stuck on a waitlist with thousands of other kids. He goes to day care at a church in Raleigh, but Niemeyer fears he’s falling behind. “I try to work with him at home, but I don’t have a teacher’s background,” she says. “I really worry that he won’t be prepared for kindergarten.”

The officials who run the state’s pre-K program are hoping they can get more kids into classrooms in January. They aren’t sure yet where the money will come from, but fingers are crossed that the state will restore some funds. Meanwhile, legislators are trying to overturn Manning’s ruling, which one state GOP leader said would create “a massive new welfare program.” Under pressure from the general assembly, the North Carolina attorney general filed a notice of appeal, setting the stage for a showdown before the state’s supreme court. The kids will be waiting.