September 25, 2013: Sara Mead, the director of the Early Education Initiative at the nonpartisan public policy institute, the New America Foundation, who blogs on EdWeek in "Policy Notebook," today tackles the problem of getting kids into "quality programs that prepare them for school."
Education insiders overwhelmingly believe that President Obama's universal preschool proposal is going nowhere fast.
But, just for a second, let's pretend the program gets enacted. Let's also pretend that all 50 states fully embrace the plan and pony up funds to provide free or subsidized pre-k to every 4-year-old.
Where are those kids going to go?...
...there's not enough capacity in existing systems to serve all kids in a universal system. Most public schools don't have the classrooms to add another grade of students. Current preschool, nursery school, and center-based care settings (including both parent-paid and publicly funded options) serve a bit less than 70% of all 4-year-olds, meaning that, in order to offer universal pre-k access, we'd need to expand the total number of pre-k seats by at least 40%...
...But the point of universal pre-k isn't just to get more kids in programs. Its to get them into quality programs...There's reason to believe that many, indeed most, existing community-based programs don't meet that standard...Even good elementary schools make lack the early childhood expertise needed to deliver a good preschool program.
Long story short: If we want all kids to be able to attend high-quality pre-k, we're gonna need more quality pre-k providers. We don't just need more funding and higher standards. We need a strategy to grow the supply of great preschools, whether by creating them from new or by identifying and replicating the most effective existing preschools...
...However weak the political prospects for universal pre-k in the current Congress, in the long-term it's a pretty safe bet that the United State will eventually move towards universal pre-k. It's the reality in most of the developed countries that we compete with economically--and at some point we're going to need to follow their lead in order to keep up...
The only real question is whether universal pre-k, when we get there, is[it] going to be any good?... People who care about the answer to this question should start thinking now about how to build the supply of quality pre-k providers.
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