Four states in very different regions largely dominate pre-K enrollment numbers in the United States and each served more than 100,000 children in the 2010-2011 year. Texas, Florida, California, and New York together serve more than 642,000  3- and 4-year-olds in their state pre-K programs, nearly half (48.5 percent) of the country’s reported 1.3 million students in state-funded pre-K enrollment. The Big Four’s reach is significant but, as the Yearbook reveals, there’s more to the story than enrollment figures alone.

Florida, a pre-K “late bloomer” whose program began in 2005, led the country in enrolling the highest percentage of 4-year-olds in state pre-K programs in 2010-2011, reaching more than 75 percent. Similarly, New York and Texas served approximately half of 4-year-olds age-eligible for pre-K (though New York remains stalled in achieving universal access by the 2013-2014 deadline established by the state’s Legislature). If you are 4 years old in California, your chances of participating in a state pre-K program drop even lower to one in five. Quite a spread, indeed indicating insufficient capacity to enroll all age-eligible children.

Total Number of Children Enrolled State-Funded Pre-K in “the Big Four”

* During this time, New York provided pre-K through more than one program.

Quality among the Big Four is another story. New York fared best among the group meeting seven of 10 NIEER’s quality standard benchmarks (20 states meet eight or more). The other three states find themselves in the shallow end of the national pool with California and Florida meeting only three benchmarks and Texas slightly better at four. This means that almost half of the nation’s children attending pre-K cannot be guaranteed the kind of quality early education experience known to benefit them.

As we have learned from previous research, quality costs. Quality is not inexpensive, but it is cheaper than the long-term costs associated with poor quality. As states continue to use a variety of funding mechanisms for pre-K in difficult economic conditions, it stands to reason that failing to make adequate investments do more harm than good. Each Big Four state came up short for providing sufficient resources to meet NIEER’s 10 Quality Standards Benchmarks, as seen below and in Table 7 of our State Preschool Yearbook.

Per-Child Funding Levels Necessary to Ensure High Quality in “the Big Four”

In order to meet all 10 Quality Standards Benchmarks and pay pre-K teachers on par with kindergarten teachers, each of these four states would need to provide additional funding per child. Nationwide, programs spend a total of $4,847 per child from all funding sources. Of the Big Four, only California exceeds this average. In both Florida and Texas, per-child funding would need to be nearly doubled in order to ensure high quality.

The Big Four aren’t the only ones guilty of prioritizing expansion over quality—over the last 10 years, per-child funding has decreased nationwide by more than $700 per child, which inevitably affects the quality of a child’s preschool experience. At the same time, enrollment nationwide has roughly doubled. Quality, access, and resources demand a delicate balancing act, but states have focused their attention on increasing enrollment, to the detriment of other areas.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “We can afford all that we need; but we cannot afford all we want.” If policymakers in the Big Four and other states are to make good on their promise of cultivating an educated public and skilled, competitive workforce, they’d be wise to heed FDR’s advice. Voluntary access to high-quality early education for all children is more than a want; it is something we need, and state budgets and policies should reflect our needs.

- Jim Squires, Senior Research Fellow, NIEER

Twenty-one percent of 3- and 4-year-olds nationwide live in an immigrant family with at least one foreign-born parent. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 6.1 million Hispanic children were living in poverty in 2010, representing 37.3 percent of all poor children. As can be seen in the graph below, the number of Hispanic children living in poverty accelerated sharply during the recession, due in large part to the 11.1 percent unemployment rank seen among Hispanic workers in 2011. The combined impact of being from a low-income family and having limited English proficiency can put these students at a serious risk of school failure, especially if they lack access to a quality preschool program.

Original graphic from the Pew Hispanic Center can be viewed here.

More than half of the nation’s Hispanic population resides in just three states: California, Florida, and Texas.  Unfortunately, preschool programs in these states may not give Hispanic students the boost they need. Florida and Texas have high enrollment levels but low quality standards, which means that thousands of children are enrolled in programs that may not meet their needs. They both have per-child spending levels under the national average of $4,151, which further threatens quality. California’s program has grown rapidly due to including the state’s child care programs under the same umbrella, but per-child spending levels and policy standards are low there, as well.  While many programs may exceed minimum standards, particularly when public schools are the providers, two aspects of these programs are particularly worrisome—class sizes and funding. Texas limits neither class size nor ratio and Florida has been increasing class size. California does somewhat better since it limits teacher-child ratio to a reasonable level even though it does not limit class size. All three states decreased funding per child in recent years, and in Florida it barely exceeds $2,400 per child, a figure too low to sustain quality under any reasonable definition.

Additionally, there are five other states with Hispanic populations above one million: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, as can be seen from this interactive map from the Pew Hispanic Center. Arizona totally eliminated its state pre-K program in recent years, though First Things First stepped up to provide some services to preschoolers there. Illinois and New Jersey are bright spots ranking among the top 15 in the country for program quality standards and both ranking in the top 3 for enrollment of 3-year-olds.  However, both New York and Colorado reduced per child funding when the recession squeezed state finances.

The video below shows the change in enrollment in these states with large Hispanic populations over the last decade. While enrollments have increased tremendously, due in large part to the Florida program’s creation in the 2005-2006 year, we know that funding has not kept pace with the needs of so many more students. You can look at other trends in spending, quality, and access for these eight states in this interactive data set.

As was noted last year by Celia Ayala, Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles Universal Preschool, “[w]hile ELLs can come from any linguistic background and therefore include children of any race and ethnicity, Hispanic children merit particular attention as their population grows, but many continue to suffer from an achievement gap.”  At least 140,000 ELL students are served in state-funded pre-K programs; this number is likely to be significantly higher as many states with large Hispanic populations could not report ELLs specifically. Less than half of state pre-K programs report limited English proficiency as a factor that may make students eligible for pre-K. The majority of pre-K initiatives require at least one support service for ELLs and their families, with support services ranging from administering a home language survey to providing translators to offering monolingual non-English classes in pre-K.

Recent research on the benefits of bilingualism can bring renewed attention to this important issue. Research has pinpointed significant benefits to bilingualism including increased language and print awareness, classification and reasoning skills, concept formation, visual-spatial skills, and creativity. Bilingual children maintain strong connections to parents, grandparents and extended family leading to improved academic outcomes. Students also benefit from being secure with their home language. There has also been important research in the last few years indicating that attending a high-quality preschool program improves outcomes for Hispanic children, and that dual language practices can enhance outcomes in both English- and Spanish-speaking children. Pre-K attendance can improve early literacy and mathematic skills, and at least this one study found that gains were improved by being in a classroom with a Spanish-speaking teacher.

As the Hispanic student population grows and extends into rural and suburban areas, schools must provide additional supports for those students growing up in a dual-language household. A recent report from the New America Foundation focuses on bilingual education efforts in state-funded pre-K in Illinois and offers sound advice for all pre-K programs as they work to ensure ELLs receive high-quality services:

• ensure that pre-K providers receive financial support from their local districts for resources they spend on English language learners, and that there is an adequate bilingual/ESL budget to cover eligible children;

• track student outcomes for ELL students over time to determine where investment is most (and least) effective; and

• continue to align the ELL experience in pre-K, kindergarten, and the early grades and enable shared professional development opportunities in ELL instruction for teachers and school leaders across the pre-K to third grade span.

Additional recommendations on supporting dual language instruction at both the policy and classroom level can be found in the NIEER presentation “Enhancing Policy and Practice for Young Dual Language Learners: What Is the Research Base?”

There is significant support within the Hispanic community to increase access to quality preschool programs.  The National Council of La Raza advocates for supportive programs for both students and families, and international music star and early education advocate Shakira, a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, recently spoke at the Summit of the Americas on the need for quality early learning.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan explained at the Yearbook 2011 release, “High-quality early learning is what we want for our own children—which means that it must be what we want for all children.” Despite the impressive enrollment growth in state-funded preschool—nearly doubling to 1.3 million children in a decade—recession-driven funding cuts have made it difficult to give this opportunity to all children.

Using data from the 2011 Yearbook, GOVERNING Magazine created a map that highlights these disparities. States are shaded based on the percent of their 3- and 4-year-old population served in state-funded pre-K. Eleven states offered no state-funded pre-K in the 2010-2011 school year, including Arizona, which became the first state to completely remove it state-funded pre-K program. Of the 39 states that do provide these programs, an additional 15 did not enroll 3-year-olds, which drives down their percentage served compared to the measure of 4-year-olds served. For example, Florida is ranked number 1 in enrollment for reaching 76 percent of its 4-year-olds, a percentage that is slashed in half to 38 percent when combined with 3-year-olds.

Map from GOVERNING magazine. Click here to use it interactively.

This map is a great tool for some quick looks at regional trends—you can quickly see the “hot spots” for enrollment, including the Wisconsin-Illinois-Iowa trio in the Midwest; the “not so hot spots,” such as the Midwest duo of Michigan and Ohio; and the cold spots, including seven Western states that do not offer programs at all. Additional details on enrollment and spending can be found by clicking on the individual state.

Enrollment, however, only tells part of the story: programs of high-quality are necessary to guarantee long-term gains, but quality varies startlingly from state to state. During the 2010-2011 year, only five states met all 10 of our quality standards benchmarks (Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, and Rhode Island), while at the other end of the spectrum, Ohio met only 2. California and Florida met only 3 benchmarks each, which is particularly concerning given that these programs serve each serve more than 100,000 children, including large populations of Hispanic children.

How many preschoolers a program can enroll and what program standards it can effectively meet (i.e., not just on paper) are inherently linked to the funding available. Disparities in resources across states have persisted, contributing to the “haves” and “have nots” in state-funded pre-K. In the report’s executive summary, we say, “Disparities among the states in funding per child are substantial and persistent. In 2001, the difference in spending per child from the highest spending state to the lowest was nearly $9,000. Today, the range is more than $10,000. Massachusetts and Ohio had erratic changes in spending from one year to the next over the decade, but both states ended the period with decreases in pre-K spending of more than $3,000. By contrast, Arkansas and Maryland increased per-child spending over the decade by more than $2,000 each.” Quality, enrollment, and resources do not exist in a vacuum—each factor influences the others in ways that differ by state, but it is clear that too many states are not providing enough per-child funding to ensure quality for the children enrolled in their pre-K programs.

In order to explore these trends more fully, we’ve created a Google Motion chart of interactive Yearbook data. We encourage you to use this animated tool to explore pre-loaded variables on quality, access, and resources across states; you can select a particular state of interest to track its progress relative to other states.

Using our interactive data set via Google Motion Charts, the video above demonstrates the relationship between quality standards met by a state and the state per-child spending over time. On the whole, it’s clear that states have shifted toward meeting more quality standards in 2010-2011 than they did in 2001-2002, though per-child funding has by and large stayed below what is needed to implement these standards and ensure teachers are paid a competitive wage, as presented in Table 7 of the Yearbook.

Education has always been largely funded and controlled at state and local levels, which allows for greater flexibility and a focus based on local needs. However, there is no doubt that such large disparities among states prevent the benefits of early childhood education from reaching all children who could benefit. Given the increasing mobility of American society, the failings of one state to prepare children today is to the detriment of another state’s workforce down the line. We encourage all stakeholders in early childhood education to look at the data not just for their state, but for other states, and reach across state lines to bring best practices home and to their neighbors.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

Also speaking at the release of The State of Preschool 2011 was U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who stated, “We cannot continue down the path of cutting investments in early learning and jeopardizing the quality of programs for young children. Budgets are never just numbers. How we spend our resources, especially in tough economic times, reflects our values.” Secretary Duncan was referring to the State Preschool Yearbook’s findings that state spending for pre-K has decreased by nearly $60 million since the past year’s report, and per-child spending is down more than $700 over the 10-year period.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and NIEER Director Steve Barnett: two strong advocates for high-quality pre-K.

Dr. Barnett and Secretary Duncan were introduced at the event by Bancroft Elementary School’s Principal Zakiya Reid who also noted the importance of preschool by saying, “We know that high-quality pre-K works. It helps prepare children for school. And research tells us that high-quality pre-K eventually gives children greater opportunities to graduate from high school and pursue college and good careers. … Families need and deserve for their children to have a great start to their education.”

Following the release, Dr. Barnett and findings from The State of Preschool 2011 were featured in a video from NIEER as well as a segment on NBC news. In NIEER’s video statement, Barnett said, “The key message in this year’s report is that cuts are endangering quality, and quality is what’s responsible for the payoff from preschool.” NBC correspondent Tracie Potts’s video segment ran on several affiliate stations throughout the country.

Besides the NBC coverage, the 2011 State Preschool Yearbook story was picked up by additional national outlets, such as The Washington Post, Governing magazine, The Huffington Post, Time magazine, and Education Week, to name a few.

State-specific findings from The State of Preschool 2011 were also covered in numerous state media outlets, including, but not limited to, The Miami Herald, The Huntsville Times, Chicago Parent magazine, The News & Observer, The Seattle Times, The Charleston Daily Mail, Dayton Daily News, The Press of Atlantic City, Tulsa World, The Times-Picayune, The Orlando Sentinel, Cronkite News, The Washington Examiner, The Tennessean, Oakland Tribune, The Columbus Dispatch,  and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Have you seen The State of Preschool 2011 featured in your state or local media? Let us know where by adding a comment below!

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

Brookings Institution research finds that 42 percent of children born in the bottom income quintile in the U.S. stay there as adults and only six percent of them reach the top quintile. Meanwhile, a policy brief just out from The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project finds that in the U.S., there is a stronger link between parental education and children’s economic, educational and socio-emotional outcomes than in any of the other countries studied. In other words, who your parents are counts for more here than in other countries studied when it comes to moving up the ladder. Not surprisingly, another key finding is that exposure to preschool can have lasting positive effects on economic disparities, particularly for low- and middle-income children.

Coinciding with all this is the arrival of a new book The Pre-K Debates: Current Controversies and Issues. Edited by Edward Zigler and Walter Gilliam of Yale University and myself, it calls on more than three dozen leaders in the various fields associated with early education to argue the issues surrounding the hottest debates.  Chief among them — and first in line in the book — is the policy question of whether public preschool education should be made available to all children or only those who are economically disadvantaged.

I argue in favor of making public pre-K available to all children for four reasons:

1. Universal preschool programs will reach a significantly greater percentage of low-income children than has been the case with targeted programs these last 40-plus years.
2. Universal programs produce larger educational gains for disadvantaged kids.
3. Children from middle-income families also benefit and, numerically speaking, they account for most of the nation’s problems with inadequate school readiness and school failure.
4. Universal pre-K is likely to yield a larger net economic benefit to the nation.

David Lawrence Jr., president of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation in Florida puts forth similar arguments for a universal approach, adding that outside the ivory tower or government no one thinks in terms of means testing and it is never a good strategy to divide Americans. Lawrence led the fight for Florida’s universal pre-K program and, while he calls it nowhere near good enough, those familiar with Lawrence know better than to doubt his dedication to program improvement.

Joining us on the pro-universal side of the debate are Sharon Lynn Kagan and Joyce Friedlander at Columbia University. They argue that all young children have a right to high-quality preschool education plus any additional health or social services needed to get children off to a good start in school. Their approach, termed “universal plus, ” represents a substantial shift in mindset away from the targeted services strategy that most state and federal programs have pursued in recent decades.  My co-editor Ed Zigler has made much the same case over the years in advocating for his School of the 21^st Century.

The proponents of targeted services are predominantly economists like me. James J. Heckman, University of Chicago, proposes developing measures of risky family environments to facilitate targeting programs to the most disadvantaged kids. He recommends providing those families with home-visiting programs such as the Nurse-Family partnership as well as high-quality pre-K.

Art Rolnick at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Rob Grunewald, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis favor targeting because the highest returns on the public’s investment in pre-K come from programs for the disadvantaged. They acknowledge the substantial difficulties targeting has had in identifying and serving those who qualify and recommend redoubling those efforts by way of means testing.

Finally, sociologist Bruce Fuller of the University of California, Berkeley, cautions against pursuing a policy of universal preschool because it would, in his estimation, squander scarce public dollars and likely widen gaps in early learning because well-heeled communities would “top up” private investment in preschool with public funds and then recruit the most skilled teachers. Viewed through Fuller’s lens, universal pre-K would work to the disadvantage of disadvantaged kids.

Having studied pre-K in this country and abroad for the past 30 years, I have more than a little difficulty embracing the arguments of my colleagues on the anti-universal side of the debate.  None of the opponents has offered a practical solution to the targeting problem.  In Europe both average test scores and inequality in test scores decline as enrollment moves past our levels in the U.S. toward 100 percent.  In the U.S. we have pursued a targeted approach since the early 1960s and still don’t reach half the children in poverty with even modest programs.  And most private sector programs available to the beleaguered middle class fall far short of providing quality education, a problem that Quality Rating Systems will not fix.  Forty years of failure should be enough to convince my economist colleagues that something must be wrong with their assumptions. On purely practical grounds, I think it is about time we chart a new course.

In future posts, we’ll address other issues of contention from The Pre-K Debates.

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

North Carolina’s pre-K program, formerly known as More at Four, was ranked as one of the best programs nationally in terms of quality. Solid research from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill shows More at Four improved readiness and raised third grade test scores for at-risk children.

Nationally, the research is clear that effective preschool programs like North Carolina’s permanently raise achievement, decrease dropout, and increase employment, productivity and earnings as recently reported in the distinguished journal Science.

Over the last half century, North Carolina’s leaders took on the enormous task of updating the state’s traditional economy of textiles and tobacco to refocus on newer fast-growing industries such as biotech and information technology. They did so, in part, by investing in improvements in education needed to boost the skills of the work force.

It’s a good thing they did or North Carolina would have an unemployment rate much worse than the 10.5 percent reported in September.

Given North Carolina’s legacy of pro-business policies and the ongoing economic development arms race between the states, one would think North Carolina would jealously guard its comparative advantages as it looks forward to economic recovery. Sadly, this is not the case.

In this year’s budget, the legislature reduced funding to state pre-K and Smart Start programs by 20 percent, meaning they could serve several thousand fewer children this fall. If this cut is sustained, thousands more children will enter kindergarten each year unprepared to succeed in school.

More recently, Judge Howard Manning, Jr. stepped in as part of the ongoing Leandro case to rule that it’s unconstitutional for the state to prevent eligible at-risk children from enrolling in state pre-K.

After Manning’s ruling, Governor Beverly Perdue issued an executive order requiring the state to accept all eligible 4-year-olds into North Carolina’s pre-K. Perdue’s plan restores enrollment to previous levels by January at no added cost to the taxpayer and provides a roadmap to achieve full enrollment on a reasonable time table over the next few years.

What remains to be seen is whether state lawmakers will support the plan Governor Perdue has put forward. The first test will be whether they pass the legislation needed to restore services to thousands of children in January at no cost.  If they fail this first hurdle, it will serve as yet more evidence that not only has North Carolina’s economy declined, so has the quality of its leadership.  And time is fast running out to take advantage of the opportunity the governor has offered.

Unless this situation is resolved to the benefit of the thousands of kids who lack a fair shot at succeeding in school, North Carolina risks rolling back years of progress made by earlier leaders who remember all too well what life was like when cotton was king.

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

The growing importance of education in the labor market is underscored in a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Data from across OECD’s member nations shows that unemployment rates among university graduates stood at an average 4.4 percent in 2009, a year after the recession began. People who left school without qualifications experienced an unemployment rate of 11.5 percent in 2009, up from 8.7 percent the year before. These figures are likely different now (and not for the better), but the disparity between the educated and relatively uneducated remains, without a doubt, valid.

OECD calculated employment levels for citizens in three education categories: 1) Below upper secondary, 2) Upper secondary and post-secondary (but not tertiary) and 3) Tertiary educations. Those categories roughly account for 1) High school dropouts, 2) High school graduates with some secondary schooling, and 3) College graduates. What they found was that in 2009 for OECD member countries as a whole, 56 percent of category 1 was employed, 74 percent of category 2 was employed and 84 percent of category 3 was employed. The U.S. workforce placed below these levels at 52, 69 and 81 percent employed respectively. (Note: Because of the way the numbers are compiled it is not valid to infer unemployment levels from these employment data.)

The report also shows how the global talent pool is changing: Japan and the United States have nearly half of all tertiary-educated adults in the OECD area (47 percent). But that lead is slipping. While it’s true that one in three university-educated retirees resides in the U.S., it is also true that only one in five university graduates entering the workforce does.

Contrast this picture with China where only 5 percent of adults have a tertiary degree. Because of its population size, however, China now ranks second behind the U.S. and ahead of Japan in population with tertiary attainment.

Why are these figures important? Because, says the report, the earnings premium (net present value over a lifetime) for an individual with a tertiary degree exceeds $300,000 for men and $200,000 for women across the 34 OECD countries.

With trends like these and the apparent absence of political will to boost investment in education, it is little wonder that OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria talks about the developed countries producing a “lost generation” of citizens who will be ill-equipped to make their way in the ever more competitive world.

So why am I focusing on higher education in a blog on preschool education?  Because far too many of our children enter kindergarten so far behind that higher education will not be within their reach, despite the best efforts of our schools to prepare them.  If the United States is to increase the percentage of our population with education beyond high school, we will have to do a much better job educating children in the first five years.  The current recession only makes that more difficult, of course, but the choices we make now at local, state, and national levels will determine whether the United States will have–as Thomas Friedman has argued–“a hard decade or a bad century.”

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

Bartik’s research makes a strong case for both the short- and long-term benefits of quality early education programs for students, parents, employers, and taxpayers. Short-term, investing public dollars in early education can:

• Help attract skilled workers with young children, who prefer areas with high-quality education programs to those with low-quality or inaccessible programs;
• Provide peace of mind to local employees, allowing them to be more productive and fully present on the job; and
• Increase the demand for highly qualified teachers, who are likely to move to the area as well as spend their earnings locally.

These are essentially the same reasons parents are drawn to areas with good elementary and secondary schools. Businesses want to be in areas rich with highly qualified, happy employees, reflected in years of research showing that public services, including education systems, play more of a role in locating a company than does the business tax rate. Offering peace of mind to parents regarding the arrangements for their young learners has become more important throughout this economic downturn. A 2010 report from the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (NACCRRA) found that 51 percent of families with child under age 5 had their child care affected in some way by the recession, even as 57 percent of these families reported child care as an economic necessity.  Investing in high-quality early education could not only go beyond the needs of “just” child care but also alleviate the stress families feel regarding both the quality and cost of this care.

Some may ask, “What about the taxpayer?,” echoing the rallying cry of this age of austerity.  As noted above, quality early education can improve the environments for both families and businesses, improving local tax revenues and quality of life.  Bartik notes that the short- and long-term effects of pre-K include higher test scores. Looking further down the line, quality early learning experiences can reduce special education placements by up to 50 percent through second grade and reduce grade retention by up to 33 percent through eighth grade, both of which significantly reduce the cost of public education. All told, school systems can save up to $3,700 per child over the K-12 years, to say nothing of the crime-related savings of between $2 and $11 per each dollar invested in early education.

Bartik also calls up an interesting statistic in this age of globalization: 60 percent of American workers, including 45 percent of those with a college degree, continue to live and work in the state in which they were raised.  Thus, the investments states make during early childhood to prepare children for school and, eventually, work pay off in benefits to taxpayers of those same states later in life. As any real estate agent can attest, parents are attracted to areas with good schools. Bartik’s research find the testing score improvements attributed to pre-K can improve property values by $13 for every dollar invested.  Creating attracting education systems can also working parents to stay local, benefitting businesses and local tax bases.

Early childhood education does not need to be limited to state efforts. Bartik’s data indicates that as an economic development strategy, half-day pre-K for all 4-year-olds more than holds its own against business tax incentives. At the state level, pre-K benefits $2.78 for each dollar spent, not far behind the $3.14 benefitted by business incentives. At the national level, however, the $3.79 per dollar benefitted by pre-K far outstrips the $0.65 benefit-cost ratio of business tax incentives.  Tax incentives encourage businesses to play musical chairs throughout the country, seeking to cut overhead without necessarily producing more.  High-quality early education, though, starts children on an improved educational and social path that benefits workforce quality into the future.  It is not difficult to understand, then, the federal government’s current Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge that seeks to develop these early learning programs.

As government at all levels continues its belt-tightening, there are those who claim pre-K is an unaffordable luxury, when in reality it is an astonishingly good investment for both the short- and long-term benefit of the nation. While pre-K has not traditionally been considered in the elementary education system supported by taxpayers, using public funds to provide such programs can actually spur current economic growth while preparing America for a prosperous future.  A recent NIEER brief examines current public financing of early learning as well as how the system can be improved.  Advocates of publicly-funded pre-K support early learning not only because it is the right thing for children, but also because it can mitigate some of the long-term deficit ills so recently brought to the national light.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

(PART 3 OF 3-PART SERIES)

In our annual report of state-funded preschool programs, we examine three key features of each state pre-K initiative: access, quality standards, and resources. Here we provide a big picture look at the last of these features, resources, in an effort to analyze the nation’s commitment to financing prekindergarten at the state level. (See our previous posts in this series for analyses of access and quality standards.)

In The State of Preschool 2010: State Preschool Yearbook, we found that in the 2009-2010 school year, states spent more than $5 billion on state pre-K.*  This represents an inflation-adjusted decrease of almost $30 million or 0.6 percent from the previous year, when this spending had a 10 percent nominal increase the previous year. The decrease in real state spending on pre-K is unprecedented and confirms the negative affect of the recession on pre-K many anticipated.

Furthermore, state funding per child for pre-K decreased by $114 for the 2009-2010 school year.  This downward slide, coupled with the more modest decline of the pervious year, indicates the dangerous impact of the recession on state-funded pre-K. And, without the aid of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds, per-child spending nationwide would actually have decreased by $148 to less than $4,000 per child, a low not seen since the 2007-2008 school year.  While stimulus funds taper off, pre-K funding may be further jeopardized in the next years as states continue to reel from budget crunches.

However, state funding is not the only source of funds for state pre-K programs as states may choose to direct local and federal funds toward state-funded preschool education initiatives. Lack of information about local and locally allocated federal funds makes it difficult to determine how much is actually spent on prekindergarten in each state. While not all state preschool programs are explicitly designed to rely on combined state, federal, and local funding as is the case with K-12, it is still common to do so. Although we continue to improve our ability to estimate funds from federal and local sources, these data remain incomplete, making it difficult to make good cross-year comparisons on total funding per child. Nationwide, per-child spending from all reported sources was $4,653 though this figure surely underestimates the true national figure if all spending could be identified.

Other key findings regarding funding include:

•  State spending per child nationwide was $4,028, an inflation-adjusted decrease of $114 per child.

•  States differ greatly in per-child spending.  New Jersey, Connecticut, Alaska and Oregon spent more than twice the national average of per-child spending. On the other end of the spectrum, Arizona spent only $115 per child. Nebraska, South Carolina and Maine spent less than $2,000 per child. Colorado, Kansas, Florida and Nevada spent less than $3,000 per child.

•  Adding up all reported public funding for state-funded prekindergarten (federal, state, and local), the total exceeded $5.7 billion dollars, an increase of $55 million or just one percent over the prior year (inflation-adjusted).

•  We continue to get more accurate information on funding from other sources, making a large difference in total funding for some states. Based on reported spending, nine states used local and/or federal sources to fund at least one-third of their program.  Additionally, over half of the funding for pre-K in Maryland, Kentucky, and South Carolina came from these non-state sources.

•  Per-child spending from state, local, and locally allocated federal funds was $4,653 for the nation. This is an inflation-adjusted decrease of $58 from the previous year.  If the increase of only $32 per child in the previous year was a sober indicator of the recession’s potential impact, this year’s decrease confirms the fears that state pre-K could be battered by the downturn.

•  We can only confirm 17 states spent enough to deliver a program that met all 10 NIEER benchmarks.  Some others may, but even allowing for incomplete reporting on spending, a substantial number of states are unlikely to provide funding adequate to sustain an educationally effective pre-K program. (See Table 7 of The State of Preschool 2010 for details).

•  More than 60 percent of all 3- and 4-year-olds in state-funded pre-K nationwide were served in six states—California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, and Texas—none of which report enough per-child funding from all sources to adequately fund a high-quality preschool education program.

•  Some states used funds from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) to replace lost state funds for pre-K.  Without these reported funds, state spending per child would have fallen even further to $3,994 while all source spending would be $4,619.

The Yearbook also includes an analysis of which states adequately funded their preschool education initiatives to meet the NIEER quality standards benchmarks. This year, we could identify with confidence only 17 states as providing sufficient funding to meet all 10 benchmarks. While states might have adequately funded programs, we did not have sufficient information on other sources of funding to make that determination.  Seven of the states that we could not clearly identify as adequately funded met eight or more of NIEER’s benchmarks, including Alabama which met all 10 NIEER benchmarks.

In sum, two consecutive decreases in inflation-adjusted state spending per child enrolled is taking its toll on pre-K programs.  State per-child spending is almost $700 below its 2001-2002 level. Since the 2001-2002 school year, eleven states have decreased nominal per-child spending, and a total of 25 states have failed to keep up with inflation. Looking ahead, many states are struggling to make ends meet and pre-K is all too often sacrificed in the attempt to balance budgets.  Researchers and economists agree that high-quality early childhood education more than pays for itself in academic and social benefits.  Scrimping on quality programs for young learners may help close budget gaps now but, in the long-term, it is a “penny wise, pound foolish” approach to future prosperity.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

*Note: A policy change in California resulted in a large increase in enrollment and funding reported for preschool by that state.  In prior years, California funded child care with similar goals and standards to preschool, but with periodic redetermination of eligibility based on parental work status and income that failed to ensure children obtained at least one school year of service.  This policy was changed and these programs merged with preschool.  The increase in children and funding for California over last year thus reflects a positive policy change, but not a net increase in enrollment or spending across all early childhood programs. The increase in California’s spending and enrollment is thus not counted in national figures.

How badly has pre-K been impacted by this recession? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, this recession started in December 2007, so we compared data from this most recent Yearbook against the 2006-2007 year, the last year before the recession impacted state revenue.

Per-Child Spending
From 2006-2007 to 2009-2010, real per-child spending is up 1.1 percent, which means an increase of only $44. Per-child spending was cut in 21 states, ranging from a cut of 2 percent in Florida to a whopping 95.6 percent reduction in Arizona. Ten states continue to spend no money on state-funded programs: Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

Enrollment
Enrollment has grown by 21 percent since 2006-2007. However, the recession has undoubtedly slowed enrollment growth. In 2006-2007, 4-year-old enrollment grew by 9 percent over the previous year, and in 2007-2008 by an even higher 10.9 percent. The growth rate declined to 7.5 percent in 2008-2009 and an anemic 3.8 percent in 2009-2010 school year. Three-year-olds fared even worse, with enrollment increasing only 12 percent between 2006-2007 and 2009-2010.

Since 2006-2007, 28 states have increased enrollment as a percentage of their 3- and 4-year-old population. Nationwide, there was a 2.6 percentage point increase in children enrolled. As shown by Table 1, there was great variation among the states. While most increases and decreases were mild, some states increased enrollment sharply. However, many of the states that increased enrollment did not increase total funding proportionately resulting in declining spending per child, creating concern for quality. Seven states reduced both total spending and the proportion of their population enrolled.

Unemployment and Income Changes
The recession’s impact can be traced fairly directly. States that experienced larger increases in unemployment rates tended to cut per-child spending. Nationally, the unemployment rate increased by 4.7 points from 2006 to 2009. Of 15 states with the largest increases in unemployment, 12 decreased their per-child spending on pre-K, while one state – Indiana – continued to provide no state funds for pre-K. The other two of these 15 states were North Carolina, which increased per-child spending by just 1.2 percent, and Rhode Island, which introduced a pilot pre-K program in 2009. At the other end of the spectrum, nine states increased per-child spending by at least 10 percent during the recession; none of these had increases in unemployment rates above the national average.

As we have shown above, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has negatively affected pre-K across the country and the impacts have tended to be greater where the recession hit hardest. Nevertheless, states have made remarkably different choices when faced with difficult decisions. West Virginia continued to steam ahead toward universal pre-K access while Arizona defunded its pre-K program entirely. This year continues to present governors and legislators with difficult choices in most states. We encourage all of them to carefully consider the impacts of decisions about pre-K on the lives of their youngest citizens, and to recognize that cutting quality may be worse than cutting enrollment as an educationally ineffective program offers little benefit to children or the taxpayers.

We have grave concerns that with less federal aid to weather the effects of the recession, state funding and thus growth in pre-K programs may continue to decline in the next few years even as parents return to work and seek preschool services for their children. Speaking to The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio, NIEER co-director Steve Barnett characterized cutting pre-K during the recession as a “double-whammy for the children,” further noting that, “We know that when a recession hits, when parents lose their jobs, when family income declines, that has a permanent negative impact on child development.” So children already hurting from the recession’s impacts on their families are doubly hurt when state-funded early learning programs are cut.

Finally, it does not seem to be widely recognized that the recession has increased the number of children eligible for most pre-K and other early learning programs. Most programs determine eligibility based on family income. As families have experienced salary cuts and layoffs, more children have qualified for programs. The optimal response is to increase funding for these programs, not to cut. Advocates and program administrators alike must be forceful in upcoming budget debates and as the economy slowly recovers to ensure programs are adequately funded to reach all children who need pre-K services. As Steve Barnett said upon the report’s release, “Overall, state cuts to preschool funding transformed the recession into a depression for many young children.” We must all do our part to remedy that situation.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER
- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER