Beyond the national averages, however, there’s a very mixed picture — some of it good, some bad and some downright ugly. First, the good: Enrollment increased nationally with nearly 1.3 million children attending state-funded preschool education. While the enrollment increase was not large, it does stand as testimony to the value many state leaders grappling with tough economies place on preschool education. Alaska and Rhode Island started programs for the first time – the first new states to provide pre-K in many years.

But there was plenty of bad news. After adjusting for inflation, state funding per child declined in 19 of 40 states with programs. Many of these were relatively large states. Nine state (Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Carolina) cut per-child spending by more than 10 percent. While four states (Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia) improved on NIEER’s Quality Standards Checklist, two states (Ohio and Nebraska) lost ground. And, despite increased enrollment at age 4, enrollment of 3-year-olds decreased across the country with nine states (Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington) cutting enrollment at age 3 by 10 percent or more.

In talking with members of the early education community as we prepared to release the report, it sounded like more bad news is in the offing in states like North Carolina, New York, and Illinois. These are states that have made good progress in state pre-K in recent years – progress which is now being threatened by the proposed cuts and changes in governance. Barbara Bowman, a NIEER scientific advisory board member who runs Chicago’s pre-K program, describes the funding situation in Illinois as “dire” and points out that if the federal stimulus money she used this year to support public pre-K in Chicago isn’t replaced she will have to cut the number of kids they serve next year.

This state of affairs is not lost on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who joined me in Washington to present the yearbook findings. Duncan remarked that educational inequality is the civil rights issue of our time and increased access to quality pre-K and other early learning opportunities is the way to begin addressing disparities.

– Steve Barnett
Co-director, NIEER

This is an ominous sign for those of us whose responsibility it is to look at public investments through the prism of the returns they provide the nation in the form of future human capital formation (better-educated workforce) and our global competitiveness. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, chairmen of the president’s deficit commission charged with making recommendations for returning the nation to prosperity recognize the need to invest in education. But they were unable to convince enough elected officials in their group, whose ears are bent to the call for austerity sweeping the country, to sign on to the report.

Now come two reports that offer sensible analyses and additional prescriptions for making critical investments in programs like early education while setting the nation on a course to recovery. Both point out that at this crossroads in our economy, austerity at this point in time represents a false cure. One, a special report in the November issue of The American Prospect, devotes 10 articles to various aspects of the economic debate. Its purpose is, as editor Robert Kuttner writes, to disentangle the proper sequencing of recovery spending and deficit reduction, agreeing with Bowles, Simpson, Alice Rivlin, Pete Domenici, and others that the nation needs better fiscal balance once we emerge from this deep recession. But now, when unemployment is unacceptably high and families are struggling, is no time to cut back on social investment. In fact, stepping up social investment at this time is critical to achieving the recovery the deficit hawks seek through austerity.

In the Prospect report, political scientists Christopher Howard and Richard Valelly aptly refer to the post-election obsession with austerity as “deficit-attention disorder” pointing out that even though Americans are worried about the deficit, the great majority of polls show they are far more worried about the economy’s weakness than the nation’s public debt. Once again, the public is displaying more wisdom than many of those representing them in Washington give them credit for. Perhaps some recall that during the Great Depression, it was the premature fiscal tightening that pushed the U.S. economy back into recession — an outcome we now run the risk of repeating.

Economist James K. Galbraith points out that fully half the increase in the budget deficit is due to collapsing tax revenues. Less than 10 percent is due to increases in discretionary public expenditure such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He separates the deficit into the active deficit — comprised of social spending for things like stimulating employment and education — and the passive deficit, which is incurred due to high unemployment which reduces tax revenues necessary to pay for public spending. It is, in fact, this passive, recession-induced deficit that makes it impossible, no matter how much austerity is imposed on social spending, to wipe out the public debt.

Algernon Austin at the Economic Policy Institute writes we are putting our children’s future in jeopardy because of large cuts to pre-K through 12^th grade education. About 40 percent of America’s children are low-income and their circumstances continue to decline because unemployment in the service and blue-collar sectors where their parents work stands at 10.7 percent and 13.7 percent respectively. Citing NIEER’s research, Austin calls for additional investments in high-quality pre-K and kindergarten.

Another important report just out is Investing in America’s Economy: A Budget Blueprint for Economic Recovery and Fiscal Responsibility. It’s a collaboration between The Century Foundation, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute and it proposes a budgetary path for returning the economy to sound footing by 2018. Tackling our rising health care costs and addressing our recession-induced revenue shortfall by enhancing long-term investment in job creation and education by reallocating funds from the Department of Defense are central to their plan. It, too, points out the necessity of “front-loading” investments in early care and education because it is vital to economic growth and future competitiveness.

The plan recommends a comprehensive upgrade and expansion of child care from birth to preschool and provides revenues to pay for it to the tune of $88 billion per year. It calls for providing resources to upgrade the quality and training of providers and new investments to ensure that all low-income families who wish to participate can enroll in Early Head Start and Head Start.

That is the right idea, but not the right mechanism.  As most in the field have recognized, we need to move beyond single program solutions to achieve universal coverage of low-income families with early care and education. For that to happen, we would need to sustain the new investments recently made in Head Start and Early Head Start while underwriting state efforts to increase their investments in early learning programs so as to raise quality while expanding access.  State governments no less than the federal government need to be shifting toward more efficient, pro-growth uses of their resources.  All across the country, states are responding to the current economic crisis by cutting jobs and offering tax incentives and other inducements to business to relocate in a zero sum game that has no benefits nationally and only leads to more job cuts in state government—talk about reorganizing the deck chairs on the Titanic!  Now more than ever we need a federal Early Learning Challenge Fund that will incentivize states to spend more of their own money on early learning programs and jumpstart those efforts with added stimulus funds for early learning over the next two years.

Lest anyone think this analysis is just wishful left-wing analysis, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke also has called for a two-part strategy of immediate stimulus followed by other efforts to reduce the long-term deficit.    If those who believe the road to prosperity is paved with sacrifice prevail, we are in for more of it than they imagine because we will also be sacrificing the future prospects for a large proportion of our children. And they’re the folks upon whom the future of the nation rests.

Steve Barnett

Co- Director, NIEER

Science teachers from all grades, from high school all the way down to elementary school, are taking advantage of this summer research opportunity. The hope is that these teachers will then import their knowledge to the students they teach throughout the school year.

While the article notes even first-grade science teachers are hopping on board this stimulus train, there is no mention of preschool teachers taking part. A recently published NIEER policy brief notes that science, along with mathematics, is a largely overlooked subject in preschool curricula. The authors conclude part of the reason is that most preschool teachers are not trained in, and thus are not comfortable, teaching science and math.

How does your district or school incorporate scientific (and mathematical) concepts in the preschool experience? Are stimulus funds going to change the approach to teaching science?

The district also plans to use the stimulus funds to keep marginal students in school, help students set career and education goals, and for early alert monitoring for students in danger of failing, as well as for one-time expenses such as staff training, technology upgrades, building projects, and new textbooks.

The Anchorage Daily News editorial can be found here:
http://www.adn.com/opinion/view/story/844011.html.

Share Your Thoughts. We want to know what you think about ways pre-K can benefit from the ARRA, experiences you may have had in applying, or questions you may have. There are, to be sure, far more approaches than the few outlined here. Knowing how others in the field are approaching ARRA can be a big help in formulating your strategy.

Toward that end, NIEER has launched the Idea Factory to serve as a forum for sharing ideas and successes with others.

• Using Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding to provide professional development for special education and regular education teachers in math, literacy and behavioral supports.
• Using the State Fiscal Stabilization funds to construct preschool facilities that provide features like play areas where children can exercise their motor skills, food and snack preparation areas, learning centers, and conference space for parents and teachers.
• Applying for competitive grants from the “Race to the Top” program to build upon and expand pre-K programs that have been shown to make progress in narrowing the achievement gap.
• Applying for grants from the Innovation Fund to improve recruitment and placement of high-quality teachers.
• Using Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funds to supplement spending on early care and education for low-income families – as long as the money doesn’t “supplant” state budget reductions under specific conditions.
• Using Title I funds to expand pre-K programs, deliver early childhood screening, provide professional development or temporarily increase income eligibility to serve more families.