Why PreK for All? the United States Can't "Race to the Top" When Many Children Are Not Even at the Starting Line

Our public schools do far too little during a child's most critical period for healthy development. Children's earliest years are crucial for developing school readiness, and achievement gaps appear well before children set foot in a kindergarten or 1st-grade classroom. Without a strong foundation of early learning, many children start school with a deficit, and teachers spend years trying to help these children catch up. Consider that, before kindergarten: * More than 30% of low-income children have no familiarity with print. That is, they do not know that books are read from left to right or where a story starts or ends. Seventeen percent of children from middle-income families and 8% of those whose parents have a bachelor's or higher degree also lack this knowledge (West, Denton, and Germino-Hausken 2000). * About 60% of low-income children and more than a third of middle-income children do not know the alphabet (Coley 2002). * Only 6% of poor and 18% of middle-income children understand numerical sequence (Coley 2002). These statistics illustrate two facts: First, significant gaps in the development and ability of America's children occur before age five. Second, while the gulf is widest between poor and upper-income children, middleincome children also lag behind their more affluent peers when they start kindergarten. The fact is that the cutoff point at which most states consider a child middle class--or too affluent for publicly funded high-quality prekindergarten--has no meaningful relationship with children's potential to benefit educationally and developmentally from high-quality early learning programs. To ensure that all children have the strongest foundation for success as students, we must reduce these disparities during the early years. Over 50 years of research, including several recent independent studies, illuminate both the educational and economic development effects of high-quality early education and its potential to address many school-readiness challenges (Wat 2010). Advocates, policy makers of varying political views, and educators have examined this research and are increasingly turning to prekindergarten as a policy solution to lay a strong foundation for academic success. Forty states and the District of Columbia currently offer a state-funded prekindergarten program. Many of these states consider prekindergarten a critical part of their school reform agendas because they understand that a prekindergarten program aligned with the standards, teaching practices, professional development, and curricula of the early elementary grades can provide a strong start for young children. Moreover, the solid foundation gained through preK can amplify the outcomes of later reforms. Unfortunately, we have yet to see similar commitment at the federal level. Head Start, the primary federal investment in early education, is offered to only the poorest children, serves only about half of eligible children, and has weak connections to our nation's larger school-reform strategy. The vast majority of federal education reform resources have focused on the years after kindergarten. But we can't "race to the top" when so many children are not even at the starting line. PREKINDERGARTEN FOR ALL? This evidence clearly shows the importance of investing in high-quality preK for all. Why would we reserve it for a small segment of the population? States may start with preK programs targeted at low-income and other at-risk children, but the research doesn't support stopping there. The benefits of high-quality prekindergarten for low-income three- and four-year-olds are well documented and widely accepted. But prekindergarten can significantly improve all children's cognitive skills. For example, a study of the Tulsa, Okla., preK-for-all program found that middle-income children who attended preK scored 41% higher in assessments of letter-word identification and 17% higher in spelling than their peers without preK (Gormley et al. …