Proponents of public school pre-kindergarten programs generally argue that it has two benefits: that it helps children succeed in school, and that it is a reliable, free source of child care for working parents.
There’s some debate about what the data say about that first point, but few argue with the latter. Despite that, not every school district offers pre-kindergarten — and some districts have even seen fierce battles to stop the expansion of pre-K programs.
One state avoided that fight, however, and has one of the US’s most successful public, universal pre-K programs: Oklahoma.
My colleague Coleman Lowndes recently traveled to the state to better understand how its program came together. I asked him about that, and what other states can learn from Oklahoma. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below:
Coleman, what is universal pre-K?
In the US, pre-K is generally not part of the elementary school system. It’s usually part of what’s called a targeted program, which means that it’s geared toward low-income or at-risk children.
Universal pre-kindergarten is a public elementary school grade for all 4-year-olds, no matter your income or risk level.
Why is universal pre-K beneficial?
On a basic level, it’s good for kids: An extra year of school creates an extra year of readiness for the child.
Critics argue that while that may be true, middle- and upper-class children don’t need it, as their parents can afford to put them in private programs. The counterargument is that we need to take more than education into account, and universal pre-K should be defined as a workforce issue.
Child care in America is very expensive, and middle-class families that are left out of a targeted system and that struggle to pay for private child care can decide to try to teach their children at home. Sometimes that makes the most sense financially: One parent’s income often goes to child care anyway.
With universal pre-K, a parent doesn’t have to make that choice to drop out of the workforce, so the idea is that it benefits middle-class families and parents by increasing their earnings and reducing their child care costs.
Why don’t more states have universal pre-K?
There’s an argument that it’s too expensive. And some people argue that there isn’t even a rigorous enough way to prove that an extra year of school is good for kids.
There’s a concept called fade out, where by third grade, the advantages that you see in kids that went to pre-K fade out, and by third grade, they’re all pretty much the same reading level.
The argument against universal pre-K says that that proves it’s not worth it.
The main problem for states that want to implement universal pre-K is they will need to do it in a way that doesn’t bankrupt private child care.
The way that the private child care business model is set up is that each age group has a different ratio of teacher to child; infants need the most care, so there may be one adult for four infants. Meanwhile, 4-year-olds need less attention, so maybe you have one adult for 15 of them.
If you have two adults per age cohort, that’s 30 4-year-olds in a classroom, all paying customers, versus your eight paying-customer baby families.
When states enact universal pre-K, parents often will say, Okay, this is free now, no need to send my 4-year-old to private child care now. Suddenly, private child care facilities’ most valuable clients are gone. And they either have to close or they have to raise their prices, which is tricky, because child care in America is already incredibly expensive.
You went to Oklahoma, which figured out a way around these problems, and does have universal pre-K. Is it unusual for a red state to have universal pre-K?
Oklahoma being such a red state, passing a big social program and especially an education program was surprising. I will say though, if you look at the map of where universal pre-K exists, it’s probably half and half conservative states and progressive states.
Georgia was the first state, though they don’t have it anymore. Florida, West Virginia, and Oklahoma all have it.
How did Oklahoma get its program?
A lot of motivated people made it happen. But there’s a key figure: Joe Eddins. He was a state representative and a former elementary school teacher in his younger days who wrote legislation to close a loophole — legislation that ended up founding the universal pre-K program.
Essentially, kindergarten was a pretty new thing for Oklahoma public schools back in the ’90s, and Oklahoma law said, if you open a kindergarten program, we’ll give you $X per kid, and you can open a half-day program or a full-day program.
Pretty quickly, schools realized that language meant half-day and full-day programs got the same amount of money. And so they opened two half-day programs, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and got double the money.
Because Oklahoma is largely a rural state, districts started to run out of 5-year-olds to enroll. They realized there’s nothing in the law that said you couldn’t put 4-year-olds in kindergarten. So they started packing them with 4-year-olds.
The people advocating for universal pre-K found out about this, and along with Joe, said they wanted to enact a bill closing the loophole. And to help out parents who’d already enrolled their 4-year-olds, the state should have an official 4-year-old program that’s voluntary for parents.
To solve the problem of this hurting private facilities, the bill also said that since public elementary schools probably didn’t have enough classroom space yet for a whole new grade, they could use their state funding to hire existing qualified providers to teach the voluntary pre-K program.
That caused the private providers to be less spooked, because it seemed like the public schools were just going to interface with them. What the child care lobby didn’t really catch was that the contracted providers would have to meet certain standards — standards that happened to be ones that were easier for public schools and Head Start programs to meet.
My understanding is that it’s kind of all balanced out now, but that the private child care industry in Oklahoma in the ’90s and early 2000s did suffer.
Overall, though, Joe was able to get it through because he and his allies were very careful not to advertise that this very complicated piece of legislation was creating a free grade for 4-year-olds.
By the time that became clear, Joe said it was like free beer at the baseball game — everybody just finds out where to get it. It’s so unbelievably popular there now, and has been from the very beginning.
What can other states learn from the success that Oklahoma has had with this program?
Replicating Oklahoma’s success is tough because we’re not in the ’90s anymore. I don’t think you could pass a bill as quietly today, and not every state has loopholes that lawmakers are eager to fix.
But I think the lesson from Oklahoma is that there’s no question universal pre-K will be a popular policy, so states should focus on the how and not the why. If you can figure out how to keep the child care industry afloat, develop an appropriate curriculum, and build enough facilities, the benefits will be felt by the entire state.
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