Universal Pre-K Is Harder Than We Thought – By Alicia Simba (The Progressive) / April 3, 2024
But that doesn’t mean we should give up on it.
In late February, the Biden Administration released a letter encouraging state-by-state efforts to “serve more of our youngest learners in high-quality preschool” as administered by “community-based childcare providers, schools, Head Start programs, and family child care homes.” The guidance included no provisions for funding; instead, it offered recommendations around how to spend existing federal, state, and local resources.
With the Presidential election a few months away, the letter can be seen as an attempt by the White House to follow up on the campaign promise Biden made four years ago for free and reduced child care for all three- and four-year olds. That pledge was derailed by the slimmed-down Build Back Better package—which did not include funding for early childhood education—and the expiration of pandemic-era funding for childcare providers and agencies.
The letter signaled that, while universal preschool is still on Biden’s radar, bringing the program to fruition at the federal level is not politically possible. And so, it placed the burden on states to do the impossible, and blue and red states alike have outlined their ambitions to do so. Alabama and Georgia are looking to transform their current first-come, first-serve, lottery-based system of free state-funded preschool to all families. The governors of Illinois and Michigan have made promises and budgetary commitments towards free preschool for all four-year olds in the next few years. But California is providing a model right now of what universal preschool could look like—and revealing all the challenges that come with it.
