Just How Dire Is America’s Preschool System?

In an open letter to Obama printed in The Washington Post, Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, and Cassie Schwerner, senior vice president of programs at the Schott Foundation for Public Education, stated that low-income kids “have less access and exposure to early development opportunities, which can leave them unprepared for Kindergarten and in danger of falling further and further behind their better-off peers.”

This is happening too often in the U.S. We are ranked 28th in the percentage of four-year-olds in early childhood education, with a 69 percent enrollment rate, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

This is less than most other countries in the OECD report. On average the other countries (including France, the U.K., and Japan) had an 84 percent enrollment.

There are only 1.3 million children in America who attend a state preschool program. Of these, 1.1 million are four-year-olds, accounting for 28 percent of the four-year-old population, according to The National Institute of Early Education’s State of Preschool 2011 report.

National Catholic Education Association reported that they had 154,282 children enrolled in their preschools during the 2011-2012 year.

While the typical starting age for early childhood education is four years old in the U.S., it is three years old or younger in 21 OECD countries.

Photo: National Institute of Early Education

The minimum requirement to be a preschool teacher in Finland is a bachelor’s degree in education science. To work with the youngest children, a bachelor’s degree in social services is acceptable.

In the United States, requirements for preschool teachers are much more lax and vary greatly by state. Only about two-thirds of states require that preschool teachers have a bachelor’s degrees. In-home childcare facilities that function as preschools have no college degree requirements.

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In an effort to improve early childhood education, President Obama has advocated the expansion of the Head Start program.

The Head Start program was started by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It was originally a summer school program to help socioeconomically disadvantaged children. It was expanded under Nixon, Carter and Reagan. In 1998 President Clinton turned it into a year-round, full-day program. President Bush reauthorized the program in 2007.

Head Start helps children ages 0-5 from economically disadvantaged families grow their language, cognitive, and social skills while promoting better health and an improved approach to learning. The goal of this program is to help put these children on a level playing field by the time they enter kindergarten.

In 2012, the federal Head Start program served 1,124,824 children and cost just under $8 billion.

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In 2010-2011, 16,812 children were served by state-funded Head Start programs, which reported expenditures of $145 million. The per-pupil spending was $8,625. Comparatively, state-funded preschool programs spent an average of $4,151 per pupil in 2011, down significantly from nine years earlier. Per-pupil spending was $4,866 in 2002.

To justify Head Start, which has twice the per-pupil spending, the program would have to show significant results.

According to Head Start Research’s Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study Final Report, “by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts…in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.”

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images