Bigger Isn’t Better for New York City Pre-K
By Katharine B. Stevens
BLOG
November 13, 2014
New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio triumphantly announced yesterday that the city’s huge pre-K expansion had “reached its 2014 target,” as over 53,000 children are now enrolled in the city’s new Pre-K For All program. Reaching targets is always nice. But the probability that all those kids are really “learning in high quality pre-K,” as the press release put it, doesn’t seem high.
While adding tens of thousands of pre-K slots in a matter of months makes for good headlines, unfortunately for New York City it does not make for good pre-K. It’s just not possible to scale up an enormous program that quickly while simultaneously maintaining high quality. Start-ups are difficult in every field and not less so in early education, where the stakes are especially high.
The critical drivers of quality in early education are a solid curriculum and good teachers who know how to implement it. Finding and training the high-quality early childhood teachers who are essential to high-quality pre-K doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, DeBlasio isn’t even focused on making sure that teachers are actually good—just that they are “are supported, and getting better all the time.” Young children don’t need teachers who are supported and getting better all the time, however. They need good teachers, or they’re not going to be learning.
Other cities are taking a stronger approach to building public pre-K. Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel is planning to use “social impact bonds” to add 2,600 new slots for low-income children to Chicago’s long-successful Child-Parent Center preschool program over the next three years. In Seattle, voters just approved a carefully-planned 4-year demonstration program to provide free pre-K to low income children, aiming to serve 2,000 kids by 2018. The city’s ultimate goal is to serve all 3- and 4-years-olds, using the pilot project to inform program improvement to scale.
Programs like these give children access to preschool that actually is high-quality, not just called that in press releases. And as the dismal performance of New York City’s K-12 public schools makes abundantly clear, it’s much easier to do things right at the outset than to fix them once they’re in place.
See Also
Op-Ed ~ October 14, 2016
Op-Ed ~ February 10, 2015
Op-Ed ~ October 8, 2015