The Next Front in the Preschool Fight
By Katharine B. Stevens
OP-ED
May 12, 2015
Bruce Fuller, an education professor at UC Berkeley, wrote recently that "as the pre-K bandwagon gains steam, it's careering into hazardous territory." Minnesota is currently embroiled in an unusual political battle over expanding preschool that provides a glimpse of where that bandwagon may end up not too far down the road.
On the one side in Minnesota's confusing preschool fight are, predictably, preschool advocates. What's fascinating is who their opponents are: more preschool advocates! That's because the question now on the table in Minnesota isn't if but how –and two very different visions of what's best for kids, families and the public are at the heart of what observers are describing as a "painful" struggle between former allies.
The problem arose around an innovative, public preschool program called "Early Learning Scholarships" that Minnesota has been scaling up over the last couple of years, aiming both to increase low-income families' access to high-quality child care and preschool and to increase the number of high-quality programs by incentivizing them to improve. The program provides scholarships to the parents of three- and four-year-olds living at or below 185 percent of poverty, which parents can use at any provider they choose, including center-based child care, family child care, private preschool, public school-based programs and Head Start, as long as the provider has received an acceptable rating from "Parent Aware," a state-wide quality rating system
The Early Leaning Scholarships Program has shown strong results in multiple evaluations and has built substantial public and bipartisan political support across Minnesota. But despite growing increases in program funding, only a fraction of eligible children can currently be served, and early education advocates have been pushing for an additional $150 million annually to bring the program to scale.
When the state recently projected a $1.9 billion budget surplus, early education advocates thought their dream for full funding was within reach. Gov. Mark Dayton has long been a supporter of the increasingly popular scholarship program and they expected him to use the surplus to expand access to all eligible children. But Dayton doesn't want to expand the Early Learning Scholarships. Instead, he's pushing for $1.25 billion over four years to establish school-based, universal pre-K for all four-year-olds across the state.
While that might sound good in theory, longtime early education advocates in Minnesota are strongly opposed to Dayton's proposal. The governor's own Early Learning Council, which he created in 2011, is instead asking for $196 million to scale up the scholarship program plus $194 million to expand home visiting for at-risk children. In a report submitted to the governor and legislature, the council argued that the state should prioritize funding what's already in place and working, writing that "innovations that have demonstrated encouraging results … need to be sustained" and the universal pre-K plan "should be piloted and evaluated prior to statewide implementation." Karen Cadigan, the founding director of Minnesota's Office of Early Learning (established by Dayton four years ago) and now an early education specialist for the Minnesota public schools, too, describes the universal pre-K proposal as "a terrible idea."
The two leading supporters of the governor's plan to add pre-K to the public schools are the state education department and the teachers union. State Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius said she's "super-perplexed that we're even having a debate." "I'd like to know their basis for making some of those statements," she said of the scholarship program's proponents. "We know that universal pre-K helps all kids." The head of the state teachers union Denise Specht argued that free pre-K for all four-year olds and the plan's requirement that pre-K teachers be state-licensed by 2020 (a predicted 2,849 licensed teachers would be needed) are the best approach to "reducing opportunity gaps in Minnesota."
There are a lot of complicated details of the unfolding conflict, which you can read about here and here and here, just for starters. Overall, though, the battle in Minnesota is notable because substantial experience with a decentralized, targeted approach is causing long-committed early education advocates to strongly oppose the universal pre-K model so often championed by the field. In fact, Minnesota's unusual debate highlights three crucial questions that the growing early care and education sector is increasingly going to face as more initiatives get off the ground across the country.
1. Is the goal universal access or universal subsidy? The first question is the distinction between universal access to preschool versus universal subsidy for preschool. Should public money be directed to disadvantaged children whose families can't afford good preschool on their own? Or should public dollars support free pre-K for every child in the state as an additional grade in the public schools?
2. Who should benefit from government-funded preschool? The second is deciding who should be targeted for early education services, given public resources that are usually limited. Should funds be used to enable disadvantaged kids to attend preschool at both three and four years of age? Or should those resources be used to provide pre-K to all four-year-olds regardless of income?
3. What's the best role for government in preschool delivery? The third is defining the best role for government in preschool delivery. Should new dollars go to families who choose the preschool programs they want to, relying on the government simply to provide funding and monitor quality? Or should dollars go to the government-run public schools to add pre-K onto the centralized K-12 system?
In its nascent stages, the early education movement has often aimed to maintain a united front , focused on building public support and obtaining much-needed funding. What Minnesota shows, though, is that as the field advances, advocates will need to address more complex questions, moving beyond the black-and-white, "pro" and "con" positions that have understandably dominated to date. We'll need to pay more nuanced, thoughtful attention to both the how and the why of early learning in order to fulfill its real promise going forward.
See Also
Op-Ed ~ June 10, 2015
Op-Ed ~ March 9, 2015
Essay ~ April 23, 2015