Students attend pre-K at PS 124 in New York City on January 13, 2021. A new report shows a decrease in student enrollment in state preschool programs during the 2020-school year- 2021.
Image Michael Loccisano / Getty
hide captions
switch captions
Image Michael Loccisano / Getty
Students attend pre-K at PS 124 in New York City on January 13, 2021. A new report shows a decrease in student enrollment in state preschool programs during the 2020-school year- 2021.
Image Michael Loccisano / Getty
State preschool programs have experienced significant declines in enrollment and state funding amid the pandemic, according to a annual review of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University. If there’s good news in the report, it’s that for the 2020-2021 school year, federal bailout money has filled the hole left by state spending cuts.
“There’s no time to waste,” said Allison Friedman-Krauss, NIEER research associate professor and parent of a preschooler.
NIEER has been releasing its State of Early Childhood Annual report for two decades now, and this year’s edition, which looks at the 2020-2021 school year, offers a remarkable, albeit dated, snapshot of Impact of the pandemic on preschool in the United States.
The review is a storm of swirling data points, so we thought we’d start by picking a few of the most intriguing numbers.
Pre-K enrollment drops for the first time in 20 years
According to the report, nearly 300,000 children attended preschool in the 2020-2021 school year less than in the 2019-2020 school year – an 18% decrease. Given the time frame, the researchers attribute the drop in large part to school closures due to the pandemic and the challenges of providing remote preschool. On average, states serve less than 30% of all 4-year-olds. Worse news for 3-year-olds: States serve less than 5%.
The report warns: “The pandemic has wiped out a decade of progress in increasing enrollment in state-funded early childhood education programs.”
Some states cut funding, but Congress filled the void
According to the report, states spent about $9 billion on pre-K in the 2020-2021 school year — an inflation-adjusted decrease of $254 million from the previous year and a “decline in biggest funding since the Great Recession”.
Now the good news: The federal government has provided about $440 million in early childhood pandemic relief that states could use to offset more than $254 million of that drop.
The average state spends $5,867 per child, a number that the NIEER said “has not improved significantly in two decades” after adjusting for inflation.
One note: This is an estimate, not based on actual program enrollments but on capacity. That’s because with funding generally flat but enrollment significantly reduced, states actually spent more than $7,000 per child. But NIEER says measuring program spending based on last year’s capacity, rather than actual enrollment, is a more accurate comparison than in previous years.
Similarly, the report notes that overall, state spending on preschool has more than doubled over the past two decades, from $4.1 billion in 2002 to about $9 billion in 2021. But when you analyze the data the other way, look at state dollars Each childspending has been very flat.
US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said on Monday’s call with reporters: “I can tell you, early childhood problems. “Preschool should be available to everyone, but right now it’s not. We’ve made some progress as a country, but we still have a long way to go.”
Low-income families are hardest hit
Perhaps the most disturbing data in the report comes from parent surveys that capture the impact of the pandemic on preschool enrollment based on family income.
Before the pandemic, nearly half of low-income children, 47%, attended some kind of preschool. However, by the fall of 2021, that number has dropped to 31%. By comparison, before the pandemic, 62% of children from families with incomes above $25,000 were enrolled in preschool, and although that number also dropped, by the fall of 2021 it was back to 58 %.
In six states, enrollment rates fell by more than 30%.
The report includes a color-coded map showing which states experienced the biggest drop in preschool enrollment: Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Kentucky and Nevada.
Interestingly, half a dozen states have seen an increase in enrollment: Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Washington.
Some states are close to pre-pandemic pre-pandemic
When you combine the state’s early childhood education, special education and federally funded Head Start programs, NIEER found that six states, plus Washington, DC, are serving at least 70% their 4-year-olds before the pandemic began: Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Only DC continues to serve more than 70% of 4-year-olds between 2020-2021.
Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Wyoming do not offer public preschool for the 2020-2021 school year.
Enough in quantity, what about quality?
NIEER’s annual review isn’t just about enrollment and funding; It is also about quality control. The researchers rated every state using 10 quality metrics, including whether they had early learning standards, small class sizes, and well-trained teachers.
Only five state programs scored a perfect 10 out of 10: Alabama, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Hawaii’s Executive Office of the Early Learning Public Preschool Program, and its Excellent Start Ready Program. Michigan.
West Virginia is one of the few state programs that scores between 9 and 10.
The state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, said in a phone call with reporters discussing the NIEER report: “West Virginia has now become the diamond in the rough that everyone misses. West Virginia’s High School Pre-K Program operates in every county in the state and meets nine of the 10 NIEER quality standards. Justice calls the preschool investment “important”.
“I don’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, an independent – first of all, we’re Americans. And we need to constantly do what’s right for America,” Justice said.
At the other end, programs in Alaska, Florida, and North Dakota meet only two of NIEER’s 10 quality standards.
Approximately 40% of all children in state-funded preschool are enrolled in programs that meet less than half of NIEER’s quality standards.
What happened to President Biden’s grand preschool plan?
The NIEER review falls at an awkward time for the Biden administration. The President is an outspoken champion of general early childhood education and has made this idea the central topic of his Build Back Better agenda, committed $10 billion over the next two years to increase the pre-K capacity of the states. That act has stalled for months in the Senate, though Biden also requested additional funding before K in Budget Proposal 2023.
