Recession Stalls State-Financed Pre-Kindergarten, but Federal Money May Help

By SAM DILLON

April 8, 2009

One of the most drastic expansions of public education in recent American history unfolded quietly in this decade, as dozens of states added free pre-kindergarten classes to their traditional kindergarten to high school offerings.

But the recession appears to have stalled the expansion of state-financed pre-kindergarten programs, according to Steven Barnett, a professor at Rutgers University who is a co-author of a new report documenting trends in early childhood education.

“We had been making remarkable progress, things were going great guns, but as the recession hit state governments, things started to change,” Dr. Barnett said. “It’s gotten so that some people would even consider flat funding to be good.”

From 2002 to 2008, spending on pre-kindergarten by states nearly doubled, to $4.6 billion from $2.4 billion, enabling states to increase enrollment to 1.1 million preschoolers from about 700,000.

That growth came partly because governors and legislatures, convinced of the value of early childhood education, stepped in to fill a gap left by federal inaction. President George W. Bush, who focused mainly on trying to improve achievement among older children, allowed budgets for the largest federally financed preschool programs to stagnate.

But given the economic decline, nine states — Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina and South Carolina — have already announced cuts to state-run pre-kindergarten programs, Dr. Barnett said.

And legislatures are debating cutbacks in some others, including Tennessee and Washington State, he said.

“All of this may produce dire consequences for state pre-K programs,” says the new report, the State of Preschool 2008, by the National Institute for Early Education Researchat the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. “In most states, expenditures on pre-K are entirely discretionary and therefore easier to cut than expenditures for some other program.”

Meanwhile, however, at President Obama’s request, Congress has significantly raised federal financing for preschool education. Mr. Obama promised during the campaign to make large new investments in early childhood education, and in the economic stimulus package, Congress appropriated more than $4 billion for Head Start and Early Head Start programs and for grants to states to support child care for low-income families.

“The big picture here is that for the last eight years, the only game around for early childhood was in the states, because under Bush there was nothing going on at the federal level,” said Cornelia Grumman, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, an advocacy group based in Chicago. “All of a sudden that’s changed. Now the only game is federal, because if you’re a state-funded program relying on your state legislature, well, it’s not a rosy picture.”

The two largest federal preschool programs are Head Start, which serves low-income 3- and 4-year-olds and was begun by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, and Early Head Start, which serves infants and pregnant mothers and was inaugurated under President Bill Clinton in 1994. The combined budget for both programs was $6.5 billion in 2002. In 2008, Mr. Bush’s last full year in office, their combined budget was $6.9 billion.

The National Head Start Association, a nonprofit advocacy group, says that when inflation is taken into account, the financing for the two programs declined 13 percent from 2002 to 2008.

Under the Obama administration, financing for Head Start and Early Head Start has been separated and has greatly increased. The stimulus law includes $1 billion for Head Start, which last year served about 830,000 children, and the 2009 budget includes an additional $235 million.

The stimulus law increases financing for Early Head Start, which serves 62,000 families, by $1.1 billion. That will allow the program to enroll an additional 55,000 families.

Mr. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan say their enthusiasm for early childhood education is based on research showing large paybacks for every dollar spent on the careful nurturing of poor children.

Mr. Duncan repeated those arguments at a forum on early learning in Washington last week. “For every dollar we spend on these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health care costs and less crime,” Mr. Duncan said.