Education Secretary Arne DuncanWASHINGTON – Want your child to go to a state-funded pre-K program? Choose your home state wisely.
A new report to be released Tuesday finds wide disparities in the number of spots available for publicly funded preschool programs. A whopping 94 percent of 4-year-olds attended such a program in the District of Columbia and more than 7 out of 10 did in Florida, Oklahoma and Vermont. Ten states had no such program.
In fact, even as lawmakers from both parties have embraced the idea of expanding early childhood programs, the number of children enrolled in state preschool programs saw a modest decline of about 9,200 children in the 2012-2013 school year – the first such reduction since 2002, when researchers at Rutgers University started tracking pre-K trends. Even as funding increased from a year earlier, more than half of states with programs made cuts. California alone, for example, lost nearly 15,000 slots.
Overall, $5.4 billion was spent by states on pre-K funding for about 1.3 million preschoolers.
The report is from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers in collaboration with the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics.