Is Universal Pre-K the Answer?

In 2020, the debt to GDP ratio in the United States hit its highest point since World War II. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Washington has spent over $6 trillion on various forms of relief. As we slowly emerge from the pandemic, Washington will inevitably have to start making more judicious choices about where best to allocate taxpayer dollars.

But what’s the right choice to help American kids become the best they can be?

President Biden’s Build Back Better Act includes a voluntary universal pre-K program that would cost Washington over $200 billion over ten years. While having access to pre-K is critically important for kids from low-income families, Biden’s plan is likely far too broad. It will deliver benefits to families that don’t really need them, may favor certain kinds of families over others, and may, according to at least one Nobel Prize-winning economist, be a “waste of funds.”

A survey of the best research on early childhood education points to three major takeaways on the effectiveness of pre-K. First, early childhood education seems to be especially beneficial for low-income and otherwise vulnerable children, but less so for middle-income, high-income, and less vulnerable children.

According to Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, “We know, after a half-century of empirical research, that pre-K buoys the cognitive and social skills of children from poor families. Yet sustained gains for upper-middle-class children, most of whom are raised in safe, stimulating households, range from tepid to null.” While high-income children have access to many of these benefits at home, pre-K can provide low-income children with better nutrition and allow them to develop stronger language skills than they otherwise would.

Second, the benefits of pre-K show up more in longer-term measured outcomes (such as behavioral outcomes, college attendance, employment outcomes, etc.) than in short-term measures like grades and test scores.

A 2021 study conducted by researchers at MIT measured long-term outcomes for students who had been randomly selected in a lottery to attend public preschool in Boston. The pre-K students were nine percentage points more likely to take the SAT, six percentage points more likely to graduate high school, and eight percentage points more likely to attend college than their peers who were not selected. They were also less likely to get suspended, skip class, or be placed in a juvenile detention facility. However, there was no significant difference in standardized test scores between the two groups.

And third, there is some evidence that the benefits of early childhood education can fade in the short term for some students not attending high-quality elementary schools with effective teachers.

Researchers at Vanderbilt studied the effects of Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program (VPK) and found that children randomly selected to participate in the program via lottery saw significantly higher achievement scores by the end of the pre-K year than their peers who were not selected. But by the end of kindergarten, gains had faded out—there was no significant difference in achievement between the two groups for most students. And by the end of second grade, the pre-K students ranked even lower in achievement and behavioral outcomes than their peers.

The researchers write, “One possible explanation for why the gains children made in voluntary pre-K did not continue to advantage them afterwards is failure of kindergarten and later teachers to build on the skills those children bring from their pre-K experience. For instance, teachers may teach to the children who need it the most while learning for more advanced children languishes.”

In a follow-up study, pre-K students maintained their advantage in math and reading through at least third grade if exposed to effective teachers at high-quality elementary schools. Just one or the other was insufficient to prevent fadeout — pre-K students who had ineffective teachers or attended low-quality elementary schools (or both) eventually fared worse than the control group.

While the effects of pre-K can vary based on a wide range of factors, it is clear that pre-K is a worthy investment for many children. However, given the research, Congress would deliver both more impact and be more fiscally responsible by focusing pre-K benefits on the low-income families that need them most.

If Congress wants to both improve and enhance the impact of the current pre-K proposal, they should replace universal pre-K with a means-tested, hybrid model of pre-K funding in which the federal government would provide enough funding for schools to fully subsidize tuition for low-income families while charging all other families tuition at a rate determined by a sliding income scale.

In addition, Congress and every American should be mindful that some of the benefits kids get from pre-K will not be maximized if we as a country don’t do more to fix the longstanding problems with our K-12 schools, in which far too many of our kids can’t read, write, or do math as well as they should — and as well as they must to reach their full potential.

Julia Baumel is a Senior Policy Analyst at The New Center.