I’m at an age when a lot of my friends are trying to figure out where to send their children to preschool. Because of what I do for a living, and because I serve on a board that oversees charter schools in the District, some of my friends ask me for advice about preschool options. More often, they simply want to complain to me about the frustrations of navigating what is an incredibly fragmented and complex non-system in most places, even for well-educated, upper-middle-class parents.
Earlier this spring I was talking to a friend who lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., about preschool options for his daughter. She will be three next spring and is guaranteed a preschool slot at her neighborhood school. My friend and his wife were also considering applying to a nearby charter school. Since both options are totally free for families, he was quite excited about the prospect of not having to pay $1,800-plus a month in child care next year.
“Is there any place else in the country,” he asked me, “that offers people like us [i.e., solidly upper-middle-class] free preschool for a 3-year-old?”
By taking a look at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) state of preschool report released earlier this week, the answer is a resounding “no.”
For very good reasons, my home city’s public education system has a horrible reputation (although my Public Charter School Board colleagues and I are working hard to improve that). But the District of Columbia is doing something pretty remarkable when it comes to pre-K. According to NIEER data, D.C. enrolls a higher percentage of both 3-year-olds (69 percent) and 4-year-olds (92 percent) in pre-K than any state in the country.
Does that mean all these pre-K seats are high quality? No. But there are reasons to believe D.C. is doing some good things around pre-K quality. DCPS has long served preschool students, but for a long time these programs were largely overlooked, had widely varying curriculum and quality, and were often lousy. Under the leadership of former DCPS Early Childhood Director Miriam Calderon and current Director Danielle Ewen, DCPS has made significant efforts to improve pre-K quality, better support pre-K teachers, and improve alignment from pre-K through third grade. It also has launched a major campaign to raise parent awareness about DCPS pre-K offerings and attract parents to DCPS. In the charter sector, most of the District’s highest-performing charter elementary schools offer pre-K, and there are also nationally recognized pre-K-only charter schools. Again, not all charter pre-K offerings are high-quality, but the D.C. Public Charter School Board is developing an early childhood Performance Management Framework to monitor and ensure the quality of early childhood education in charter schools that we oversee.
To be sure, there are still major frustrations for parents, including too few seats in high-quality, pre-K programs in either the charter or DCPS sector, as well as a complex and unduly frustrating enrollment and lottery process for charter or out-of-boundary DCPS schools. Just ask another friend of mine who entered his 3-year-old daughter in the lottery for six charters and one out-of-boundary DCPS school this year only to be wait-listed at all of them. But on the whole, D.C. probably does more to offer high-quality, publicly funded preschool programs to 3-year-olds than any other jurisdiction except for New Jersey’s Abbott school districts.
As D.C. goes through a major construction and population boom, and the hipsters who moved here in the past decade as young 20-somethings start to have school-aged children, the biggest question that will shape the city’s future is whether its schools can become good enough to offer high-quality options that keep young families in the district—and enable other families in the historically underserved neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River to access quality education that enables them to share in the benefits of the District’s growth. Answering that question in the affirmative will require major improvements in K-12 schools in both the DCPS and charter sectors, as well as continued growth in the supply of high-quality schools. But the District’s high-level access to pre-K will also make a difference here. For families choosing whether to decamp to Takoma Park, Md., or Vienna, Va., or to take a chance on D.C.’s Brookland, Petworth, or Deanwood neighborhoods, the possibility of two years of free preschool—saving upwards of $30,000 in childcare costs—has got to be a real factor.
And if DCPS or charter schools can do a good job offering quality preschool, they may be able to persuade families to stick around for elementary school. Moreover, if DCPS and charters do a good job of preparing 3- and 4-year-olds for kindergarten, it will create a virtuous cycle that makes it easier to improve school performance in the elementary grades. If, as I dearly hope and believe, D.C.’s horrible public education reputation will be history a decade from now, pre-K will have played a role in accomplishing that.
Photo Credit: Bricks 4 Kidz