Early in my career — when the world was still young and the nihilistic carnival wing of our politics seemed safely marginalized, I was a periodic columnist for Talking Points Memo. Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote what seemed like a pretty decent prediction:
It’s increasingly clear that universal pre-K is coming. It probably won’t arrive in 2015. It might not be for a few more years. But this longtime progressive dream is going to happen — you can take that to the bank.
If any of you happen to be longtime readers who did, in fact, take my optimism to the bank, I’m sorry. Here in 2024, universal pre-K remains a distant dream — the National Institute for Early Education Research reports that just 35% of all 4 year olds were enrolled in public programs. U.S. pre-K enrollment actually dropped from 1,378,146 children in 2014-15 to 1,332,999 in 2022–23.
I was hardly wishcasting. Pre-K had relatively good political prospects. Washington, D.C.’s universal pre-K system — where I already had one child enrolled (and would eventually have three) — was about three years into full implementation, San Antonio wasn’t far behind, and New York City’s and Seattle’s expansions were imminent. It wasn’t just the big blue cities getting in on the act! States like Oklahoma, West Virginia and Georgia were investing in large pre-K programs. Almost every year, President Obama would introduce universal pre-K proposals — and by 2014, they were attracting bipartisan support.
Pre-K also benefited from solid research backing — children’s brains have particularly high levels of neuroplasticity in the early years, meaning that their developmental trajectories are more flexible than they will be in later years. Early education programs that expose young children to high-quality learning environments full of rich language and engaging activities can make the most of this moment and help advance children’s development.
A bevy of studies has found that early education investments help kids prepare for kindergarten; develop stronger academic, social, and linguistic abilities; and get better long-term life outcomes. Further, these impacts save the public money by helping schools work more efficiently — for instance, pre-K programs can reduce the number of kids who are retained and have to repeat a grade. In 2022, researchers even found that the children of Head Start graduates appeared to have better long-term outcomes because of the program: higher high school graduation rates, greater college enrollment rates, reduced criminal behavior and the like.
Given our growing national conversations about how to make it less expensive for young Americans to choose to have children, it’s especially relevant to note that well-funded universal pre-K programs can help parents get back to work sooner. New research has corroborated these findings, showing that full-day early education programs boost parental employment rates. Shoot, even at a macroeconomic level, pre-K’s a good policy bet — it’s overall more efficient and cheaper to have kids in quality early learning classrooms with student-teacher ratios around 8:1 than it is to have kids at home with one parent and only a sibling or two.
Not coincidentally, other developed countries have already devoted considerable resources to a suite of family-friendly policies like universal pre-K, as well as affordable child care, paid leave and child allowances.
Nonetheless, like fetch, minidiscs, renaming Twitter as X, universal pre-K hasn’t taken off. There are bright spots: California is pushing towards universal coverage, Seattle’s pre-K program is growing, and the Biden administration, while it still could, kept proposing large federal early education investments. But on balance, a decade after my misbegotten prediction, pre-K’s political prospects are somewhat less rosy. Maryland’s pre-K push has been uneven, and even New York City’s established pre-K program is struggling.
Washington, D.C.’s pre-K program lost the major federal grant that many — including me — believed was uniquely helpful for raising its quality. Some cities, like Portland, Oregon, are struggling with pre-K expansion, while pre-K class sizes are going up because of tight budgets in Oklahoma. Tennessee’s pre-K classrooms have been under increased scrutiny after discouraging results from a study of their effectiveness.
What happened? Why hasn’t policy tracked the evidence that compelled so many of us a decade ago?
Let’s not overthink this. The main problem is politics. During the campaign, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris maintained her party’s support for large national early education investments. If she’d won and Democrats had enough votes in Congress, universal pre-K would already be rolling out. This could still be true if Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, were to run and win the White House in 2028.
National conservative leadership on pre-K has largely evaporated. Republicans who supported universal pre-K — like former U.S. Rep. Richard Hanna — have been more or less pushed out of the party. The campaign of president-elect Donald Trump didn’t take a clear position on any early education investments — let alone pre-K — but as president, he proposed cuts to Head Start, the federal government’s largest investment in early learning for 4 year olds. Furthermore, writing in the Heritage Foundation’s much-discussed “Mandate for Leadership,” usually referred to as “Project 2025,” Trump’s conservative allies have called for Head Start to be defunded.
Back in 2015, it was possible to look forward and see a world where local, state and federal policymakers across the political spectrum would turn to universal pre-K as 1) a powerful intervention for improving kids’ linguistic, social and academic development; 2) a way to ease financial pressures for families and 3) a way to use public education dollars more efficiently. While it’s always a fool’s errand to trust strong data to deliver political progress, universal pre-K seemed like such a good fit for so many challenges facing U.S. public education — and American families.
Obviously I was wrong. Wiser heads knew it right away. Soon after I wrote that TPM column, I met the late early education expert Ruby Takanishi for coffee. She pulled out a printed copy of my piece, plopped it on the table, and told me that I was not the first progressive to prophesy a major pre-K expansion just around the corner.
“I hope you’re right,” she said with a wry smile, “but I bet you won’t be the last.”
Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
