Pre-K Education
The Pew Center on the States completed its 10-year campaign to advance high-quality, voluntary pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-olds on December 31, 2011.
Pre-K Now ignited a spark in the early learning movement by bringing together unique voices and supporting strategic advocacy efforts in the states. In its final report—“Transforming Public Education: Pathway to a Pre-K-12 Future,” the campaign challenged the nation’s policy makers to transform public education by moving away from our current K-12 system.
The future of public education is Pre-K-12.
We know from more than 50 years of research that vital learning happens before age five. Yet, for decades, policy makers and education leaders have been working to “fix” public education while overlooking the demonstrated benefits of pre-kindergarten education.
To ensure that all children fulfill their potential as individuals and citizens, we must re-imagine public education as a system that begins not with kindergarten, but with quality pre-k, and builds on that foundation to raise performance in later grades.
Through our campaign, we galvanized existing and new stakeholders, fostering concrete policy change, and setting the stage for an ongoing movement.
Numerous advances for pre-k education were made during Pre-K Now’s decade of work:
- State funding for pre-k more than doubled nationwide to $5.1 billion in FY2012.
- Pre-k access increased from just 700,000 children in 2001 to more than one million in 2011, driven by program growth in many states and expansions of eligibility such as to military and foster children in Texas.
- Six states—Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Vermont and West Virginia—and the District of Columbia opened their programs to all four year olds, bringing the total number of pre-k-for-all states to nine plus DC in 2011.
- Three of the 13 states that offered no pre-k in 2001—Alaska, Florida and Rhode Island—created new programs.
- Another seven states created new pre-k programs to supplement, expand and improve their existing services.
- The number of states with at least one program meeting eight or more of 10 established benchmarks for pre-k quality rose from five in 2002 to 23 and the District of Columbia in 2010.
View our body of pre-k research.
For additional resources on pre-k, please visit the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), the New American Foundation and, the Education Commission on the States.
