Pre-K Education

Research shows that attending a high-quality prekindergarten has a solid impact on a child’s success both in school and in life, and leading economists have found that investing dollars in high-quality preschool yields significant returns. Many states have increased funding for prekindergarten, but there is more work to be done.

Pew’s Pre-K Education projects—rigorous, policy-focused and research-based—demonstrate the value of high-quality preschool for all three- and four-year-olds. While we work with a variety of groups to advance access to high-quality prekindergarten programs, two major organizations operate at the core of our initiative:

• Pre-K Now provides assistance to advocates and other leaders in targeted states to encourage funding of new public pre-kindergarten programs and improve the quality of existing programs. Pre-K Now strives to educate and mobilize key sectors of the public and policy makers at the state and national levels about the severity of America's school-readiness problem. They offer state profiles.
• The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) provides objective, nonpartisan information based on research. It was established at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education with Pew support. The institute is part of our long-term strategy to ensure universal, voluntary access to high-quality early education for three- and four-year-old children. NIEER publishes an annual report about state-funded prekindergarten programs.

In 2005, Pew also joined with the Foundation for Child Development and the Joyce Foundation to launch the National Early Childhood Accountability Task Force. Bringing together leading experts in child development, early education and state policy, the project seeks to help states assess programs and use the results to help improve early education. The first phase of the project ended with the release of the Task Force's report on October 31, 2007.  Now a second grant from Pew to the Council of Chief State School Officers is helping states use the Task Force’s recommendations to improve their accountability systems.