When you enter a preschool classroom in Tulsa, you will see children sorting acorns, building with blocks, and listening to a five-year-old read aloud from a frayed copy of Dr. Seuss. Enter one in rural Ohio, for example, and the scene could be completely different. same age range. A completely different experience. This gap is the silent scandal that lies beneath America’s preschool boom, and it all boils down to one unanswered question: what should be included in a preschool curriculum?
Nowadays, about half of all four-year-olds in the nation begin their education in a public pre-K classroom, and states have been investing billions to increase access. However, access was never truly a challenge. It’s quality. Researchers consistently discover that the majority of public preschool programs perform poorly on the instructional content that truly develops early literacy and number sense, while scoring highly on warmth and structure—the kinds of characteristics parents notice on a tour. The rooms have a sense of security. It turns out that the learning is frequently less substantial than claimed.
The fact that “curriculum” is more than one thing contributes to the issue. Certain programs employ all-encompassing, whole-child approaches that attempt to address language, math, social skills, and motor development all at once. Others rely on domain-specific curricula, which are more focused resources created by math or literacy experts and added to the rest of the curriculum. Both strategies have supporters and studies supporting them that demonstrate genuine, if inconsistent, effects. It’s important to consider whether creating a curriculum that works for everyone was ever a feasible objective in the first place.
The issue of who is teaching it is another. Without a teacher who knows how to use it, a curriculum on paper is meaningless. Well-funded classrooms, manageable ratios, and credentialed teachers who received genuine coaching—rather than the generic, sporadic training sessions that pass for professional development elsewhere—were the recurring themes among researchers examining Tulsa’s program. When a brilliant curriculum is given to an overworked, inexperienced teacher, it often becomes much less ambitious than it was intended.
Then there’s the unglamorous bureaucratic detail that seldom makes headlines: according to the most recent count, only roughly nineteen states even keep lists of approved preschool curricula, and some of those lists still contain content that lacks solid proof. States are investing actual funds in early education while, frequently, failing to thoroughly examine the effectiveness of the materials being used. That isn’t precisely negligence. It’s more that, despite the fact that the stakes may be equally high, early childhood has traditionally received less attention than what occurs in third grade.
A movement to treat preschool curricula with the same seriousness as K–12 materials, external reviews, evidence standards, and the kind of scrutiny a fourth-grade reading program would naturally face is now slowly taking shape. It remains to be seen if that becomes widely popular. A better curriculum won’t make funding shortages and high teacher turnover go away.
Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile place to sit. The curriculum in these classrooms is not chosen by the students. Adults are making the decision for them, frequently with little agreement on what “good” actually entails. Correcting that won’t address every injustice a four-year-old carries. However, it’s one of the few levers that policymakers can truly control, and the data indicates that it matters more than most people realize.
