Early childhood educators are very familiar with a certain kind of anger. The money comes in, sometimes in large amounts and sometimes just barely enough, and then it disappears quietly after a few budget cycles. In just one fiscal year, programs that took years to build are taken apart. The teachers quit. Those on wait lists get longer. Again, parents are left in a mess.
That cycle might be getting close to a real test. A bill backed by the Organization Mondiale pour l’Éducation Préscolaire (OMEP) is making its way through the legislative chambers in three U.S. states. Its goal is to make preschool funding permanent instead of temporary and structural instead of seasonal.
It’s still early, and these bills might not make it through the day. But the people who are paying close attention—advocates, researchers in early childhood education, and a lot of tired preschool directors—seem to think that this time is really different.
The main point of the legislation backed by OMEP is not hard to understand. It comes from a line of thinking that seems so obvious once you hear it: if the US views K–12 education as a public duty that is funded through dedicated channels and shielded from annual budget battles, then there’s no good reason to treat three- and four-year-olds differently. The research on how young children learn has been settled for many years. The money is still up in the air.
At the federal level, the Build Back Better Act gave this a brief chance to happen. One of the things it suggested was giving all kids in preschool $18 billion over the first three years, with a longer-term system of entitlements to come after. That bill was put on hold. But the talk it sparked didn’t end. There’s a chance that the most lasting effect of that federal effort will be the new laws that were made at the state level that don’t wait for Washington to act.
The approach backed by OMEP is different because it focuses on structural permanence. The bills being looked at don’t just add more money to preschool budgets. They want to tie funding to things like enrollment numbers, state income thresholds, and quality standards. This makes it harder to quietly cut funding to programs. Families whose income is less than a certain percentage of the state median income would not have to pay anything. There would be long-term investments instead of one-time grants for providers that meet licensing and quality standards.
It’s hard not to notice the difference between what preschoolers need and what they usually get when they walk through a well-run classroom. A lead teacher who is in charge of 18 three-year-olds and plans their day so that they learn language, motor skills, and social skills—work that neuroscientists and pediatricians agree is some of the most important at any age—often makes less than a parking garage attendant. That’s not a fancy way of saying something. It’s how the American early childhood system really pays its workers.
It’s really not clear if these three state efforts will make it through their legislatures without getting weakened a lot. Budget committees can turn big plans for changes into smaller programs called pilots. Still, the fact that OMEP’s framework has been written into law in several states at the same time shows that things are changing, and not just politically. People are becoming less tolerant of the old, broken model. There comes a point when the difference between what the evidence says and what the system does is too big to keep defending.
