You notice things when you stroll through any underfunded preschool in rural Idaho or the lower parts of Montana. Alphabet-lettered wall borders are peeling off. classrooms that occasionally serve as storage spaces. teachers who are genuinely concerned but are overworked. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the kids seated in those areas are getting a slower, quieter start in life due to their birthplace rather than any personal fault.
While the youngest students—the three and four-year-olds who may require the most deliberate investment—remain an afterthought in half of the states, America has spent years debating education reform at the high school and college levels, holding televised debates and congressional hearings. When you sit with the data, it’s uncomfortable.
With metrics ranging from access to state-funded pre-K to spending per enrolled child and overall program quality, WalletHub’s recent analysis of all 50 states and the District of Columbia presented the gap with a clarity rarely found in summary statistics. At the top is New Jersey. In terms of preschool enrollment and college readiness, it leads the nation. Massachusetts and Connecticut follow suit, viewing early education more like infrastructure than a luxury, much like water or road systems. States like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Indiana, on the other hand, are failing to appear by almost every metric.
The lowest total reported spending per child enrolled in early education programs was shared by six states. Six. That isn’t an anomaly or a coincidence. This pattern points to a common political assessment that the benefits of investing in early childhood education are either too remote or too imperceptible to warrant the cost. This is odd because there is no longer much room for discussion in the research. High-quality pre-K enrollment is consistently associated with improved academic performance throughout adolescence, higher graduation rates, a lower chance of unemployment, and even lower rates of adult incarceration. Early childhood education is not a soft policy. It’s probably one of the most lucrative public investments a state can make.
Perhaps surprisingly, New Mexico ranks close to the top of WalletHub’s list of the best-performing states, indicating that early education outcomes and wealth don’t always go hand in hand. Some lower-income states seem to have consciously chosen to prioritize access even in the face of limited resources. Others who have a lot more money have just decided not to. The effects of that decision compound over decades, eventually manifesting in workforce quality, public health expenses, and economic mobility statistics that will be difficult for policymakers to explain.
Approximately 46% of children aged three and four are enrolled in some kind of preschool, and the national average for annual pre-K spending per student is approximately $6,329. Until you keep in mind that there is a huge variance around that average, those figures seem almost reasonable. Before kindergarten even starts, a child in South Dakota and a child in New Jersey are living in very different educational environments.
This is especially challenging to reconcile because the states that are falling behind in early childhood education aren’t suffering in silence. While children in their lowest-income communities lack access to the kind of structured, stimulating early environments that children in wealthier zip codes take for granted, they maintain strong ideological positions regarding local control, parental choice, and government overreach. Some of those arguments might be valid in different situations. However, they begin to feel more like excuses than principles when applied to a four-year-old in a rural community without a preschool nearby.
Slowly but surely, the nation appears to be coming to understand the importance of early childhood education. However, in this instance, real children are gradually losing out on real opportunities.
