A New Way to Track Pre-K—Hourly: Part 2

In a blog post from earlier this week I examined the issues of funding streams and dosage. We currently have no way to track a state-funded pre-K center’s level of funding or the different ways it is funded. We also have no reliable way of measuring how some pre-K programs supervise children for much longer than others because we rely on a vague binary measurement of “half-day” versus “full-day”. In this post I will explain how we can fix these problems.

The previous blog post in this series described the challenges faced by local decisionmakers – including parents – who may be trying to gather some fairly basic information about a publicly funded pre-K programs.  Without seemingly simple data on how much money the program receives from the state and how many children it serves, it becomes impossible to make comparisons to other state-funded pre-K programs.  In the example I set up earlier this week, that lack of good data stymies a parent who wants to prove that her daughter’s program is underfunded and that she is not in class with an instructor for nearly as many hours as the child of a friend in a bordering district.

The following is a new proposal for how to think about pre-K that solves many of the problems outlined in the previous blog post.

Hours

Unlike “half-day” or “full-day”, hours are a distinct unit of time and significantly more precise. Instead of talking about pre-K in terms of days, the conversation would switch to hours served per year and hours served per week. Under this model, each pre-K center would be required to report the number of hours that a given child is enrolled in the program (that means being supervised under high-quality standards).

One part of America’s education system already measures by the hour: higher education, where we use the credit hour. The cost of a student’s semester is often determined by credit hours–the more hours, the higher the cost (and more federal aid one can receive). My colleague Amy Laitinen has made a compelling casethat the credit hour is poorly suited to determining cost and federal aid for higher education. Yet for a preschooler, hours served is one of the most important metrics.

Total Funding

The other fix involves reporting funding streams together, instead of separately. Right now, if a pre-K center is funded by two funding streams, there is no central location where the funding data are aggregated (and often some of streams are not visible at all). Under this new proposed system, each early childhood center would be required to report all sources of funding to the state. These changes would be a huge leap in terms of data reporting, but the key feature would be that each funding stream would be reported per child, per hour.

If those two reporting standards were required, the collection of data on hours would not only enable you to know how many hours of pre-K services are offered by each pre-K provider, but what part of your child’s day is funded by which source. Imagine, for example, if it became clear that a particular public pre-K provider in a particular school district paid for three hours of a child’s day, while the parent’s income paid for another three hours. This could lead to a brand new debate about pre-K funding. Some would argue that split private-public funding is good because parents should have “skin in the game.” Others would argue that the state needs to step up funding in order to make the system more equitable to children in households of all income-levels. Either way, at least then we will know what the costs really are and who is bearing them. We will have a comparable data set, which means we’ll be able to actually examine the differences between programs, instead of just suspect that our child is at a disadvantage compared to her peers in the next county.

While some may argue that this is too much for a small preschool provider, such as a community non-profit, to keep track of, it’s hard to imagine an effective, modern organization, no matter their size, that does not account for exactly where every dollar goes, and the amount of time children are served. And even if it did cause a few headaches, a requirement that would allow for comparability between pre-K programs across the country is worth the extra effort.

If these proposals were implemented, pre-K would actually be ahead of K-12 in terms of dosage reporting. In the K-12 world, we rely on “per-pupil-expenditure,” that is, how many dollars go to a student in a school district. However, those numbers are not completely reliable or comparable because a) kindergarten programs vary greatly in how many hours a day a student is served, just like in pre-K and b) in the face of budget cuts, many schools districts across the country funded less than the 180 day standard. The entire PreK-12 system would benefit from a paradigm shift from “days” to “hours” and pre-K could lead the way.