How Title I Early Childhood Funds Could Extend to Community-Based Providers

We’ve been hearing the last few weeks about growing opposition to the administration’s proposals to set aside $500 million in Title I funds to provide incentive grants to school districts that use new Title I funds they received under the stimulus to invest in pre-k. We’re not surprised. When the stimulus bill was moving through Congress, the administration sought to set aside 15 percent of Title I funds in the stimulus for pre-k programs, but that proposal encountered opposition from school boards and the school administrators’ association, who succeeded in getting that proposal removed from the final legislation.

The administration’s current proposal, which provides an incentive rather than an absolute set-aside, is a kinder, gentler version of that effort, but established education groups still aren’t that crazy about it, in part because it transfers funds from Title I grants to LEAs to use for this purpose. In addition, groups that represent community-based pre-k and child care providers are up in arms about the proposal, because they fear that if school districts increase their pre-k spending, it will create competition that will hurt existing community-based providers.

Our response: District officials’ opposition to setting aside Title I funds for pre-k shows exactly why this program is needed. Evidence shows that high-quality pre-k programs, as part of an aligned, high-quality PreK-3rd continuum, can help raise student achievement and close the achievement gap–exactly the goals Title I is all about. And current law allows districts to use Title I funds for pre-k. Yet only about 2 percent of Title I funds are actually spent on pre-k. That shows that districts need an extra push to do what they should have been doing all along: investing in pre-k as part of a broader achievement gap-closing strategy. The fact that they’re opposing the new incentive just shows why it’s needed.

It’s reasonable for community-based organizations to have some concerns about school districts playing a bigger role in pre-k, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Nothing in Title I requires districts that spend Title I funds on pre-k to deliver those services themselves. School districts that spend Title I funds on pre-k could easily contract with high-quality community-based providers to expand the number of slots they offer or provide other supports and resources to help community-based providers improve quality. A recent report by the Center for Law and Social Policy highlights some districts that already use Title I funds to provide quality early education using community providers.

States could create incentives for school districts to include community-based providers in Title I-funded pre-k efforts. Under the administration’s proposal, the $500 million in Title I Early Childhood Grants funding would be distributed by formula to states, which would then have considerable flexibility in how they designed their own matching grant programs to districts using these funds. States could easily design the program to offer priority for matching grants to districts that work with community-based providers to deliver pre-k, and to provide a higher match for districts that do so (for example, districts that work with community-based providers might receive $1.25 in matching funds for every dollar they invest in pre-k, while districts that don’t work with community-based providers might receive only a $1 to $1 match).

Encouraging districts to invest new Title I funds in pre-k leverages existing programs for pre-k expansion. It can also help strengthen alignment between pre-k programs and the early elementary grades. If states make smart decisions about how to design these programs, both school districts and community-based providers can benefit.