Moderated by Stephen Bowen, executive director of the Hoover Education Success initiative, the conversation features Hoover Visiting Fellows Corey DeAngelis, Anna Egalite, and John Singleton. Watch the full conversation, and check out our past coverage from School Choice Week: 

• 40 Years After ‘A Nation At Risk,’ How School Choice Policies Are Reshaping American Education

• Next Wave of Microschool Founders are More Diverse, Less Likely to be Educators

• New Analysis Finds Charter School Sector Still Has Plenty of Room to Grow

• Seizing on Parents’ Frustration, GOP Governors Push for Education Savings Accounts

• The New Face of Homeschooling: Less Religious and Conservative, More Focused on Quality

The past forty years witnessed several significant initiatives in K–12 education policy in the United States. These include school finance reforms to ensure equity and adequacy of funding as well as the adoption of school accountability policies (exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act) linking measures of student success with sanctions and rewards for teachers and schools. A major development was likewise school choice: public policies that provide families with increased access to schooling options other than a neighborhood-assigned public school.

Although school choice policies in the United States take several forms in practice—this chapter surveys findings from public school choice (e.g., “open enrollment”), charter school, and private school voucher programs—the school choice movement is unified around a common logic and set of policy goals. Its intellectual heritage typically is traced to economist Milton Friedman’s argument that, while government rightly should fund primary and secondary education, a robust system where substantially more private providers also produce and deliver that education and where the funding a school (public or private) receives is directly linked to its enrollment could be more efficient and more equitable (Friedman 1955). As with the debates over school finance and school accountability, a central issue is the low productivity of public schools in the United States in comparison with other nations. School choice policies distinctly diagnose this problem as a symptom of monopoly power. Poorly performing public schools are the logical product of weak incentives to supply a high-quality education in this view. Introducing choice and therefore competition—to K–12 education follows as a remedy.

Watch: A Special Hoover Institution Panel on the State of School Choice Policies

This broadly economic rationale connects with two other motivations for the introduction and expansion of school choice policies. The first can be described as a pragmatic appeal that has historically proven important: given the entrenched power of the public education bureaucracy in the United States (e.g., the political influence of public teachers’ unions), reform from without—as opposed to from within—has often proved more feasible. In other words, rather than attempting to reform public education from the “top down,” school choice policies advance reform in a more decentralized, “bottom-up” fashion. The other motivation recognizes that the students who are most underserved by public education in the United States are disproportionately disadvantaged. In particular, it is families of low socioeconomic status who otherwise effectively lack school choice; they often do not have the resources to pay for private school tuition or to move to affluent suburban neighborhoods with good public schools. From this perspective, school choice policies stand to level the playing field for low-income and minority students both by improving access to high-quality schools and by spurring improvement of public schools.

This chapter surveys the present landscape of school choice policies in the United States and assesses what global experience so far suggests about their potential for reforming public education. This experience includes both several decades of state- and district-level choice policies in the United States as well as the experience of countries where choice has been introduced (e.g., Sweden and India) or has long been a feature of the national education system (e.g., Chile). A major point of emphasis is that the potential of school choice policies as a large-scale education reform rests in large part on the degree to which they improve the quality of education in traditional public schools. Such learning spillovers are likely to depend on how school choice programs are designed and may or may not be positive.

The chapter then summarizes key elements of the major school choice policies present across the United States, with a focus on the incentives that funding and accountability provisions may or may not create. These policies include public school choice options, such as magnet schools and open enrollment policies, as well as charter schools, which are operated independently but are publicly funded and tuition-free. While vouchers (and voucher-like programs) that defray or reduce the cost of tuition at private schools have attracted renewed policy interest recently, a much greater share of current public funding for school choice flows to charter schools: more than ten times as many students attended a charter school in fall 2019 as used a voucher to attend a private school. Charter schools educated around 6 percent of all students. Survey numbers also suggest that around as many students “chose” their public school (as opposed to attending an assigned one).

This leads into a critical appraisal of the empirical literature to date. The review focuses primarily on the evidence regarding the effects of school choice programs on public school students. It is argued that a consensus, built on the findings from both domestic and international programs, supports the view that school choice policies usually—but not necessarily—have positive spillover effects and that they do so by causing public schools to raise their quality in the face of competition. The chapter then highlights several important gaps in current knowledge. These include the need to understand the sources and significance of heterogeneity in impacts across different settings and programs and for greater evidence of effects on long-run student success (such as education attainment). There is also a need for work that considers the implications of the growing reality in the United States where several different school choice policies can be present at the same time.

The last sections of the chapter reflect on takeaways for school choice policy moving forward and on challenges of evidence-based policymaking in a post–COVID 19 future that is likely to feature greater school choice. One conclusion is that policymakers should consider and leverage incentives that stand to intensify competition. Specific applications include providing public funding for transportation to nonpublic schools; producing and supplying families with information about schools and their impacts; and targeting vouchers to those students who are underserved by public education.

Orienting the focus toward education quality in the aggregate

How should school choice policies be evaluated as successful or not? The perspective adopted in this chapter is that their impact on the quality of education, understood as the level of skills that students acquire in schools, should be the foremost focus. An important point is that this focus accommodates a broad conception of skills that encompass cognitive and other (noncognitive) aptitudes; it is not reducible to academic achievement. While measurement raises crucial questions returned to later, skill production in schools as a central focus has two advantages. The first is that it serves to summarize in terms of student outcomes the multitude of individual elements that constitute a schooling environment —for example, the quality of the teachers, the culture and leadership, the curriculum, and so on. The second advantage is from the perspective of policy: it provides a common basis for comparing the effectiveness of school choice policies with other major K–12 education reforms.

One way the question is often framed of whether school choice policies are successful or not is from the perspective of parents and caregivers: “Will sending my student to a charter school be better than sending them to their assigned public schools? Will using a voucher program to send my student to a private school be better than sending them to their assigned public schools?” This framing connects with a mature empirical literature and body of evidence that asks whether charter and private school alternatives provide higher education quality than traditional public schools. A fundamental empirical challenge for research is self-selection—the fact that the students who choose to use a voucher or switch to a charter school are not randomly drawn from the population—and scholarly work has advanced several approaches to address this. Important findings in the literature include that certain charter schools (many aligned with “No Excuses” practices) generate dramatic improvements in students’ academic achievement and whether they go on to college (e.g., Angrist et al. 2016; Dobbie and Fryer 2020); that recent national data sources show learning gains of charter school students exceed those of traditional public school students (Shakeel and Peterson 2021; CREDO 2023); and that voucher recipients in statewide programs in several US states perform lower than comparable traditional public school students on state standardized tests (e.g., Mills and Wolf 2017; Abdulkadiroğlu et al. 2018).

From a policy perspective, however, some of the attention to whether school choice alternatives are higher quality is misplaced. This is because the promise of school choice policies as large-scale education reforms rests in a fundamental way on how those policies impact students who choose to attend traditional public schools. In theory, school choice policies can increase education quality in the aggregate by creating incentives for public schools to raise their productivity. Analogized to a “tide that lifts all boats” (Hoxby 2003), this competitive response prospectively redounds to the benefit of students who remain in public schools. The key point, emphasized in the next section’s survey of the school choice landscape in the United States, is that those students who participate in choice programs (i.e., use a voucher program to attend a private school or choose to attend a charter school) are a minority of all students. As a consequence, even small spillover effects on the comparatively larger share of students who remain in public school will matter more in the aggregate. A numerical example helps illustrate this point: if 10 percent of students used a voucher to attend a private school and their learning was consequently advanced by six weeks each, education quality on average would be negligibly improved if there was zero impact on the 90 percent of public school students. While the voucher program in this example might pass a cost-benefit analysis, the point is that it would be difficult to justify the attention of policymakers concerned with developing and implementing policies that address the systemic failures of K–12 public education in the United States.

A growing literature, drawing on evidence from programs in the United States as well as international findings, tests for competitive effects of school choice policies. School choice policies can have negative spillovers, too, however, and a central empirical question concerns effects on resources and student composition in public schools and separating those effects from changes in public school productivity. A major empirical challenge for this branch of the literature is that the public schools that are exposed to competition are likely not random. The review of the empirical literature below summarizes the major findings about spillovers of school choice policies.

The school choice policy landscape in the United States

There are various policies that create or expand access to school options across the United States. This chapter provides a brief overview of three broad categories: (1) policies that provide choice among public schools (e.g., open enrollment and magnet programs); (2) charter school laws that allow for the creation and operation of publicly funded and tuition-free schools by independent organizations; and (3) voucher and voucher-like programs that defray the cost of tuition at private schools for qualified students.

Public school choice

Public school choice policies offer families choice among public schools. One example is magnet schools, which are typically district run, feature specialized curricula, and often have selective admissions. Students must apply to be considered for admission. Examples include “exam” schools such as Stuyvesant in New York City, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, Virginia, and many schools of the arts around the country. Another example of public school choice is open enrollment policies intended to provide a process whereby students can transfer between public schools. Most states allow school districts to voluntarily accept students from other districts, and twenty three have policies in place that make such interdistrict transfers mandatory (Education Commission of the States 2017). Transfers within a school district are mandatory, subject to limitations, in nineteen states.

Choice mechanisms are a kind of open enrollment policy that facilitates within-district public school choice. Such mechanisms allow students to submit ranked lists of school preferences, which are then aggregated (and can be combined with preferences identified by schools and specialized programs and other criteria) to assign students to schools via an algorithm. An example is Denver’s SchoolChoice process, first put in place in 2012, where families (most with students in either kindergarten, sixth, or ninth grade) rank up to twelve schools, and matching priorities include neighborhood zones and siblings. School districts often pair choice mechanisms with guides for families to understanding the ranking and allocation process and that detail aspects and attributes of the various schools and programs available. While public school choice mechanisms expand choice options beyond charter or private schools—and introducing choice into the system may be a response to the availability of charter or voucher options there is greater ambiguity about the theoretical system-level implications of magnet, specialized programs, or open enrollment policies on education quality. This is because choice between public schools does not obviously create meaningful competitive incentives: whichever public school a student chooses to attend, they (and the revenue attached to them) ultimately stay in the public system.

It is difficult to provide an exact number as to how many students in the United States “chose” their public school via a policy option (as opposed to being assigned it based on residence). Pre-2020 survey numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) imply a figure of around three million students (about 6 percent of all public and private enrollment) (Hanson and Pugliese 2020). A number of large public school districts have at least limited school choice mechanisms in place, including New York City, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg (in North Carolina). These programs can take different forms. In some cases, magnet program and charter school options are integrated into the same choice mechanism as for traditional public schools.

Charter Schools

Charter schools, in contrast, are essentially privately operated public schools. Charter schools are supported by tax revenues, are regulated by government entities, do not charge tuition, and cannot have selective admission criteria. They also participate in school accountability programs (i.e., standardized testing) and can be closed by public school authorities for poor performance. At the same time, they are created, operated, and managed by independent organizations and, like private schools, have considerable autonomy when it comes to decisions over curricula, human resources, and where to locate. Charter school operators are generally nonprofit organizations (well-known examples include the Knowledge is Power Program, Rocketship, and Success Academy), though for-profit management companies operate in several states.

How (and at what level) charter schools are funded has long been a major point of debate. This is in part because most per-pupil funding for charter school students moves out of the public school system to the charter school the student enrolls in. Thus, the fiscal implications of school choice can be immediate for public schools in the case of charter school competition. From an economic perspective, this means that the presence of charter schools in principle creates a meaningful incentive for districts to retain students (though public school leaders may not act on those incentives). In several states, however, these incentives are muted by “hold harmless” provisions that at least temporarily offset the full financial impact of enrollment lost to charter schools. Public school leadership, at both district and state levels, has at times been hostile to charter school growth in the face of fiscal impacts, and charter schools are a frequent target of public school teachers’ unions. At the same time, the amount of funding is also typically disparate—charter schools generally receive less revenue per pupil than is spent on a student in a traditional public school—and this disparity has itself been (and continues to be) a focus of policy attention.

About 3.4 million students in the United States attended a charter school during 2019–20. This equates to more than 6 percent of all school enrollment and reflects steady growth; charter schools enrolled about 4 percent of students in 2010–11. The average charter school student is much less likely to be White and more likely to be economically disadvantaged than the average public school student (NCES 2022). Although all but four states have charter school laws in place, charter school penetration varies considerably across places. In several states, more than one in ten non–private school attendees attended a charter school in 2019, including Washington, DC (45 percent), Arizona (18 percent), Colorado (14 percent), Louisiana (12 percent), and Florida (11 percent) (NCES 2022). Note that these numbers mask major within-state heterogeneity: for example, about 25 percent of Miami-Dade non–private school students attend a charter school. In New Orleans, virtually all students who do not attend private schools attend charter schools.

Vouchers

The last variety of school choice programs highlighted in brief here are those that defray the cost of tuition at private schools for eligible students. These programs are generically referred to as “voucher” policies but can take several different forms across the United States. These forms include prototypical government-funded programs that cut families a check; tax credit scholarships—which deputize nonprofits to receive tax-advantaged contributions and provide scholarships to students; and education savings accounts. Education savings accounts instead allow families to allocate a given sum of government funds across education expenses, including private school tuition.

Voucher programs have historically been means tested, whereby eligibility is restricted to students in families whose income does not exceed some threshold. A number of programs are targeted specifically to students with disabilities, and a few restrict or expand eligibility to students assigned to persistently low-performing public schools. Similar to the revenue disparity between traditional public schools and charter schools, effective voucher amounts are typically well below per-pupil expenditures in public schools and often do not cover the average sticker price at private schools. For example, Ohio’s means-tested statewide vouchers are worth $5,500 at the elementary and middle school levels for 2022–23. Other policy parameters concern accountability provisions of voucher policies. At issue are typically
three aspects of the programs: (1) whether participating private schools may apply their own admission criteria or not (with seats in oversubscribed private schools allocated by lottery); (2) whether private schools can require supplemental tuition from voucher recipients; and (3) whether voucher recipients must take the same achievement exams as in public schools.

While the country’s first voucher program (which began in Milwaukee in 1990 and served nearly thirty thousand students in 2022–23) requires lotteries and allows tuition supplements only at high schools, almost all major voucher programs instituted in the United States in the past twenty years relax these provisions.

In fall 2019, about 4.7 million K–12 students were enrolled in a private school nationally (NCES 2022). This level, which is a little less than 10 percent of all students, has been relatively constant over recent. years. However, the estimated share of private school enrollees who are part of a voucher or scholarship program has grown. More than five hundred thousand students (about 1 percent of all public and private school students) attended a private school via a school choice policy in 2019—more than double the number ten years prior (EdChoice 2023). As of 2023, thirty US states (plus Washington, DC) had some kind of voucher program in place. The country’s largest voucher program, Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, began in 2001 and served more than one hundred thousand students as recently as 2020–21. While private school students as a whole tend to be more advantaged (and less likely to belong to an underrepresented minority) than public school students, those students who use vouchers— reflecting in part the income-based eligibility criteria for such programs—are generally less advantaged and relatively more minority (Wolf 2020).

What do we know?

What do we know about the externalities of school choice policies on the learning of students who nonetheless attend a traditional public school? This section considers the evidence on this question. The topic of spillovers juxtaposes countervailing forces. On the one hand, incentives to retain enrollments may lead public schools to respond to school choice policies by raising quality, as intended. On the other hand, expanded school choice may negatively impact students who remain in public schools through a resource or peer effect channel. If, for example, more advantaged or higher-achieving students leave public schools (and exposure to such students benefits their peers), the learning of students left behind will suffer. There is also an important concern that low information about school quality (or preferences for other attributes of schools) could incentivize responses by public schools that are unrelated to impacts on learning.

The body of rigorous evidence to date supports the conclusion that spillover effects on student learning are usually—but not necessarily—positive on net. The pieces of evidence supporting this are twofold. First, the net effect on students remaining in an assigned traditional district school is generally zero or positive; this implies, and more direct evidence affirms, that negative externalities from peer sorting are limited. Second, the patterns for net improvements in student outcomes are consistent with increased competition causing public schools to raise their productivity.

A recent review of the findings from private school choice programs in the United States highlights that most studies find positive evidence of competitive effects and that no study finds evidence of negative effects on students attending traditional public schools (Wolf 2020). Figlio and Karbownik (2016), to highlight one example, compare two sets of Ohio public school students: (1) those in traditional public schools who marginally exceeded a score threshold (based on standardized test performance) below which all students would become eligible to receive a voucher; and (2) those in public schools who marginally failed the score threshold. The latter group, who were exposed to private school competition but should otherwise be on average the same as the first group, showed greater test score growth. The body of evidence on spillovers of charter schools on public school students is more ambiguous. Older findings drawn from a variety of states suggest that test score impacts are limited. One important study, by Imberman (2011), reports negative impacts from charter schools on the achievement of students in traditional public schools. The more recent evidence is generally more positive. Studies that find improvements in public school students’ test scores include Cordes (2018) for New York City, Gilraine et al. (2021) for North Carolina, and Ridley and Terrier (2022) for Massachusetts. The New York City study compares student test scores between traditional public schools exposed to charter school competition at different times and at different distances. These studies of US programs are accompanied by results showing increases in public school student outcomes following the introduction of vouchers in 1992 in Sweden (Sandström and Bergström 2005) and, despite increases in stratification that likely reduced average student academic potential in public schools, no changes associated with entry of private schools in India (Bagde et al. 2022).

Two kinds of evidence additionally support the claim that increased competition can cause public schools to raise their quality. The first kind is from settings where competition increases but in which other responses cannot arise. Figlio and Hart (2014) is a foremost example: students could apply for Florida’s means-tested voucher one year in advance of the program launch. The authors present evidence of increases in test scores at competitively exposed public schools in even this “pure competition” year where students could not yet re-sort. Implementing the same idea, Gilraine et al. (2021) provide evidence for competition in the context of charter schools in North Carolina. The second kind of evidence is drawn from models of school choice that generate predictions for how much competitive pressure different public schools experience. Gilraine et al. (2023), for example, show (1) that demand for charter schools offering a “nontraditional” curriculum is not very sensitive to the quality of public schools; and (2) that, as would be expected, the quality of public schools does not increase following nearby entry by a “nontraditional” charter school. They further show that the test score value added of public schools does increase following entry of math and reading skills–focused charter schools. Campos and Kearns (2023) take a similar approach to argue that competition among public schools is the mechanism supporting improvement in student outcomes, including high school completion, in Los Angeles’s high school Zones of Choice. Card et al. (2010) for Ontario, California, and Neilson (2021) for Chile, respectively, are two examples that bring international evidence of this kind to bear.

What do we not yet know that we need to know?

While the evidence summarized in the previous section points to emerging consensus on the spillover effects of school choice policies, this section highlights several gaps in current knowledge. These gaps include (1) the paucity of evidence on long-run impacts, such as on wages; (2) the little attention to implications of how choice programs are designed; and (3) the need to consider markets (which may feature several overlapping choice options and programs) as the appropriate units of analysis, not individual programs and policies.

First, a major limitation of the existing evidence on the aggregate effects of school choice policies is the limited amount of work that speaks to impacts on students’ “long-run” outcomes. These outcomes include educational attainment (such as college entrance or graduation), marriage, employment, work history, and labor market earnings. This is important because long-run indicators of success are reliably better measures of human capital acquisition than test scores, which are more widely used due to their greater availability in US datasets. Long-run markers of success, for example, depend on many kinds of skills, while test scores may only reliably measure cognitive skills acquisition. A large literature recognizes that near-term impacts on math and reading scores or measures derived from them may not capture durable (and multidimensional) skill gains. An exception in the literature is studies that examine effects on postsecondary outcomes of charter school attendance. But the lack of long-term outcome data is especially relevant to the evidence on statewide voucher programs, where negative effects on test scores for voucher recipients may conflate lower education quality with private schools’ nonalignment with the public school curriculum. Further, little to no existing work estimates competitive impacts from school choice policies on measures of student success in the long run.

A second gap in the existing evidence concerns how impacts on education quality relate to how choice programs are designed and implemented. This is because how policy elements combine has implications for the incentives facing public school leaders and thus for the potential of choice to generate competition. A simple example in illustration is whether (and how much of) public funds actually follow students who switch from public schools to a school choice option like a private school via voucher or a charter school. However, other elements of choice programs are also relevant. These include whether funding and policy support a competitive threat to public schools. For example, are negative impacts of statewide voucher programs on participants partly due to high-quality private schools being insufficiently incentivized to participate? Should barriers to charter school entry be kept low, or is it better that authorizers screen applications to open new schools or expand existing schools based on proven success and limit where new charter schools can open? Answers will require more work that tackles how schools—public, private, and charters alike—make decisions. Though they have clear implications for policy, little existing evidence in the literature speaks to these questions.

This relates to a third limitation of the existing stock of knowledge, which concerns its applicability in the current policymaking environment: increasingly, K–12 education “markets” feature multiple school choice programs. It is no longer unusual for a voucher program that defrays private school tuition, several charter schools, and some kind of choice among public schools to all be options available to families in a district. One issue this creates is interpreting findings from individual choice programs: a case in point is that recent data from the Washington, DC, voucher program shows that 42 percent of the control group students attended charter schools (Dynarski et al. 2017). The bigger question raised, however, concerns how combinations of school choice programs interact at scale. How should limited resources be allocated across schools and programs? Is the marginal dollar better spent on expanding charter schooling, or on expanding vouchers, or on implementing better public school choice mechanisms, or on increasing public school quality generally? This requires a shift in focus from school choice options and policies in isolation to “education markets” as they exist and evolve.

What should be done?

This section collects several takeaways from the global experience with school choice programs to date. A first recommendation is that policymakers should recognize the central importance—and leverage the power—of incentives. The simple point is that, for choice policies to create meaningful competition, traditional public schools and districts must feel threatened with losing students and funding. One practical application of this recommendation is to transportation: a compelling argument that education funding should be directed toward providing transportation of students to charter schools or, in the case of voucher programs, to private schools is that doing so will make it easier for students to potentially leave traditional public schools; it will increase competition. A second application is providing parents with better information about schools (public, private, and charter). A large body of evidence indicates that parents may not know about available choice options and do not have accurate information about school quality. The implication is that supplying information to parents about the effectiveness of different schools at advancing student learning will strengthen incentives facing traditional public schools to increase their quality.

Given limited resources, policy decisions would additionally benefit from considering where returns are likely to be highest. This recommendation channels an animating motive for school choice programs: expanding choice for low-income families and students will yield greater improvements in education quality overall than will expanding choice for high-income families, who already have the means to choose private schools or public schools in affluent neighborhoods. But combined with the logic of incentives, this recommendation produces additional insight: because high-income families experience little real change in their ability to exercise choice, the schools under their consideration also experience limited changes in incentives. This stands in marked contrast for low-performing schools that disproportionately serve low-income students: continuing to miss the mark, when effective choice programs are in place, will risk losing enrollments. This observation has several applications. One is that policymakers could provide financial incentives to charter schools to locate in neighborhoods and areas where traditional public schools underserve students. Several pieces of evidence show that financial considerations are important for where charter schools open (and whether they survive). Long-standing eligibility criteria for voucher programs that are based on the performance of the student’s local public school or family income carry a similar logic. This implies that making vouchers and voucher-like programs universal, while perhaps appealing on fairness grounds, also may reduce their overall effectiveness. An alternative would be to scale the generosity of the voucher with family income. Policy decisions about charter school authorization (and funding) could also benefit from considering which providers or operators generate greater competitive externalities. It stands to reason that high-quality or “proven” providers likely have an advantage in this regard, and evidence, mentioned earlier, suggests that core skills–focused charter schools compete more closely with traditional public schools.

A final recommendation is just that policymakers value the potential of data and evidence to inform policy development and implementation. For example, there is no technical obstacle to creating measures of school (and teacher) quality that recognize multidimensional, durable skill development and reflect long-run success. Such measures could be built on rich evidence from test scores across many subjects, from GPAs, from attendance and discipline records, from college entry and completion data, and even from earnings in the labor market. These measures could then be used to inform parents so that they can make better decisions about schools (publicly available information about the quality of private schools is especially scarce), to target policies in effective ways, and to allocate resources. Rather, the obstacles are tragically often bureaucratic.

Looking forward

The COVID-19 global pandemic and the resulting school closures and shift in education delivery models will likely prove to be the largest single “shock” to school choice in the United States to date. This shock has a demand side and a supply side. On the demand side, widespread dissatisfaction with the responses of public school leaders to the pandemic—in particular, delays in reopening schools drove many families to seek choice alternatives. Private and charter schools were generally quicker to return to in-person instruction. This dissatisfaction is reflected in data on enrollments, which shows declines in public school enrollment (particularly among kindergartners) that were especially pronounced in districts that were slow to open buildings to in-person instruction (Dee et al. 2021). Public school enrollment declined nationally by 4 percent between fall 2019 and fall 2020, whereas charter school enrollments over the same time period increased by 7 percent (NCES 2023). Rates of students attending private schools and being homeschooled also increased (Musaddiq et al. 2022).

The durability of this increase in demand for choice—particularly as new cohorts of students come of age—will combine with policy developments on the supply side that likewise portend a future with more school choice. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy momentum behind expanding private school voucher programs has rapidly gained steam across numerous states. An example is 2023 legislation that extended the eligibility for Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, mentioned earlier, to all Florida students. Previously, eligibility was means tested (though vouchers remain prioritized to lower income students under the new legislation) and was restricted to students either attending a public school or entering kindergarten or first grade. Florida is joined by Arizona, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia in creating new or expanding existing private school voucher programs postpandemic. Like the Florida program, several of these will be universal in student eligibility, marking a significant departure from earlier voucher programs in the United States.

The fresh momentum for vouchers highlights a fundamental challenge of evidence-based policymaking: research findings typically lag policy. This is brought into relief by the fact that the recent turn to vouchers arrives amid important new findings pointing to successes from charter school choice. Moving forward, the post-pandemic policy developments raise at least two questions for policymakers and researchers alike. The first is, for effective school choice policies, how important are accountability provisions—as opposed to accountability to the “market” alone? As detailed earlier, charter schools are generally subject to accountability provisions that are typically absent for private schools in voucher programs. The second question is how to produce rigorous evidence about new voucher (and voucher like) programs as they grow. Many existing data systems do not contain reliable information about private schools (or private school teachers), may not record or track recipients of vouchers (especially those who do not at some point have contact with the public school system), and—in states where administration of state tests is not required—will not readily contain information suitable for evaluation. Producing rigorous research findings in the post-pandemic world will thus require renewed cooperation to develop and make available high-quality data as well as creativity to identify and draw from other information sources.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

Whole-child education models are those that expand the ambit of schools beyond a traditional academic focus. While a range of whole-child models have been explored since at least the Progressive Era, use of these models has expanded greatly over the past twenty years.

Because nearly all children in the United States attend public schools, it can be a tempting place to provide near-universal access to programs and resources. However, for various reasons, some families and educators are wary of a more expansive role for schools in children’s lives beyond academic training. In the Hoover Institution’s report “,” I review several examples of whole-child reforms that have become popular over the past few decades: community schools, school based health centers, wraparound service models, and social emotional learning curricula. 

While some models have proven effective at shifting child outcomes in certain settings, none have yet been proven — at large scale, using high-quality causal research methods — to be a silver bullet that can overcome the challenges many children face today in terms of improving academic outcomes. Though they may have other positive impacts on their own, without related investment in academic reforms, they are unlikely to be the panacea for the low academic performance that plagues children in the United States. Thus, at the end of my brief, I close with recommendations for policymakers to think carefully about implementation of these models in their own contexts.

• Whole-child education models are becoming better known in the United States

• Their adoption in some public schools provides an opportunity to see which models contribute to academic success.

• However, they are a part of the topic of child welfare, not the entire picture.

In the past couple of decades, there has been a renewed interest in the idea that schools should expand their ambit to address a wider range of student needs around health and well-being. Often this is described as a focus on development of the “whole child” rather than just the academic aspects of child development.

Of course, promotion of a wider ambit for schools beyond the academic sphere is at least a century old, as is the debate about whether it is optimal. The intellectual leaders of the Progressive Era, in the nineteenth century, sought to bring a broader focus to education systems than the traditional academic one. This included various ways of engaging the whole child, some of which are similar to the models covered here, particularly the social and emotional learning curricula and community school models that have skyrocketed in popularity in the past several years.

Similarly, the roots of whole-child reforms that are focused on improving children’s physical health are deeply embedded in US education history. As early as 1850, states began requiring immunizations and sometimes hosted immunization clinics in schools, where there was easy direct access to children. Also, the beginning of what we now know as the standard school nurse model began in 1902 as a pilot program aiming to insert healthcare into schools in order to improve chronic absenteeism by managing easily treatable illnesses and focusing on prevention. Each of these foreshadowed the more recent creation and rapid expansion of school-based health centers, which insert healthcare providers directly into schools with the goal of improving academic and overall well-being.

Recent decades have seen a renewal in the popularity of whole-child models. To some extent, this renewed interest is partly a backlash to what many perceived as the laser focus of the No Child Left Behind era on student test score performance. The difficult periods of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to this shifted focus. The recent version of this movement has also been helped by increased emphasis on the complex relationships between education, health, housing, and other social dimensions across a range of academic disciplines and policy spheres.

This whole-child movement in schools has taken many forms, some of which I describe in more detail below. Across all its forms, the theory of change driving whole-child reform has two main parts. First, many students struggle academically because their basic needs are not met. Second, supporting these basic needs directly by bringing healthcare and/or social service resources into the school itself will overcome the access barriers that some children face, particularly poor children, thereby increasing their ability to thrive academically and socially.

To some extent, this theory of change pervades the entire US education system. Almost all districts in the country provide some form of nonacademic care to students through the school nurse, school counselors, or expanded offerings like universal vision screening programs. And many provide extracurricular activities or partner with community organizations in a variety of ways. What differentiates the whole-child models of reform here from the standard public school environment is the broader range of services provided and the depth of engagement between the school and community partners.

Intuitively, the first part of this theory of change makes some sense. How can a child learn if they suffer from an ongoing undiagnosed disease or disorder that prevents them from attending school regularly, concentrating in class, or participating fully in the community around them? How can a child learn if they feel isolated in a community, are surrounded by violence, and lack strong support inside and outside of school?

There is little direct causal evidence to support this theory of change, and there are plenty of anecdotes about children thriving despite incredibly challenging experiences during childhood. Yet a majority of parents would agree that children thrive most when their basic needs are met. However, as with all aspects of childrearing, there is debate about which “needs” require fulfillment for children to thrive. Furthermore, there is debate about whether schools are the best provider of health and social services to support children.

For decades, people have debated whether schools are the most effective places to solve the deep-rooted societal problems, like poverty, that leave many children with their basic needs unmet. Some people see schools as the great equalizer, holding them uniquely responsible for the achievement and well-being of all students, regardless of their backgrounds or the social forces determining those backgrounds. Others argue that systemic poverty, isolation, violence, poor health, and other ills have such a strong role that schools cannot be responsible for overcoming them.

Because nearly all children in the United States attend public schools, it can be a useful place to provide nearly universal access to programs and resources. However, for various reasons, some families are wary of a more expansive role for schools in children’s lives beyond academic training. Some have concerns about the differences between their own values and beliefs and those promoted in the school environment, as is the case with the recent backlash among social emotional learning programs. Others have concerns about whether school employees have the bandwidth and expertise to provide an expansive range of high-quality care; instead, they suggest that a focus on academic knowledge would allow school employees, like teachers, to be more impactful. Still others distrust the push for schools to focus on issues beyond academics because of concerns about greater intrusion into the private lives of families.

In “A Nation At Risk +40,” I review several examples of whole-child reforms that have become popular over the past few decades. After describing the general framework of each, I explore research into each model’s effectiveness. Most have been described as effective by the literature, but this assertion is generally based on research that is largely theoretical, comprises mixed methods, or is conducted either at a small scale or without the types of carefully constructed comparison groups that are essential for determining causal impacts. I focus on summarizing the subset of this literature that meets the Tier 1 or Tier 2 standard of the US Department of Education for strong or moderate evidence of effectiveness from either an experimental or a quasiexperimental design study (What Works Clearinghouse 2020).

Further, since many areas of research have shown patterns of effective programs in small studies that have limited effectiveness when taken to scale, I place particular emphasis on the relatively few studies that have analyzed the effectiveness of programs with large numbers of students across multiple school settings. 

While some have proven effective at shifting child outcomes in certain settings, none have yet been proven at scale, using high-quality causal research methods, to be a silver bullet that can overcome the challenges many children face today. Importantly, when looked at in total and given the scale of the existing research, the lack of conclusive evidence of a clear positive causal effect of these reforms on children’s academic achievement casts doubt on the theory underlying these reforms. Though they may have other positive impacts, on their own and without attention to academic reforms they are unlikely to be the panacea for low academic performance that plagues children in the United States. 

Thus, at “A Nation At Risk +40,” I close with recommendations for policymakers to think carefully about implementation of these models in their own contexts. . 

Maria D. Fitzpatrick is a professor of economics and public policy in the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. She is co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an affiliate in the CESifo Research Network. Her research focuses on child and family policy, particularly education. 

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: .

This chapter summarizes the history of the development of public preschool in the United States and its current role in education reform. The chapter reviews research on preschool’s effectiveness and research related to the many decisions that states need to make after deciding to invest in public preschool. Pros and cons of each decision are discussed, along with specific recommendations for state policymakers.

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, extending school downward to include younger children has become the most expansive and deeply rooted strategy for improving achievement and reducing the achievement gap. The theory of change for public investment in preschool is that enrolling children in an educational program before they enter elementary school can help them develop the skills they need to succeed in kindergarten and can thus set children on a trajectory for school success.

Preschool programming can take many forms, which are explored in depth here, but with regard to student outcomes, the operative phrase is “high quality.” Only programs that meet high quality standards have shown long-term effects. States have many policy levers to affect quality, including program licensing standards, teacher and administrator credentialing standards along with ongoing resources to support effective teaching, child learning standards and assessments, program quality monitoring systems, and curriculum guidance.

Policies related to preschool should not be considered in isolation. If teachers in the upper grades do not build on what children learned in preschool, the benefits will fade. States can help sustain benefits by making sure that learning standards, program standards, curriculum, assessments, and teacher credentialing are aligned across preschool and the early grades.

Preschool is not a panacea. It alone will not improve achievement scores and other important child outcomes or reduce that achievement gap. But of the many school improvement initiatives this series discusses, preschool is among the most studied, and it may have the most potential to move the needle on improving student achievement.

• Preschool has become the norm in children’s educational experience, although controversies still exist about specific goals and how to provide it.

• Policymakers increasingly view preschool as a strategy for launching children on a positive trajectory for academic success and reducing the achievement gap related to economic circumstances that exists before children enter kindergarten.

• Research demonstrates long-term benefits of preschool only for high-quality programs, especially when followed by high-quality and coherent instruction in the early elementary grades.

PRESCHOOL CONTEXT

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, efforts to improve student achievement have taken many forms. Extending school downward to include younger children has become the most expansive and deeply rooted strategy. Nearly every state in the country has made significant investments in public preschool, and preschool has become the norm in children’s education experience.

Preschool is defined as an education program provided to three-to-five-year-olds during the two years before entering kindergarten. Traditionally, preschool has been an education-focused half-day program, which does not meet working parents’ childcare needs. To address this need, preschools are increasingly offering extended-day (“wraparound”) childcare.

Given that children are learning something all day, whether that is intentional or not, the distinction between childcare and preschool is blurry on a practical level. But the distinction has policy implications. Funding for childcare and preschool often comes from different sources, with different family eligibility requirements and standards. This chapter concerns programs (or those parts of programs) that intentionally focus on promoting children’s learning and development, not caretaking.

Unlike the K–12 system, in the United States preschool has no common governance structure, and administrative oversight rests with different levels of government. Children can attend a private, tuition-based preschool; a public preschool funded by the federal government (Head Start) or the state government (state preschool); a program funded by local resources (e.g., local taxes or philanthropy); or a preschool that involves funding from several sources.

A commitment to educating children before school has its roots in the infant school, designed in the 1820s and 1830s by social reformers to offer free daycare and education emphasizing “moral habit” for the children of poor working parents. In many respects, this is the original “compensatory education” for young children, although it emphasized values and behavior, not preparing children for school success. Soon after infant schools were created for the poor, more affluent parents began sending their young children to private infant schools where the emphasis was on early enrichment and social skills rather than moral reform. But preschools as we currently know them were not widespread in the United States for either poor or more affluent children until the 1960s.

At about the same time that infant schools were introduced in the United States, kindergarten was developed by German educator Friedrich Froebel. He believed that children should be in school from a young age, and the lessons he designed for children ages three through six emphasized music, nature, stories, and play. The first kindergartens in the United States were created by German immigrants in the mid-1800s. Over time, kindergarten for five-year-olds became a grade of schooling in the United States. In 1965, eighteen states funded public kindergarten. By 2000, all states funded some sort of kindergarten, most of them free to all children who met the age qualifications. Today nearly all (about 98 percent) children attend kindergarten prior to first grade, although kindergarten is not compulsory in most states. As kindergarten became viewed as “school,” preschool for three-to-four-year-olds (sometimes referred to as prekindergarten or pre-K) took its place as the education program for the year or two before school. Preschool has become the norm in the United States, and although private programs exist, preschool, like kindergarten, is increasingly supported with public funds. The theory of change for public investment in preschool is that an education program before children enter elementary school can help them develop the skills they need to succeed in kindergarten and can thus set them on a trajectory for school success. The next section offers a brief explanation and history of private and public preschools in the United States.

PRIVATE PRESCHOOL

In the decades prior to Head Start, children younger than five years of age were mostly in private and tuition-based preschool programs affiliated with universities or with religious or other community-based organizations. Now there are many community-based nonprofit programs as well as for-profit chains. Families that enroll their children in private preschool have, on average, higher incomes than families that enroll their children in public programs.

Although academic-focused private preschools exist, most focus primarily on social development and socialization — giving children an opportunity to learn how to get along in a setting with peers — as well as general cognitive development, including communication and problem-solving skills. Specific models, such as Montessori and Reggio Emilia, are prominent in the United States. As publicly funded preschools become more available, the proportion of children in community, tuition-based programs is declining.

PUBLIC PRESCHOOL

Specific goals of public preschool vary across funding sources, states, and localities. Kindergarten readiness, however, is ubiquitous, signified by the widespread state adoption of kindergarten readiness tests for children. There is considerable research to support the belief that kindergarten readiness predicts success in school, which in turn predicts education attainment and accompanying benefits. Because some families cannot afford private programs, public funds are needed to make preschool accessible to all children.

Public preschool has had its critics. Some opposition comes from the more conservative view that the government should not be in the business of educating young children; that is parents’ responsibility. A comment in 1971 by then president Richard Nixon sums up this argument: “For the Federal Government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Some opposition has also come from skeptics about its effectiveness. A related concern is the isolation of low-income children in a program, especially given evidence that low-income children benefit from being in programs with more economically advantaged peers. Despite such
objections, the federal government launched the first expansive public preschool, Head Start,
in 1965; state and locally funded programs followed.

Head Start

Head Start was created in 1965 as part of then president Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, and it is one of the only Office of Economic Opportunity programs to survive. It was launched with a clear and ambitious goal: to reverse the cycle of poverty. Head Start was considered compensatory education in the sense that the education program was compensating for inauspicious home and community environments associated with poverty.

The specific program reflects beliefs about the academic and life skills required to escape a life of poverty. Unlike most other publicly funded preschool programs, Head Start is a comprehensive program; in addition to promoting cognitive and social-emotional development, it is designed to promote children’s physical and mental health with nutrition and social supports that affect their home environment. Health screenings and provisions for physical health (e.g., dental care) and parent involvement are key components. Head Start thus overlaps in approach with the whole-child reforms described by Maria D. Fitzpatrick in chapter 2 of this series.

Head Start has served an increasing number of children over its history, from fewer than two hundred thousand in the yearlong program in 1967 to over eight hundred fifty thousand in 2020. There has been ongoing tension between the desire to serve more children and at the same time increase quality, both of which add to the program’s costs. Quality has been given considerable attention in the past couple of decades. The 2007 reauthorization of Head Start included a revision of the quality standards and a 40 percent set-aside for quality enhancement (used in part to increase teacher salaries). The reauthorization also required that by 2013 half of Head Start teachers have a BA degree and assistant teachers have at least a Child Development Associates credential. 

Opposition specific to Head Start has been consistent but has come in different forms. Many conservatives opposed all of Johnson’s Great Society antipoverty programs. Critics concerned about parent choice have suggested that the money could be better spent by providing parents with vouchers to purchase their own childcare or education program for their children. There has also been opposition to the broad whole-child goals of Head Start by those who seek a narrower focus on academic skills. Among supporters of Head Start, the primary concern has been about effectiveness. Despite opposition, the program has survived and in fact grown with bipartisan support.

State and Local Preschool

During the 1980s, states began to develop preschool programs for students from low-income families. State-funded and locally funded preschool goals are typically more limited than Head Start, focusing primarily on kindergarten readiness. Few state preschool programs offer the health and social supports for children and families that Head Start offers.

A total of forty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, now provide at least some state funding for preschool programs, enrolling in 2021 about 29 percent of four-year-olds.11 A number of cities have also used various sources of funding to increase access to preschool. For example, San Antonio, Texas, increased its sales taxes; San Francisco added a rental tax, and Seattle added a property tax. Funding levels vary substantially from state to state, from a low of $420 (North Dakota) to a high of $19,228 (Washington, DC) in 2021.

There are several reasons for the growth in state and local preschool programs. First, preschool among middle-class four-year-olds was becoming the norm. Children in families that could not afford tuition-based preschool were therefore at a disadvantage when they entered kindergarten. Second, policymakers were increasingly aware of the large achievement gap related to economic circumstances that existed at kindergarten entry and persisted through school. It was clear that any effort to reduce the achievement gap needed to start early in children’s lives. Third, there were significant concerns about the inadequacy of public education and frustration from failed reform initiatives at the K–12 level. For example, disappointed by the results of $40 million granted to reform the Philadelphia School System, the Board of the Pew Foundation turned to preschool education with the hope that it would be more amenable to change.13 Fourth, there was accumulating research evidence for the short- and long-term benefits of high-quality preschool, including programs implemented at a very large scale. And finally, neuroscientists were demonstrating the significant effects of children’s early experience on the architecture of the brain, making clear that early brain development served as the foundation for future learning and development. Although funding for state and local programs ebbs and flows, the general direction has been toward growth.

A Nation at Risk, published in 1983, played a significant role in the rise in states’ interest in early education. While the report initially stimulated reforms mostly at the high school level, findings at the time related to the benefits of preschool education amplified interest in early childhood education (ECE) as a strategy to improve education outcomes. Many national reports after the publication of A Nation at Risk make clear that promoting “school readiness” became an important element in the school reform agenda. In 1987, the Council of Chief State School Officers included pre-K for low-income four-year-olds in its list of recommendations for improving high school graduation rates. In the six national goals for 2000, created at a national education summit in 1989 under then president George H. W. Bush, “All children will start school ready to learn” was listed first. The National Association of State Boards of Education recommended that elementary schools create early childhood (EC) units for children ages four to eight and develop relationships with community preschools to help coordinate the fragmented services.

In the decade following, preschool for economically disadvantaged children was also frequently included in state school reform legislation. By 1989, thirty-one states either funded their own preschool program or contributed funds to increase access to Head Start. Nearly all of these state programs were instituted in the 1980s. The programs were typically administered by state departments of education and were located in school buildings. Some states funded preschool through separate grants, and some included preschool in their school funding formulas.

Most of the publicly funded state preschool programs have targeted children from lowincome families in a mixed-delivery system, which can include public schools, Head Start, private preschools, and family childcare homes. States vary in whether they offer a program for half or full school days, although the trend has been toward more full-day programs to meet working parents’ needs.

Some of the opposition to state preschool comes from within the ECE field. Programs for infants and toddlers that cannot avail themselves of preschool funding often take a financial hit when the older children move to a public preschool. The problem stems from reimbursement rates being too low for infant and toddler programs to survive with the low child–teacher ratios required. Programs manage financially by including preschool for older children in the mix, which allows higher child–teacher ratios overall. Also, in mixed-delivery programs, private or community-based programs are sometimes at a disadvantage because they lack the resources and the ability to pay teachers the salaries that public programs offer. As a consequence, some people working in community settings view public preschool as an unfair competitor.

Universal Preschool

Most publicly funded preschool programs target children in low-income families. But since the early 1990s, interest in universal programs available to all four-year-olds has increased. This movement was encouraged in part by research finding preschool benefits for nonpoor as well as economically disadvantaged children.

Social programs that are universally available are also considered to be politically more robust than programs targeting the poor. A universal program extends preschool opportunities to the working poor—families that are economically fragile but with incomes just above the eligibility cutoff for programs targeting impoverished families—and it relieves middle-class families of the cost of private programs. It thus develops a stronger constituency. Greenstein suggests furthermore that a program that serves not only the poor but also people significantly above the poverty line and the middle class may lessen the racial imagery of the program.

One argument some advocates make for universal prekindergarten (UPK) concerns the value of mixed socioeconomic status (SES). Programs with low-income eligibility requirements isolate the poor. Research evidence shows, however, that children from low-income families make greater gains in programs with more affluent peers than in segregated programs. De facto segregation will continue, but children from low-income families are not officially segregated where universal preschool is available.

Georgia (1995), New York (1998), New Jersey (in Abbott districts serving low-income students, 1998), and Oklahoma (1998) were pioneers in the universal preschool movement, committing to making publicly funded preschool open to all children whose parents chose to enroll. Currently, seventeen states have legislation committing the state to universal preschool. Despite claims of “universality,” however, most states that have legislation to support universal preschool do not serve all four-year-olds, partly because of inadequate funding and partly because of parent choice and staff and facilities shortages. In the 2019–20 school year (the last year not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic), only four states and Washington, DC, had more than 70 percent of their four-year-olds enrolled in state preschool.

The infrastructure for universal preschool programs varies considerably. For example, public preschool in Oklahoma operates through the public school system. In Georgia, the program has been set up with voucher-like subsidies; money from the state is given to parents who can choose from among private and public programs that have been certified by the government. In West Virginia, state funding for public preschool flows to both local education agencies (LEAs) and non-LEAs through County Offices of Education. Most states and cities that have passed legislation to expand preschool to all four-year-olds rely on a combination of funding sources, including federal Head Start and state preschool. The one exception is California, which has used state education funds to expand preschool to all four-year-olds by essentially adding a grade to elementary school (referred to as “transitional kindergarten”).

Objections specific to universal preschool focus mainly on public subsidies for middle-class and affluent families when, critics point out, they have shown they are willing to pay for preschool. Critics have also claimed that the state should not expand preschool education when so many of the country’s public schools are failing.

ISSUES AND CONTROVERSIES

Although not uncontested, preschool is deeply rooted in the education landscape; the debates are less about whether public resources should be used to support it than they are about which type of preschool the resources should support (targeted or universal, as discussed above), where the preschool should reside (in public schools, community programs, or both), and how to ensure high quality. The latter two issues are discussed next.

COMMUNITY VERSUS SCHOOL-BASED PROGRAMS

Advocates of placing preschool in public schools argue that it is the most efficient approach to offering ECE at scale and that it contributes to alignment in curricula and teaching between preschool and the early elementary grades, which can help maintain the benefits of preschool over time. Alignment with kindergarten is difficult when children come from many different preschool contexts, and the public school they enter has no authority over the standards, expectations, curricula, and other policies at the preschool level. Another argument for public schools is that they have an infrastructure, including all the back-office supports (e.g., finance, facilities, human resources) needed. Finally, advocates point out that teachers in preschools that are part of public school systems are generally more educated and better paid and have easier access to special education supports.

But public school–based preschool has its critics. Private program providers complain that they are at a financial disadvantage, lacking the purchasing power of a school district. Another concern is that a direct link to K–12 schooling will result in a focus on academics that can divert attention from the more holistic set of goals that most experts in the field of ECE champion. Many critics expect school-based programs to “push down” from higher grades an emphasis on academics using structured, didactic instruction that is developmentally inappropriate for young children. They also worry that K–12 schools are less likely to communicate with and involve parents, a central principle of Head Start and many non-school-based programs. And there is evidence that public school–based programs often have higher child-to-teacher ratios than is recommended for young children.

For practical reasons, almost every state with a public preschool program uses a mixed-delivery approach, with some classrooms in public schools and others in community-based organizations (CBOs). A mixed-delivery system expands access by using a broad array of existing programs—including Head Start agencies, childcare centers, private schools, faith-based centers, charter schools, and family childcare homes—giving families choice and supporting small businesses. It also saves the state the cost of new facilities and allows it to take advantage of existing staff, enrollment, and organizational structures. Furthermore, including private and community providers increases political support for state programs. Another advantage of including CBOs is that teachers tend to be more diverse and likely to speak the native language of dual-language learners. A study in New York City found that CBOs also offered care for longer hours on average and were more likely to provide mental health services.

On the downside, depending on how it is organized, there are many challenges associated with coordinating preschool providers that operate in very different settings with different funding structures and often fewer resources. Also, in many states, childcare and preschool systems are overseen by the state’s human services agency, which can create a disconnect between the human services and the education aspects. It is a challenge to effectively braid and distribute funding as well as maintain quality across a wide variety of settings with different administrative oversight.

Evidence also suggests differences in the quality of CBOs and public school–based preschools. Studies show that preschool teachers in public school settings are generally better educated and better paid. A study of five large-scale, mixed-delivery preschool systems (Boston, New York City, Seattle, New Jersey, and West Virginia) showed differences in quality, despite explicit steps to improve equity in quality across settings. All five systems implemented similar program standards in both public school and CBO programs. For example, all required lead teachers in both settings to have at least a BA degree, and New Jersey, Seattle, and Boston paid teachers the same in CBOs and public schools. (New York City did so in the years after the study was conducted.) Nevertheless, analyses by Weiland et al. (2022) reveal that children in CBOs, who were disproportionately children of color and children from low-income families, were taught by less educated teachers in all localities and showed lower student gains than their peers in public schools. The authors point out, however, that differences in child gains by setting were smaller in New Jersey and Seattle, the two systems in which policies for CBOs and public schools were the most equitable. The Abbott program in New Jersey stands out for its significant efforts to ensure quality in community-based programs. The state requires frequent site visits from master teachers to coach staff, gives districts tools to conduct assessments, and employs university researchers to assess classroom quality and track children’s learning.

To summarize, there are some practical reasons for mixed-delivery systems, but ensuring quality is more challenging than in a more centralized system such as public schools. If a mixed-delivery system is used, considerable attention needs to be given to supporting equity in quality, including pay equity for comparably educated teachers across settings.

DEFINING AND MEASURING QUALITY

There are three primary levers for ensuring quality: (1) state preschool program licensing standards, including teacher-to-child ratios and teacher credentialing requirements; (2) monitoring of programs that have been licensed; and (3) resources for improvement, such as teacher professional development. In many states, monitoring and improving are combined into what is referred to as a Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). Programs are rated along particular dimensions and are typically offered opportunities to improve on those dimensions rated low. In some states, funding levels are based on a program’s QRIS ratings. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) also offers accreditation to programs that meet its high standard, although few programs go through the arduous process to receive and retain NAEYC accreditation.

Two categories of quality are included in most state preschool program licensing standards and monitoring systems. The first involves “structural” indices that can be relatively easily regulated and measured, such as requiring particular teaching credentials, teacher-to-child ratios and group size, and aspects of the physical environment considered important for safety. The second involves “process” variables having to do with the learning environment and the interactions between teachers and children and among children.

There is fair agreement on what constitutes quality regarding teachers’ general interactions with children. Research evidence indicates the value of (1) an overall classroom climate or tone that is emotionally warm, accepting, and supportive; (2) positive, proactive, and consistent classroom management practices that include more affirmation and warmth and fewer disapproving and behavioral controls; (3) educators’ positive, non-conflictual relationships with individual children; and (4) explicit modeling, teaching, and scaffolding of social-emotional skills.

There is emerging agreement as well that effective teachers need to engage in bias-free and culturally responsive teaching. Defining and measuring quality related to instruction is difficult and controversial for all education programs. But unlike K–12 education, where there is consensus on academic achievement as the primary goal, the goal of preschool is disputed. At the heart of the controversy is how much academic achievement should be a goal and, if it is, what teaching strategies are appropriate to attain it.

What Should Preschoolers Learn?

Most EC educators believe that preschool should attend to multiple domains of development— that is, the whole child. Proponents of focusing on the whole child argue that even learning basic academic skills requires self-confidence and self-regulation skills, such as paying attention, as well as the social skills required to avoid wasting learning time engaged in conflict with peers or the teacher.

On the other hand, the accountability movement, instantiated in No Child Left Behind legislation, created pressure for preschools to emphasize academic skills. School districts became focused on raising scores on standardized achievement tests, and many believed that starting early would help them achieve that goal. Current evidence that young children are able to develop foundational literacy and math skills supports advocates’ attention to academic skills, as does evidence that early literacy and math skills when children enter kindergarten are highly predictive of reading and math achievement in school.36 Although Head Start has from the beginning been committed to supporting the development of the whole child, there have been efforts to focus it more on academic preparation. The George W. Bush administration, for example, proposed shifting Head Start from a comprehensive intervention to a program that focused on language and literacy.

The debate rests to some degree on a false dichotomy. A focus on academic skills in math, literacy, science, or any other domain does not preclude attention to other dimensions of children’s development. Nonacademic dimensions of the whole child, such as self-regulation and social skills, can be developed even in the context of academic instruction. For example, math activities can involve cooperative learning opportunities that are designed to help children develop such social skills as listening, taking turns, and negotiating. Moreover, EC educators are less critical of the goal of academic achievement if other important dimensions of development are also stressed and if literacy and math are taught in what EC experts consider developmentally appropriate ways, explained next.

How Should Preschoolers Be Taught?

The debate about how preschoolers should be taught is characterized variably as play based or child centered versus teacher directed. In the extreme of play-based/child-centered programs, children choose and initiate most activities, actively exploring and manipulating concrete materials. The teacher may build on children’s activities (“How many blocks do you have in your tower?”), but they are responding to child-initiated activity. In the extreme of teacher-directed instruction, teachers lead children through rote learning exercises, such as counting and identifying letters, and children work individually on tasks that often involve worksheets. People endorsing a more child-centered approach worry about the effects of structured, teacher-directed instruction on children’s motivation and enjoyment of learning. People endorsing a more teacher-directed approach argue that children do not learn foundational academic skills through self-initiated play.

Research suggests that child-initiated play is important for children to develop general problem-solving and social skills, but the development of subject-matter skills requires more intentional teacher guidance. Research suggests that whole-child, child-centered, play-based curricula fail to produce gains in either math or literacy. In contrast, several meta-analyses of research have shown that math curricula involving teacher-led activities can have strong effects on math learning and that literacy curricula are modestly successful in boosting literacy achievement.

Academically focused instruction does not necessarily mean rote learning and worksheets. Literacy, math, and science can be taught to young children in a developmentally appropriate, engaging way. Research suggests that literacy and math are most effectively taught through intentional but playful activities in which the teacher leads children through a learning activity, but children have some discretion in how they achieve the goal of the activity. In addition to the benefits of teacher-guided, playful activities, research supports the value of a language-rich environment in which teachers listen to and engage children in conversation and small-group instruction, which is well designed to engage children’s interest in the context of a positive emotional climate.

MEASURING AND SUPPORTING QUALITY

The research is somewhat mixed on how well-structural dimensions of quality, such as teacherto-child ratios and teacher credentials, predict child outcomes and does not pinpoint specific regulations, such as determining whether a 1:12 or 1:10 teacher-to-child ratio is ideal. The evidence is also mixed on the associations between teacher credentials and quality measured by either classroom observations or child outcomes. There is some evidence that the amount of specific training in child development and ECE may matter more than the level of the credential. And there is compelling evidence that professional development (PD) can have an impact on the quality of children’s experiences. But not all PD programs are created equal. The evidence on PD suggests the value of coaches working directly with teachers, focusing on content knowledge and effective pedagogy within an identified domain. Brief workshops are ineffective in promoting lasting changes in instruction.

Classroom observations are needed to assess process quality. Those that are typically used provide valid information on general teacher–child interaction, but they do not assess the quality of literacy or math teaching. The field needs to develop assessment instruments that states can use to measure instructional quality in preschools.

CHALLENGES TO QUALITY

The most significant obstacle to quality is cost, and the critical variable is the teacher. Although research does not provide strong guidance on exactly what kind of preparation is ideal, there is good evidence that preparation is important, as is professional development. But both come with costs. Increasing the rigor of training can improve quality, but it will exacerbate the teacher supply problem without commensurate increases in salary. Professional development also requires time on the part of the teachers and funding for the people who do the PD (and ideally for the participants).

Teacher pay affects quality indirectly through its effect on the economic stress teachers experience, their classroom behavior, and ultimately, turnover.54 Because preschool teaching is typically relatively low paid, turnover is high. Turnover undermines quality because programs that invest in professional development do not get much of a return on their investment, and high turnover causes children to experience instability, which undermines the quality of the relationships they can develop with their teachers.

The field is also challenged by inequity in quality for low-income and more affluent students. A study of 1,610 preschool sites in New York City found classroom quality to be lower in sites located in poor neighborhoods and in centers serving higher percentages of Black and Latino children. Even in Georgia, a national leader in universal preschool, state preschool classrooms in low-income and high-minority communities were rated significantly lower in classroom quality.

IMPACT

Public preschool is costly, and policymakers understandably want evidence that it helps them achieve the goal of improving education outcomes. In brief, the findings indicate that preschool can but does not necessarily have both short- and long-term effects for children that also yield economic and social benefits.

The most notable long-term impact study, which has had a significant (perhaps outsized) impact on ECE policy, is the Perry Preschool Project. The program provided very high-quality preschool education to 123 three- and four-year-old African American children.

Findings based on participants and the control group long into adulthood show many longterm benefits of the program, including higher high school graduation rates, higher earnings, and lower arrest rates. Cost-benefit analyses suggest a substantial return, which economist James Heckman concluded is about 8 to 1. A substantial portion of the return comes from reduced incarcerations. The findings from this one small study have been used to convince many policymakers of the value of investing in preschool. The public programs that have been developed since, however, are not near the level of quality of Perry Preschool, which employed primarily teachers with graduate degrees in ECE and which offered a staff-to-child ratio of 1:6, teacher weekly visits to children’s homes, and parent education. It cost $21,800 per child in 2017 dollars, compared to the $5,867 spent per child on average in state preschool programs.

Results of the many studies on the impact of preschool cannot be reviewed here. Metaanalyses, however, indicate meaningful positive effects overall on school academic readiness, reductions in grade retention, and special education placement as well as small effects on social-emotional development, especially when this is a specific goal of the program.

Many studies, including a large-scale study of Head Start, show an initial benefit of preschool, but the benefit fades over the first few years of elementary school. One study in Tennessee found that the control group had higher achievement scores in fourth grade than the children who had been randomly assigned to state preschool. These findings raised questions about the quality of the Tennessee state preschool program and what early educational experiences the control group had. But along with the many studies that have documented the fading of preschool benefits in elementary school, the Tennessee study makes clear that simply implementing a large-scale preschool program does not guarantee the desired effects on children.

There are several possible explanations for the fade-out effect. One explanation, supported by research, is that kindergarten teachers often repeat material that children had already learned in preschool, allowing children who did not have preschool to catch up with those who did. Another is that teachers in the early grades do not differentiate instruction for children with varying skill levels, which impedes children’s opportunities to continue to exhibit growth. Both explanations suggest that preschool is more likely to yield long-term academic benefits if it is followed with instruction that builds on initial gains.

Although there are only a few studies of long-term effects, there is evidence that preschool implemented at scale can have significant effects into adulthood. A random assignment study in Boston found increases in high school graduation, SAT scores, and college attendance and a decrease in juvenile incarceration, especially for boys, but no detectable impact on state achievement test scores. A recent study of the Tulsa preschool likewise found effects on college enrollment. Reviews of studies that assessed long-term effects, including some studies of Head Start participants, describe increases in college enrollment and decreases in incarceration rates and teen pregnancy.

A task force created by the Brookings Institution, which included individuals with very different perspectives on the value of state preschool, worked through all of the evidence on state-funded preschool to produce a consensus summary of impact.68 Following is a summary of the task force’s conclusions:

• Studies of different groups of preschoolers often find greater improvement in learning at the end of the pre-K year for economically disadvantaged children and dual-language learners than for more advantaged and English-proficient children.

• Pre-K programs are not all equally effective. Several effectiveness factors may be at work in the most successful programs. One such factor supporting early learning is a well-implemented, evidence-based curriculum. Coaching for teachers as well as efforts to promote orderly but active classrooms may also be helpful.

• Children’s early learning trajectories depend on the quality of their learning experiences not only before and during their pre-K year but also following it. Classroom experiences early in elementary school can serve as charging stations for sustaining and amplifying pre-K learning gains. One good bet for powering up later learning is elementary school classrooms that provide individualization and differentiation in instructional content and strategies.

• Convincing evidence shows that children attending a diverse array of state and school district pre-K programs are more ready for school at the end of their pre-K year than children who do not attend pre-K. Improvements in academic areas such as literacy and numeracy are most common; the smaller number of studies of social-emotional and self-regulatory development generally show more modest improvements in those areas.

• Convincing evidence on the longer-term impacts of scaled-up pre-K programs on academic outcomes and school progress is sparse, precluding broad conclusions. The evidence that does exist often shows that improvements in learning induced prior to kindergarten are detectable during elementary school, but studies also reveal null or negative longer-term impacts for some programs.

ECONOMIC RETURN TO PRESCHOOL

Some impacts on individuals (improved school readiness, higher achievement, increased high school graduation, higher education attainment, higher earnings) bring social benefits, such as increased taxes, reduced use of welfare, and improved health. Other public-sector benefits come in the form of reduced child abuse and neglect and reduced incarceration. Public school savings are found in reduced grade retention and reduced special education use.

Because the large-scale programs are relatively recent, most cost-benefit analyses project benefits from shorter-term impacts. For example, a study of the Chicago Child-Parent Centers (CPC) used data from subjects at age twenty-six on special education use, grade retention, juvenile and adult crime, and adult earnings to project impact beyond age twenty-six, such as earnings, taxes on earnings, incarceration, depression, smoking, and substance abuse. The net economic benefits to society were estimated to reach almost $97,000 per child (in 2016 dollars), a return of nearly $11 for every $1 invested.69 Looking across cost-benefit studies, including Chicago, Tulsa, and Head Start, estimates show a more realistic return of between 2:1 and 4:1; however, such analyses are based on many assumptions for which there is not total agreement. Another caveat is that the conclusions are based on relatively highcost, high-quality preschool programs and are not likely to apply to programs of lower quality.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Publicly supported preschool began with the goal of giving children living in poverty a “head start” in school, but over time it became a strategy for reducing the achievement gap and improving academic achievement. Will public preschool close the achievement gap? No. There are many other factors associated with poverty—including poor nutrition, crowded and unstable housing, poor medical care, and stress—that have significant effects on children’s learning. But access to high-quality preschool can give children from low-income families a fairer chance of succeeding in school, and the research on long-term impact suggests it can alter life trajectories. The operative term is “high-quality.” All of the research on longterm benefits with economic returns to individuals and society are based on programs that employed well-trained and well-supported staff.

This chapter has outlined a number of issues that need to be addressed after the decision to invest in public preschool has been made, such as whether to support a targeted or universal program, whether to implement a mixed-delivery or school-based delivery system, and how to define, measure, and ensure quality. Below are a few recommendations related to specific choices.

Clearly articulated goals are important. The goals guide program development as well as the strategies and measures used to assess program quality, support program improvement, and track progress in achieving the goals.

Achieving consensus on the goals is no easy task, because there are strong differences of opinion. But many of the differences rest on false dichotomies. Even if academic skills are the primary goal, all dimensions of children’s development play a role. Furthermore, developmentally appropriate, teacher-guided instruction can be playful, and time can be put aside for children to play freely and explore.

Quality is the primary consideration in any preschool system. Only preschool programs that meet high quality standards have shown long-term effects. States have many levers to affect policy, including program licensing standards, teacher and administrator credentialing standards, and ongoing resources to support effective teaching, child learning standards and assessments, quality monitoring systems, and curriculum guidance. These policies need to align with the articulated goals of preschool and with each other. For example, teacher credentialing requirements and ongoing supports for teachers should prepare teachers to help children achieve the state learning standards.

Of the many dimensions affecting quality that these policy levers can be used to promote, the following are particularly important:

• Adult-to-child ratios that allow adults to form close, caring relationships with children

• Preparation and ongoing support for teachers in developmentally appropriate, differentiated instruction, including developing a safe, secure, and inclusive environment for all students

• Curricula that offer sufficient and developmentally appropriate attention to language, literacy, math, and social-emotional development as well as other important dimensions of child development such as creativity and motor development

• An assessment system that can be used to guide teacher decisions at the classroom level and track children’s progress related to the standards

Depending on the approach to be used, different policy considerations apply.

• If the decision is made to use public funds only for children in low-income families:
  • Because children from low-income families learn more on average in a mixed-SES setting, avoid isolating the poor by offering hybrid programs in which some children are subsidized by the state and some families pay tuition, or implement a sliding scale.

• If universal preschool is implemented:
  • Ensure that community-based providers for infants and toddlers are reimbursed enough to cover costs when they lose older children.

• If a school-based delivery system is employed:
  • Ensure that programs are developmentally appropriate for young children and that teachers and principals have training in ECE.

• If a mixed-delivery system is employed:
  • Establish strong program standards across school-based and CBO settings, and implement other policies (e.g., teacher pay equity) to support equity in quality. Findings suggest that even in states where efforts have been made to equalize quality, extra resources may be needed for CBO programs.

What happens after preschool affects the long-term benefits of preschool. Policies related to preschool should not be considered in isolation. If teachers in the later grades do not build on what children learned in preschool, the benefits will fade. Districts need to reflect on the nature and organization of instruction through the early grades, joining the movement expanding throughout the United States to develop greater P–3 alignment (i.e., alignment from preschool to third grade). States can help by making sure that learning standards, program standards, curricula, assessments, and teacher credentialing are aligned across preschool and the early grades. They also need to ensure strong connections among state agencies overseeing preschool and K–12 education.

Streamline connections between preschool and childcare. Working parents need childcare. The different funding sources and eligibility requirements cause difficulties for both programs and parents. States need to streamline funding and requirements for preschool and childcare as much as possible, and they need to facilitate wraparound childcare for preschool programs.

The politics of pre-K can be complicated to navigate. Many constituencies are affected by decisions related to state-funded preschool, including state agencies that oversee its implementation, community-based programs that are affected by whether and how they are included, higher education where teachers are prepared, school districts, Head Start, the people who staff the programs, and parents. All policy decisions should include their voices.

Preschool is not a panacea. It alone will not improve achievement scores and other important child outcomes. But of the many school improvement initiatives this series discusses, preschool is among the most studied and may have the most potential to move the needle.

The Hoover Institutions A Nation At Risk +40 research initiative spotlights insights and analysis from experts, educators and policymakers as to what evidence shows about the broader impact of 40 years of education reform and how America’s school system has (and hasn’t) changed since the groundbreaking 1983 report. () 

In 1983, the release of the groundbreaking A Nation at Risk report ignited a nationwide movement for educational reform. Marking the 40th anniversary of this pivotal moment, A Nation at Risk +40 sets out to delve deeper into the reforms that have shaped the modern education landscape. This research initiative aims to draw valuable insights, examine the evidence of reform impact, and offer lessons for today’s education policymakers.

The series, , features an array of distinguished authors, each dedicated to exploring critical aspects of school reform. By examining key questions, they seek to shed light on the path taken by education systems nationwide:

• What kinds of reforms have been attempted and why?
  
• What is the evidence of their impact?
  
• What are the lessons for today’s education policymakers?

“Education is the cornerstone of a thriving society, and for the past four decades, we have witnessed a tireless pursuit of reform to ensure our education system is stronger and more resilient. A Nation at Risk +40 illuminates where we have come since the groundbreaking report of 1983, offering invaluable insights and evidence-based practices for navigating today’s challenges,” said Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice. “This research initiative serves as a guiding light, empowering policymakers, educators, and stakeholders to safeguard the future of American education.” 

The authors of A Nation at Risk +40 have undertaken extensive research, bringing expertise from diverse fields, including education, policy, and academia. Their collective efforts culminate in a rich tapestry of insights, aiming to inform and guide the decisions of policymakers, educators, and stakeholders in the education sector.

Against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with schools across the United States facing unprecedented challenges, A Nation at Risk +40 offers more than a retrospective analysis. The series also provides relevant and research-driven guidance for navigating the current landscape and crafting strategies for a stronger, more resilient education system.

As the nation grapples with the educational effects of the pandemic, A Nation at Risk +40 bears witness to four decades of reform striving to improve education outcomes. By documenting this journey and distilling its wisdom, the series illuminates a path forward rooted in evidence-based practices and a commitment to safeguarding the future of American education.