By Kerry Gaynor
Murphy News Service
Minnesota’s preschool system has been in the spotlight this legislative session.
A recent report from the U.S. Department of Education shows that Minnesota lags behind other states in providing public funded preschool programs.
Gov. Mark Dayton has been pushing for universal preschool for the state’s 4 year olds, but the plan has faced resistance in the House and Senate.
Of Minnesota’s over 72,000 4-year-olds, over 61,000 kids—or 85 percent—are not enrolled in a publicly funded program, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s report, compared to the national average of just 60 percent.
However, this study did not take into account locally or privately funded pre-K education programs. In recent years, Minnesota has shown a consistent rate of about 54 percent of preschool aged children receiving no formal education at all. Additionally, privately funded preschool programs “appear to be quite weak” compared to federally regulated ones, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.
Along with this information on the national state of preschools, the U.S. Department of Education is pushing for major expansion of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ESEA, begun in 1965, might be known better by its early 2000s incarnation, No Child Left Behind.
The proposed expansion on ESEA would grant higher accessibility to federally regulated pre-K programs, ultimately making preschool the law as with K-12 education.
“Expanding access to high-quality preschool within the reauthorization of ESEA will narrow achievement gaps, and reflect the real, scientific understanding that learning begins long before a child enters kindergarten,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement.
Dayton’s ideas appear one step ahead of the federal proposal. Dayton’s 7-Point Plan has been reaching progress since 2011, focusing on closing the achievement gap, making education more affordable and working on early childhood care, among other endeavors.
Earlier this year in January, Dayton announced a proposed plan for utilizing the $1 billion budget surplus. Currently, part of the budget would invest $109 million into free, high-quality preschool for 31,000 of Minnesota’s 4-year-olds. The increased pre-K options would prepare more and more children for kindergarten and subsequent schooling years, according to the budget.
Dayton’s proposed numbers for free, state preschool services would only benefit about half of the over 62,000 4-year-olds not enrolled in federal pre-K. Although, the number of children in private or locally funded programs remains uncertain.
While Dayton’s ideas may look great on the surface, Art Rolnick, senior fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, thinks otherwise. Dayton’s proposal is expensive, while removing focus from the real issue at hand—the achievement gap, Rolnick said. It would also require those children to be in public programs.
“[Dayton] wants $400 million a year, essentially adding a grade to the public school system… [Public schools] don’t have the infrastructure. They’re struggling to do all the kindergarten, and they’re out of room,” Rolnick said.
Rolnick instead proposes a scholarship based system for aiding early education. This method would aim to help children of low-income and poor families much earlier than 4-years-old. The scholarship system would work with privately-funded programs at a fraction of the price of Dayton’s plan, Rolnick said.
The plan has been bouncing back and forth between the House and Senate, now with a finalized budget, not including Dayton’s preschool proposal. It seems both sides of the issue want surplus funds going towards education; the bigger question was how much.
In terms of federal issues, Minnesota has been operating on an ESEA flexibility waiver since 2012 with success, even marked praise from the Obama Administration. The waivers allow for state’s preferred methods of measuring school accountability and proficiency. With new amendments to the ESEA comes new applications for flexibility. It is unclear how state’s methods will interact with the ESEA if the expanded version requiring preschool is enacted.
Reporter Kerry Gaynor is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.