HUFFINGTON
08.26.12
SMART START?
touting the growth of state-funded pre-K as “education’s biggest
success story” of the last decade.
“Enrollment has grown dramatically and, in a number of states, so
has quality,” he wrote. “But after
years of steady progress, our data
show that many states’ commitments to their youngest citizens
are now slipping.”
Of the 39 states with some form
of public pre-K program, about half
have cut spending since the start
of the recession. Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Ohio now
enroll a smaller percentage of fouryear-olds than they did a year ago,
and Arizona has scrapped its pre-K
program altogether. In many states,
legislators are fighting over money.
At the center of the controversy
is the question of whether preschools make a crucial difference
for children. So it’s no accident that
one of the fiercest debates is playing out in North Carolina, where
all three of the state’s big research
universities—Duke, University of
North Carolina and North Carolina State—have contributed some
of the strongest available evidence
showing it does. The most influential study comes from a place called
the Frank Porter G &