62 percent

In addition to being the day of the Devil, today's also (some would say fittingly) the California primary, with voters choosing Democratic and Republican nominees for a variety of state offices, a replacement for disgraced Rep. Duke Cunningham, and also voting on Prop 82, the "Preschool for All Act." Since I've been writing a lot about this issue lately, I'm a little excited today (or possibly tomorrow) is the last time I'm going to be writing on it.

But before the door closes on Prop. 82 commentary, there's one thing I have to get off my chest. A lot of articles about the initaitive say something like this: "The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office calculates that about 62 percent of the state's 4-year-olds already attend some kind of preschool or day care, and reports from other states indicate a free program would attract about 70 percent of 4-year-olds." A lot of people are then saying "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the share of kids in preschool just eight percentage points*." Seems reasonable enough to me.

Except the whole analysis is based on a faulty notion. The number from the Legislative Analyst's Office is four-year-olds in preschool OR center-based child-care. Repeat after me: Child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool. It constantly amazes me that these two things continue to be conflated in public and policy debates. For those who don't understand the difference: Childcare is any setting in which a child is cared for by someone other than a parent, typically while parents are at work. Preschool programs specifically focus on preparing children for school. To do this, preschool programs use curricula focused on developing children’s early reading, math, social, and emotional skills and are taught by qualified teachers. Center-based childcare is simply childcare that takes place in a child-care center, rather than the home of the child or the care-giver. To be sure, some child care providers do provide high-quality, stimulating care that does support children's cognitive and emotional growth and prepare them for school. But there is tremendous variation among childcare providers, and many providers are of very low quality--essentially warehousing children. It's simply inaccurate to include children in these settings in a count of children in "preschool" just because they're not being cared for in a home.** A lot of those 62 percent of kids aren't in anything remotely like preschool, let alone high-quality preschool.

Unfortunately, a lot of analysis tends to take the stats on kids in "center-based care" (which does include preschool) as a proxy for the number in preschools, because "center-based care" happens to be what the government collects data on. As an analyst working on early childhood education, this is a huge frustration to me. But as until we stop conflating the two and define a minimum benchmark for preschool, good data here is going to be hard to come by.

*Actually, most of these people are saying, "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the number of kids in preschool just eight percent," which is WRONG, since and increase from 62 percent to 70 percent is actually a 13 percent increase, but I don't have time to get into the difference between percent increases and percentage point increases here.

**It's also troubling, to me, that all home-based care is generally lumped together in policy discussions as being of low quality. On average, center-based care is higher quality than other types of childcare, but some family-care providers probably are very good, and many families prefer them.