Proposition 82 Failed

On Tuesday, Californians voted against Proposition 82, the "Preschool for All" Act that would have established publicly-funded, universal preschool for all four-year-olds in the state. This is a major blow to universal preschool advocates, both in California and nationally, who had been putting a great deal of stock in the proposal.

Most observers blame Prop 82's loss on the controversies around Rob Reiner and the state's First 5 Commission, from which Reiner was forced to step down earlier this year due to conflicts of interest between his leadership of both the state-funded Commission and the campaign to promote Prop 82. That's certainly part of it.

But Prop 82's opponents were incredibly effective at seizing on (and driving into the ground) weak spots in the proposal that caused voters to have concerns about it. Some of the opponents' points were, of course, misinformation or deliberate misrepresentation of the policy here. But the opponents were able to seize ground, at least in part, because there were real policy shortcomings in how Prop. 82 would have implemented universal preschool that didn't sit well with voters.

Ironically, I think this may actually have been the best possible outcome for preschool advocates. Proposition 82's passage would have focused national attention on the implementation and impacts of universal preschool in California. If the program had failed to deliver the results preschool advocates promised--or if implementation had been a fiasco--that would have had a strong chilling effect on the preschool movement nationally. And there was a real risk of this, because some of the flaws Prop 82 opponents kept harping on really would have undermined the program's chances of success and popularity.

There's a broader lesson here for the preschool movement--over the past decade, preschool supporters (including major national foundation)--have focused there efforts primarily in three areas: building public support for universal preschool, building the research base on preschool quality, and cost-benefit analysis showing that preschool investments pay off for the public. These have all been important contributions. But if we've learned anything from the past 40 years of K-12 school reform, it's that regulating inputs and processes isn't enough to guarantee good educational results. Structures and systems--things like governance, incentives, culture--are also critical.

But the preschool movement has spent shockingly little time thinking about how publicly-funded preschool systems should be structured, in terms of governance, monitoring, oversight, parent choices, and how preschool providers should be selected (and who should be allowed to be one), among other factors. In fact, the preschool movement has been deliberately agnostic on such questions. There's a good case to be made that the structure of universal preschool will need to be different in different states to match unique local conditions. The two states that currently have universal Pre-K--Oklahoma and Georgia--demonstrate that very different structures can both be effective. But some structural characteristics are more likely to produce and support high-quality preschool than others. And without more clarity about what these conditions are from the preschool movement, state policymakers are likely to simply adopt the most politically expedient program design. That's basically what happened with Prop 82, and as a result there were clear flaws that undermined public support for it politically and would have undermined its chances of success if enacted. It's time for the preschool movement to start thinking about these questions.