Excellent Questions About Preschool

Richard Colvin asks some good questions in response to recent reports about poor quality in Boston's preschool program.

The first is about bachelor's degree requirements and the relative value of bachelor's degrees compared to specific training and experience in early education. It's really tempting to think that if we just required all preschool teachers to have bachelor's degrees (or bachelor's degrees with early childhood certification), we could ensure high quality. But two of the biggest and best studies of state preschool implementation, the SWEEP and Multi-state studies, didn't find bachelor's degrees were a reliable predictor of, teacher behaviors known to support students' early learning, and children's outcomes. This shouldn't be shocking when we consider that virtually all K-12 teachers have a bachelor's degree and no one believes that this makes all K-12 teachers highly-effective. As in K-12, teacher quality is probably the most important program factor for determining preschool quality and impacts, and it's clear that many public and private preschool programs do not have sufficiently high-quality teachers right now. But the bachelor's degree, and even certification, is just too blunt an instrument.

Second, Richard asks if states are jeopardizing quality by expanding their preschool programs too fast. This is a reasonable concern, and I think it's worth a broader discussion. Some of the problems with Head Start quality have their roots in the effort to expand the program very rapidly in its early years to build political support (which the program was successful in gaining). It would be a shame for states to replicate that error in their preschool programs.