RAND report suggests ways to provide quality preschool to more children
Published: June 2, 2009
California could improve the quality of and access to its preschool programs if existing resources were used more efficiently, concluded researchers from the RAND Corp. in the fourth and last in a series of reports requested by state policymakers.
California’s preschool system is not adequate to ensure all children enter school ready to learn, said lead RAND researcher Lynn Karoly, who found achievement gaps apparent already in preschool.
Despite the need, California’s early childhood education system can serve only about half of the disadvantaged children who need it, she reported, and the system does not use its current funding as efficiently as it could to promote high-quality services. Researchers found the way ECE funds are allocated makes it difficult to spend all funds available for the year, reducing the number of children who can be served, and there is little incentive to improve the quality of the programs. Overall, the ECE system is too complicated to administer, access and evaluate, Karoly said.
“Preschool Adequacy and Efficiency in California”—available at www.rand.org—makes a number of recommendations regarding the design of preschool programs in the state, but recognizes that many cannot be implemented at this time because of fiscal constraints. RAND does suggest some short-term goals that could be accomplished with existing resources:
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Serve the neediest children first.
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Modify funding mechanisms so funds are used more efficiently to serve the most children.
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Provide incentives for improving the quality of the programs.
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Streamline the structure of agencies that regulate and oversee the programs for maximum efficiency.
Karoly said the recommendations can be helpful to school board members who are directly involved in running preschool and elementary school programs. School board members, she said, may also wish to weigh in on the report’s long-term recommendations—which include developing a rating system to recognize program quality and making it easier to reallocate funding where it is needed instead of automatically directing funds to long-standing programs that no longer serve many disadvantaged children.
Board members can champion early childhood education in their communities and with fellow board members by stressing the positive impacts it can have on achievement, behavior and other developmental factors, said Marguerite Noteware, a CSBA policy consultant who works with district and county office governing boards interested in expanding access to preschool. Involvement by board members is instrumental, she added, in monitoring where gaps may exist in the availability of programs and ensuring they are of high quality.
Karoly also suggested that directing funds to communities with a high percentage of disadvantaged children, instead of overseeing a complicated screening process, could make better use of existing funding and make it easier to administer a high-quality program.
The RAND research was supported largely through a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which also funds CSBA’s state-level work to expand access to high-quality preschool programs in California. The CSBA brochure, “Improving Quality and Expanding Access to Preschool for All Children,” which lists major preschool resource and advocacy groups in the state, may be downloaded from the CSBA Web site.
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