Pre-K programs experienced their biggest boost ever in state funding and enrollment last school year, although the quality of the programs remains uneven, a new study concludes.
There are about 1.7 million children enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs, mostly 3- and 4-year-olds, according to 2024 data released April 29 by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), a nonpartisan organization focused on early childhood education access and quality. The data was part of NIEER’s 22nd State of Preschool report.
There isn’t a national standard for pre-K programs. But Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia have implemented universal preschool for 4-year-olds, and other states are beginning to move in this direction through legislation introduced this year.
“I think universal pre-K is really a policy goal for a lot of states because they want it to be the case that when kids get to kindergarten, they’re all ready to start on those kindergarten skills rather than some of them being ready and some of them needing a little time to catch up,” said Anna Shapiro, an associate policy researcher focused on early childhood and special education at the think tank RAND.
States spent more than $13.6 billion on preschool in 2023-24, an increase of nearly 17 percent compared to the previous year, and enrollment rose 7 percent to 1.75 million children nationwide.
But even though states were spending more money than ever before on preschool, the focus hasn’t been on ensuring quality, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at NIEER, which was established at Rutgers University.
“We’re seeing more policies being rolled back than states moving forward to implement new policies to improve quality in preschools,” she said.
Students who attend pre-K are less likely to fail courses or be chronically absent in K-12, and more likely to enroll in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses in high school and graduate on time, according to research by Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Research on Children in the United States.
Still, under the Trump administration, the future of early childhood education is uncertain. Most recently, the Trump administration drafted a federal budget with no funds for Head Start, a federally funded preschool program for low-income families. The move closely aligns with policies outlined in Project 2025, a conservative document associated with the Trump administration.
Project 2025 states: “Instead of providing universal daycare, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home child care.”
Funding and enrollment increased unevenly across states
The NIEER study found that while funding increased across the nation, four states—California, New Jersey, New York, and Texas—accounted for 51 percent of the total national preschool spending.
This can result in uneven access to preschool across states.
“We worry more about states that leave it up to the local level, and they inadequately fund them,” said Steven Barnett, the NIEER director.
Since 2020, the national percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-K has increased from 34 percent to 37 percent, and the percentage of 3-year-olds enrolled increased from 6 percent to 8 percent.
But 22 states with a preschool program enrolled fewer children in fall 2023 than in fall 2019, and 14 states served a lower percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds in fall 2023 than fall 2019, according to the NIEER report.
Despite the increase in spending and enrollment, the quality of preschools isn’t getting better. NIEER provides a checklist of 10 items that make for a quality preschool. Some specific requirements include a teacher with a bachelor’s degree with specialized training in pre-k, and a class size of 20 students or lower.
Twenty-one state-funded preschool programs meet five or fewer benchmarks on NIEER’s checklist, three of which are California, Florida, and Texas, accounting for most of the national spending. Based on the size of these 21 states, 44 percent of students attend low-quality state-funded preschools.
In contrast, only 16 percent of the students are in high quality programs, according to the NIEER report.
One explanation for the high funding but low quality programs is that states with more kids enrolling in preschool tend to get more federal money, said Barnett.
“It’s conceivable for states to have high standards and not fund them,” he said. “Our benchmarks are really minimums.”
Another concern for the researchers is that some states are actually going backward on their progress. For example, Texas made policy changes to loosen teacher education requirements, and North Carolina increased the cap for class sizes.
Texas no longer requires a bachelor’s degree and P-6 certification, which allows teachers to teach kindergarten through 6th grade; and North Carolina raised class size caps from 18 to 20 and increased staff-child ratios from 1:9 to 1:10. These programs shifted away from the NIEER benchmarks.
“The goal is not just to have all children sitting in a classroom, but to have kids getting access to high-quality early learning, so you can’t just expand enrollment and then forget about the quality,” said Shapiro.
Some states—Alabama, Michigan, New Mexico, and Oklahoma—were all leading in providing high quality early education programs, according to NIEER’s report. Those states prioritized quality, said Barnett.
“All of these places … [are] moving toward serving all kids,” said Barnett.
Future of early childhood education is uncertain amid federal funding cuts
Many states used some of their federal pandemic relief money to support early childhood education programs. That money has now expired, and other federal funding sources have been called into question amid President Trump’s efforts to cut costs to make the federal government more efficient—leaving the future of preschool funding uncertain.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen with the COVID funding that many states were using to make some of this progress,” said Friedman-Krauss. “If other federal sources—not just Head Start but Title I—if those things start to go away, that’s going to have a really big negative impact on the states.”
Thirty-four of the 45 states with preschool programs reported using COVID-19 relief funding to support preschools, amounting to $1.3 billion between 2020 and 2024, according to the NIEER report. The amount spent dropped by half between 2023 and 2024, and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon recently revoked any extensions in place, so that source of funding has now entirely dried up.
NIEER’s report predicts that if Head Start funding is eliminated, access to public preschool will decline in several states by more than 10 percent, and in some, by 20 percent. Across the nation, Head Start has accounted for about a 5 percent increase in enrollment for both 3- and 4-year-olds, according to the NIEER report.
“Just when states go pedal back to the metal after recovering from COVID—with an over $700 increase in spending per child, big expansions in enrollment—there’s a move for the federal government to pull the rug out from other states,” said Barnett.