Quality pre-K
Abbott’s promise of a gold standard program played Texans for fools.
A gold standard in education for 3- and 4-year-old Texans is a bragging right worth having.
The Abbott pre-kindergarten program is among the top programs in the country.
Unfortunately for young Texans, the outstanding Abbott pre-K program is not a Texas program named after Gov. Greg Abbott. It’s a New Jersey program named after a student in a court case. Today its goal is to provide all three- and four-year-old children residing in urban districts with well-planned, high quality pre-K.
Abbott ran for governor on a platform of “gold standard, high quality” pre-K, and he successfully secured enhanced funding for one budgetary cycle. But time has proven his program to be little more than fool’s gold. The extra funding was dropped in 2017 and Texas pre-K, responsible for teaching more three- and four-year-olds than nearly every other state, remains persistently substandard.
If Abbott wants to show that he’s a politician who keeps his word, he can start by campaigning for reelection on his original platform — one that makes pre-K and early education a top priority.
Texas does lead the way nationally in requiring specialized staff to teach bilingual students, but our state still lags behind much of the country in funding early education and doing more to ensure higher quality, according to a report from the National Institute for Early Education Research released last week.
Texas met only 4 of 10 quality standards used as benchmarks by NIEER, falling short on issues including class sizes, student-teacher ratios and requiring that assistant teachers have certifications.
While the state ranks high for enrollment, according to the study, Texas falls below the national average for per-student spending. The state ranked 28th in the country after total state funding for the program fell by $45 million from the 2015-2016 school year.
This failure comes despite widespread popular support for universal pre-school education, at least in Harris County. The 2018 Kinder Houston Area Survey reported that 67 percent of respondents favored increasing local taxes in order to give Texas’ youngest children a strong foundation for learning.
Critics argue that early education amounts to little more than taxpayer funded babysitting. There’s no doubt that without an appropriate student-to-teacher ratio and professional development, pre-K teachers are reduced to keeping children safely and playfully engaged. That’s why it’s so important for Texas to join the mainstream and adopt guidelines that give teachers the ability to help their students enter kindergarten ready to learn.
Recently, Abbott penned an oped for the New Jersey Star Ledger urging tax-burdened New Jersey residents to move to the Lone Star State.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy shot back in the Chronicle with an op-ed that could have been titled: “Hey, Texans go to New Jersey to get quality education. Love, Gov. Murphy.”
Murphy pointed out the longterm consequences of Texas’ failure to invest in early education, classrooms and teachers.
“This underfunding by the governor has led Texas to have the largest gender gap in educational attainment and the seventh-largest racial educational attainment gap in the nation. New Jersey, on the other hand, ranks No. 6 in the nation for college readiness (Texas is No. 21).”
A gold standard in education for 3- and 4-year-old Texans is a bragging right worth having. And right now, the Abbott program worth bragging about hails from New Jersey.