Stalls State-Financed Pre-Kindergarten, but Federal Money May Help

One of the most drastic expansions of public education in recent American history unfolded quietly in this decade, as dozens of states added free pre-kindergarten classes to their traditional kindergarten to high school offerings. But the recession appears to have stalled the expansion of state-financed pre-kindergarten programs, according to Steven Barnett, a professor at Rutgers University who is a co-author of a new report documenting trends in early childhood education. “We had been making remarkable progress, things were going great guns, but as the recession hit state governments, things started to change,” Dr. Barnett said. “It’s gotten so that some people would even consider flat funding to be good. ”From 2002 to 2008, spending on pre-kindergarten by states nearly doubled, to $4.6 billion from $2.4 billion, enabling states to increase enrollment to 1.1 million preschoolers from about 700,000.

Source : www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/education/08school.html?ref=us