The prospect of availability of preschool education for American kids who hitherto were shut out of the program by its high costs brightens recently with President Joe Biden’s announcement of his Universal Preschool plan for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old American kids.
Indeed, a cursory look at American education landscape, shows that more and more states and Cities in the United States, are opting for funding of early childhood education for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old kids residing in their domains
And from the emerging scenarios, sooner than later, every kid in states across the US may soon have access to quality preschool education. As President Biden made it clear that he wants every 3-year-old and 4-year-old kids have unfettered access to early childhood education.
The president also wants to lessen the burden of financing the program by states through making the federal government to subsidize preschool education at a cost of about $20 billion so that the preschool programs can be universally available.
The subsidy, according to Biden, will come from more taxes to be imposed on wealthy Americans in order to enable every qualified kid from poor homes have access to quality early childhood education.
What are the implications of President Biden’s Universal preschool program for kids from poor homes and those in the underserved communities in America? It is good news for kids in this social and economic categories. Those kids can now have access to what hitherto looked like exclusive preserve of children from wealthy families and they can now attend a publicly supported preschool program with ease unlike before when families with middle and low incomes found it difficult to get their children enrolled for preschool program.
President Biden also assured American that the publicly sponsored preschool program would be of high quality because it will implement, in his words, “high-quality and developmentally appropriate curriculum”
The icing on the cake is the proposal put forward by the President to pay the teachers in the new universal preschool programs a minimum of US$15 per hour in line with K-12 teachers, if they have comparable qualifications.
Indeed, there is no doubting the benefits kids will derive from of attending preschool program. President Biden’s Universal Preschool program will therefore be a great relief for middle class families who hitherto could not get their kids to be part of the preschool program because of its high costs. It was this high cost that has put preschool out of the reach for many working families in America.
Social researchers, among whom are Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Parag Pathak and Christopher Walters, have ascertained the positive impact of preschool programme on American kids’ all-round development based on the findings of their researches. They averred that preschool program will “improve children’s social and emotional skills and help them mature more than it helps in a narrow academic sense”,
“An important implication of our study,” Walters, a Berkeley economist, said, “is that modern large-scale public preschool programs can improve educational attainment.
