Growing a New Policy Initiative in Hard Times: Pre-Kindergarten and the Great Recession

Abstract

Over the last three decades, American pre-kindergarten (pre-k) policy has taken an improbable course. Before 1980, only three states offered some form of state supported prekindergarten program. Between 1980 and 2005 an additional 35 states embraced pre-k programs. The rise of state supported pre-kindergarten programs across the country has come to be known as the Pre-Kindergarten Movement. While fewer than 10 percent of American four-year-olds were enrolled in center-based early care and education (including day nurseries and nursery schools) as recently as the 1960s, by 2005, over 60% of American four-year-olds were enrolled in some form of center-based early-education program (Hofferth 1996; NIEER 2006). The galloping expansion in state pre-k initiatives was brought to an abrupt halt by the recession in 2007 and the subsequent years have brought deep cuts in many states. Pre-k was certainly not the only program under the knife, as most states responded to the financial crisis by seeking massive cuts across a wide range of human services (Guernsey and Holt 2012). And while the initial pain of the recession was blunted by federal stimulus dollars, those funds soon dwindled, leaving pre-k programs vulnerable to state efforts to balance their books. From a policy implementation perspective, this is the point where the story becomes even more interesting: While the recession was pervasive and widespread, the fate of pre-k programs differed markedly from state to state. It was certainly the case that many states retrenched their pre-k initiatives. However, some states actually expanded their pre-k programs in spite of the recession. In this respect, the varied fortunes of state pre-k programs offer a lens through which to sharpen our understanding of the structural and strategic factors that make potentially vulnerable policy initiatives more resilient to hard times. The case of pre-k offers, first, an opportunity to evaluate a rare, recent instance of policy innovation against the broader stream of economic constriction and policy retrenchment. Second, the variegated landscape of state decisions concerning pre-kindergarten policy in the wake of the recession provides a tantalizing opportunity to assess the factors that harden otherwise fragile policy initiatives. This paper explores the structural and strategic factors that explain state pre-k policy decisions in the context of economic, political, cultural, and administrative data collected from 38 states.