A few months back, we thought we had found a great Pre-K program (private, of course, because we don’t qualify for Pre-K with Dallas ISD), only to find the great program that allegedly churns out kindergarten readers who love books actually consisted of five worksheets Tiny was doing in the 3-year-old room at our beloved Mother’s Day Out.
After an arduous month where a bored 4-year-old boy did bored 4-year-old boy things, we opted to leave in favor of finding a new program. And this time, we decided, we wouldn’t let the checkbook necessarily be the thing that was the weighted factor in our decision.
We looked at schools where the monthly tuition is more than our mortgage. They were lovely, and no doubt would have taught Tiny ably and he would’ve had fun. We looked at half-day programs. We found three-day programs and co-op programs and foreign language programs. Ultimately, we found three we liked after phone conversations, a careful review of the curriculum, and looking at the tuition, but let Tiny pick the program after we toured each school. After all, once curriculum and realistic budget were out of the way, whether or not he liked it was really half the decision-making process.
We are lucky enough to be able to afford the tuition for the school Tiny picked. It’s bright, adorable, has a realistic and appropriate curriculum, and Tiny adores his new teacher. But it’s definitely (when you factor in the fact that we now have to supply lunch and are on snack rotation one week every two months or so, plus the almost $500 registration fee and the first and last month’s tuition up front) a little more expensive than the last school. At this school, every teacher has a college education. At this school, the communication is plentiful. The class sizes are small.
You get what you pay for.
Which is why this NPR piece last week resonated with me. Jessica Grose, the writer, talks about much the same things my husband and I experienced when we were looking at pre-K programs – and how it struck both of us that early education (for all the emerging and convincing evidence that it is vital) is very much a tale of paychecks.
But should it be?
Pre-K at Dallas public schools is wonderful, by all accounts. It serves an important purpose in making sure that students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to begin addressing statistical gaps in knowledge before they enter kindergarten – the gaps that make it otherwise difficult to achieve grade-level reading by third grade. Every pre-K classroom I’ve been to has been bright, cheery and set up for age-appropriate learning.
In short, it’s a gem of a program you’d pay some ducats for (trust me, I’ve been looking at programs for six months now) if you were looking for an all-day, meals inclusive program on the private level.
But if you make slightly more than the income guidelines allow, you aren’t going to be able to take advantage of it. And if you don’t make enough to send your child to the adorable program with the college-educated teachers that know the appropriate rubric for the Pre-K level, you end up sending your child to a place that is more babysitter than educator. And if you can afford to send your child to the adorable great school, chances are at least one of the parents will need a flexible schedule since many are half days, or (like ours) four and a half days.
And this is why you see people get irritated when opportunities to address this – chances to expand pre-K in their district, or even state – are passed by. Because of all the things that actually can in the long run increase test scores and improve graduation rates and ACT and SAT attempts, early education is a big one. It’s not the only one, but it’s a big one.
So why is it so darned hard to make it happen?
