How the Pandemic Devastated State-Run Early Education
Categories: US Education News
The coronavirus pandemic wiped out a decade of progress in increasing preschool enrollment – slashing care for more than a quarter-million children – even as it led to major decreases in state investment and made it nearly impossible for operators to meet best practices.While child care and preschool operators, teachers and parents have long lamented the pandemic’s impact on the early education system in the U.S. – one already rife with long-standing challenges surrounding access, cost and quality – a new assessment of state-funded care for 3- and 4-year-olds shows just how precarious the system is.“The pandemic highlighted and exacerbated long-standing problems of inadequate enrollment, quality and funding,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director and founder of the National Institute for Early Education Research. “For the first time in at least 20 years, enrollment in state-funded preschool declined and the pandemic erased an entire decade of progress in preschool enrollment,” he said. “Challenges such as health risks, closed classrooms and remote classrooms disrupted an already fragile system.”The 2021 State of Preschool report, published Tuesday by the institute, documents the impact of the pandemic on early education programs provided during the 2020-2021 school year, the first school year to be fully impacted by the COVID-19 disruptions.Strained budgets, staffing shortages and general health risks involved with operating early education programs impeded best practices for children, the report found, and meant the vast majority of providers were operating with inadequate quality and not able to provide developmentally appropriate activities. “Many of us know how the pandemic set us back,” Health and Human Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a call with reporters. “It is critical that we learn from what the pandemic has taught us to move forward.”The last three years have taken a toll on the industry: According to a new report published this month by Child Care Aware of America, nearly 16,000 child care programs across 37 states have permanently closed since the pandemic began – a 9% decline in the number of licensed child care providers.The most recent analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey performed by Gusto in February, which has been analyzing quit rates by gender since January 2020, shows that the gender gap in quit rates rose in January 2022, with 4.1% of women quitting their job compared to 3.4% of men. The increase was the first documented since August 2021. If Congress isn’t able to approve a broad package, as was originally envisioned in the Build Back Better proposal, a small matching grants program could greatly accelerate progress, the report shows. For example, a five-year commitment of just $1 billion in the first year, with another $1 billion added each year up to $5 billion in the fifth year, could increase enrollment in high-quality programs by 1 million children over those five years.Underscoring the negative impact the pandemic had on early education programs in the U.S., the report shows that even if states recuperate from losses due to the pandemic and return to prior enrollment growth rates, states are likely to enroll just 40% of 4-year-olds and 8% of 3-year-olds 10 years from now.“Preschool should be available for everyone,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said on a call with reporters. “But right now it’s not.”“Even if we fully rebounded we’re not where we need to be,” Cardona said. “It’s unacceptable to just go back to where we were.”