Public Pre-K Is Expanding Fast. So Is the Evidence It Doesn’t Work.

Public Pre-K Is Expanding Fast. So Is the Evidence It Doesn’t Work.

 

Universal pre-K is one of the most popular ideas in American education policy right now, and New Jersey, New York, Illinois, and Virginia are all in the middle of expanding it. New Jersey just codified a new Universal Preschool and Kindergarten Act. New York City is pouring over a billion dollars into 3-K and Pre-K for All. Illinois is rolling out Smart Start to eliminate “preschool deserts.” Virginia keeps growing its Virginia Preschool Initiative (VPI). Each expansion polls well and sounds like an obvious win for kids.

 

But a closer look at what’s actually happening in these four states raises a harder question: is the public school system, which is currently struggling to teach kids to read in exactly these states, really the right place to also take over early childhood education? And would families be better served by vouchers or subsidies they can spend at the private preschools already doing this work?

 

Public schools are already struggling with the basics

Before adding a new grade level to the public system, it’s worth asking how well that system is handling the grades it already has.

 

The 2024 Nation’s Report Card (NAEP) found that reading scores declined for both 4th and 8th graders compared to 2022, on top of a 3-point decline from 2019 to 2022. Nearly 40 percent of 4th graders are now reading below the NAEP “Basic” level, the largest share since 2002, and about a third of 8th graders are below Basic in reading, the largest share ever recorded. The declines were driven overwhelmingly by the lowest-performing students, meaning the kids the system says it most wants to help are falling the furthest behind.

 

Only about 31 percent of 4th graders scored at or above “Proficient” in reading in 2024, down from 33 percent in 2022 and 35 percent in 2019.

 

None of this is a one-year blip. Reading scores nationally are back to where they were in the early 1990s, despite decades of additional funding, new curricula, and repeated waves of reform.

 

And this isn’t just a national story; it’s showing up directly in the states pushing hardest to expand public pre-K:

 

• New Jersey scores above the national average, but only 38 percent of 4th graders were proficient in reading on the state’s own 2024 assessment, and 62 percent of 4th graders still scored below proficient on NAEP. Gaps between high- and low-performing students have continued to widen since the pandemic.
• New York posted 31 percent proficiency in 4th grade reading in 2024, essentially flat since 2022 and still five points below its 2019 average score. 8th grade reading actually declined compared to both 2022 and 2019.
• Illinois reported 30 percent of 4th graders proficient in reading in 2024, with scores described by the state’s own data as largely stagnant since the pandemic.
• Virginia is a useful case study in a different way: the state’s own reading tests report far higher proficiency (72 percent of 8th graders proficient) than NAEP does for the same students, more than double. That gap is one of the widest of any state, and it raises real questions about whether Virginia’s state standards are rigorous enough to catch struggling readers before they fall further behind.

 

In other words, the four states leaning hardest into building out public pre-K are the same states whose public elementary schools haven’t recovered pre-pandemic reading levels, and in some cases are grading their own work more generously than an independent federal test would.

 

The research on public pre-K itself is far from settled

Supporters of universal, school-based pre-K often point to famous early results like the Perry Preschool Project or Abecedarian program from the 1960s and 70s. But those were small, intensive interventions for a few hundred severely disadvantaged children, not a template for a statewide program serving hundreds of thousands of kids.

 

The most rigorous large-scale test we have is Vanderbilt University’s long-term study of the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program (TN-VPK), a true randomized controlled trial that followed nearly 3,000 children. The results were not what supporters expected: children who won the pre-K lottery showed short-term gains, but by third and sixth grade they had lower state achievement scores, more discipline infractions, and higher special education placement rates than children who didn’t attend. Lead researcher Dale Farran summarized the finding bluntly: for the low-income kids in the study, something turned out to be worse than nothing.

 

To be fair, this is one study of one state’s program, and other research, including on Head Start and on Boston’s public pre-K program, has found more positive long-term results. The honest summary is that the research is mixed and highly dependent on program quality and design, not a settled case that public pre-K works. That’s a shaky foundation to build a new universal entitlement on.

 

Crowding out private preschools instead of partnering with them

Rather than funding families directly and letting them choose between public pre-K, Head Start, or an existing private preschool, all four states are building pre-K capacity primarily inside the public system and enrolling kids for free, which private centers can’t compete with on price. Here’s what that’s actually done to private providers on the ground:

 

• New Jersey runs a “mixed delivery” model that was designed to lean on private and Head Start providers, but participation is sliding fast. In the original Abbott districts, private-provider enrollment dropped 25 percent between 2009 and 2022. In the newer expansion districts, only 17 percent of preschoolers are now served by private providers at all, meaning the public share keeps growing at private centers’ expense even where the state’s own policy calls for partnership.
• New York City has seen roughly a 20 percent decline in private center enrollment of 4-year-olds since Pre-K for All and 3-K expanded. Community-based providers (the centers the city calls “EarlyLearn” or NYCEECs) report losing children mid-year to public pre-K seats and say the city’s ability to see private waitlists and cold-call those families for public seats have made it harder for private programs to plan their budgets or retain staff.
• Illinois’ Smart Start initiative funnels new money to childcare providers partly to offset exactly this pressure, funding workforce grants and quality supports aimed at keeping private and community-based centers afloat as the state expands “Preschool for All.” That the state felt it needed a dedicated stabilization program for private providers is itself a sign of how much strain public expansion puts on them.
• Virginia funds two parallel tracks, VPI (public-school based) and Mixed Delivery (funds routed to private, community-based providers), but a 2025 state report found preschool access continuing to decline overall despite legislative efforts, and researchers found Virginia’s programs meeting only about half of the field’s recognized quality benchmarks.

 

That matters for the literacy argument too: if in-house public pre-K produces the same institution, curriculum philosophy, and instructional habits that are currently failing to teach kids to read by third and eighth grade in these same states, expanding it may simply extend those same problems two years earlier, while also squeezing out the private options families used to have as an alternative.

 

What the research says about private vs. public preschool

The evidence comparing private preschool to public pre-K and Head Start is mixed, but it does not uniformly favor the public model, which is worth noting given how confidently universal pre-K is marketed as the superior option.

 

A nationally representative study of low-income children (Coley et al., 2016) found kids who attended private pre-K outperformed peers from public pre-K, Head Start, and informal care on math and reading at kindergarten entry.

A meta-analysis comparing public pre-K and Head Start found public pre-K teachers spend more time on whole-group academic instruction and have higher average educational attainment, but results across studies for social-behavioral outcomes were mixed.

 

Other studies (for example, a Miami-based study by Ansari & Winsler) found public pre-K outperformed private pre-K on some readiness measures, underscoring that outcomes depend heavily on the specific programs being compared, not on “public” vs. “private” as categories in themselves.

 

The honest takeaway: quality, curriculum, and teacher training predict outcomes far more reliably than who operates the building. A voucher model lets families choose a high-quality private option directly, instead of betting on whatever quality level a given district’s new pre-K rollout happens to deliver.

 

“Free” doesn’t mean it covers your actual workday

The part of this debate that gets the least attention is the schedule. Standalone private preschools and daycare centers are typically built around a working parent’s day: 7 or 8 a.m. drop-off, pickup at 5 or 6 p.m., open through the summer, and closed only for major holidays. Public pre-K runs on the public-school calendar instead, and that gap is where a lot of families end up scrambling.

• New Jersey districts running mixed-delivery preschool follow local elementary school hours, and even full-day slots stop for the same winter break, spring break, and roughly 10-week summer vacation as K-12 students. Parents comparing options describe the real tradeoff clearly: a half-day preschool schedule means finding and paying for afternoon after-care every single day, and once that cost is added in, the “free” half-day public option can end up costing about as much as full-day private daycare would have in the first place.
• New York City’s Pre-K for All and 3-K run a standard school day of 6 hours and 20 minutes, roughly 9 a.m. to 3:20 p.m., and are closed on the same days DOE schools are closed. Extended Day and Year seats that stretch coverage to 10 hours and run through the summer exist, but they’re rationed by income eligibility, not available to every enrolled family, and seats are limited. A family that doesn’t qualify, or doesn’t win one of those seats, is left covering the other 4-plus hours a day, plus every school holiday and the entire summer, on their own.
• Illinois’ Preschool for All program is explicit about this trade-off: the state’s own parent materials say plainly that the program is typically half-day, follows the school calendar, and that “parents who need childcare are responsible for their children’s care before and after” the program, with no coverage over holidays, breaks, or summer at all.
• Virginia’s VPI mostly runs full school days (about 95 percent of slots), which helps, but it still follows each locality’s school-year calendar exactly, meaning no coverage during winter break, spring break, teacher workdays, or the roughly two and a half months of summer. A private preschool or Head Start center serving the same age group often runs closer to 50 weeks a year specifically because working parents need it to.

 

None of this makes free pre-K worthless. But it does mean the sticker price of “free” is misleading for any family that works a full-time schedule. Once you price in before-care, after-care, a summer camp, and coverage for every school closure and snow day, a supposedly free public seat can cost a family nearly as much, in time and money, as tuition at a private center that was built to run on a working parent’s actual clock. That’s a real cost universal pre-K plans routinely leave out of the pitch, and it’s another point in favor of letting families choose (and fund) a program whose hours actually match their lives, rather than assuming every household can bend its schedule to match the school system’s.

 

The case for vouchers over an in-house public model

1. Parental choice reflects real preferences. Surveys cited by the Cato Institute found fewer than a third of parents with young children were even using full-time, center-based care similar to a K-12 school model before universal programs arrived; many prefer part-time programs, faith-based centers, home-based care, or relative care, none of which fit neatly into a public-school building.
2. Existing private capacity already exists. Instead of standing up new classrooms, staff, and curricula inside public schools, states could fund the private centers and Head Start providers already serving communities and let money follow the child.
3. It avoids betting on an unproven expansion. Given that the strongest available randomized study of a statewide public pre-K program found negative long-term effects for participating children, moving cautiously, by funding choice rather than one institutional model, is the more defensible policy position until the evidence is clearer.
4. It addresses the root problem instead of a symptom. If elementary literacy instruction itself needs fixing, as NAEP’s ongoing decline suggests, pouring new funding into building out more of the same public system, rather than into evidence-based literacy reforms in the grades that already exist, may not move the needle on reading scores at all.

 

The bottom line

Free pre-K sounds like an unambiguous good, and for many families it will be. But “free” and “public school-run” aren’t the same decision and conflating them skips over a real policy choice: fund families directly so they can choose from public, private, or nonprofit options, or fund one institutional model and hope it scales better than the evidence so far suggests it will.

 

In New Jersey, New York, Illinois, and Virginia, the same public-school systems pushing hardest to add pre-K are simultaneously posting reading scores that haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and private preschool enrollment in at least two of these states (New Jersey and New York) is already visibly shrinking as public expansion rolls forward. Given that, it’s a reasonable, evidence-based position to ask public education in these states to fix its existing literacy problem before it takes on responsibility for another grade, and to let vouchers keep existing private preschools, which the data shows can perform as well as or better than public options, in the mix.

Sources

NCES, National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2024 Reading Results, nationsreportcard.gov

NAGB, “The Nation’s Report Card Shows Declines in Reading” (Jan. 2025), nagb.gov

FutureEd, “The New NAEP Scores Highlight a Standards Gap in Many States” (Feb. 2025)

Chalkbeat Newark, “New Jersey NAEP 2024 scores show reading, math levels remained flat” (Jan. 2025)

Chalkbeat Chicago, “What do 2024 NAEP scores tell us about how Illinois students are doing?” (Jan. 2025)

NYSSBA, “Despite some improvement, NAEP scores stay below pre-pandemic levels” (Feb. 2025)

NCES, 2024 Reading State Snapshot Report, New York, Grade 4

Hechinger Report, “A state-funded pre-K program led to ‘significantly negative effects’ for kids in Tennessee”

Durkin et al. (2022), “Effects of a Statewide Prekindergarten Program on Children’s Achievement and Behavior through Sixth Grade,” Developmental Psychology

Coley et al. (2016), cited in Preparing Students for Success: Differential Outcomes by Preschool Experience in Baltimore City (PMC)

Carr, Burchinal & Vernon-Feagans (2023), “Comparing the School Readiness Skills of Public Pre-Kindergarten and Head Start Participants,” EdWorkingPaper

Cato Institute, “Universal Preschool: Lawmakers Should Approach with Caution” (2022)

Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), “Governor Murphy’s Historic Early Childhood Education Legislation” (Aug. 2025)

NJ Department of Education, FY2026 Mixed Delivery Report to the State Legislature

CenterNYC, “What’s Needed for ‘3-K for All’ and Child Care Centers to…”

Chalkbeat New York, “NYC families are fleeing before kindergarten” (Oct. 2025)

Illinois Department of Early Childhood (IDEC), Smart Start Illinois program materials

Virginia Mercury, “Decline in preschool access continues in Virginia, despite legislative efforts” (May 2025)

NIEER, Virginia State Profile, 2024 Yearbook