On Tuesday night, in her State of the State address, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo staked her second term on an ambitious promise. “Tonight, I pledge to be the governor who brings universal public Pre-K to Rhode Island,” she said. “By the time I leave office, there will be a Pre-K seat for every four-year-old whose parents want it. The budget I’ll submit later this week sets us on a path to make that happen. Let’s get this done.”

Across our divided nation, universal pre-Kindergarten is one of the few policies with bipartisan momentum. In announcing his candidacy for president earlier this month, Julian Castro touted his success in expanding full-day pre-K while he was mayor of San Antonio. “As president,” he said, “I’ll make pre-K for the U.S.A. happen!” On the other side of the aisle, conservative states like Alabama have been pouring money into expanding their state-funded pre-K programs, while Oklahoma was one of the first in the nation to implement pre-K for all.



Here’s the problem: Universal pre-K is bad policy. Public money for early childhood education would be much better spent on programs that support families.

The term universal pre-K refers to publicly funded education for 4-year-olds—and, increasingly, 3-year-olds—regardless of income or other eligibility criteria other than age. To address the challenge of school readiness, the policy treats the child as the unit of change. Give her extra time in an academic environment, the theory goes, and she’s more likely to arrive in Kindergarten with the building blocks needed to succeed. This is not strictly false, but it misses the big picture of how child development works.

Children are making over a million neural connections per second in the earliest months in life, and there is now a scientific consensus that brain architecture is being built long, long before a child enters pre-K. This means that pre-K, as an early childhood policy, is pointing at the wrong part of the developmental arc; it’s adding a second floor before ensuring the foundation is sturdy. What determines the strength of a child’s neurological structures is a dizzying interplay of environmental factors centered on the home. An interdisciplinary panel of experts put it this way in a landmark report in 2000 titled Neurons to Neighborhoods:

