preschool – RI Future

I believe I have discovered a math error in Angel Taveras’s pre-kindergarten plan. Instead of $24.6 million, the total annual cost should actually be $55.2 million.

The “Ready Rhode Island” plan is only designed to provide one year of preschool, right before kindergarten, and the math error centers around confusing the figures for all preschoolers with the figures for just four-year-olds. Here are the key passages:

About 10,800 students are enrolled in public first grade, and we can expect a similar number of enrollees in Pre-K. Subtracting the number of students enrolled in Head Start and Preschool Special Education implies that approximately 5,200 children can benefit from state sponsored pre- kindergarten.

The plan then continues:

We will start by creating slots for 2,650 children to enroll in a high-quality, full-day pre-kindergarten program. Accounting for the percentage of Rhode Island four-year-olds already served by another public program, Rhode Island would achieve a 76% pre-kindergarten enrollment rate, among the highest in the nation.

Unfortunately, the critical assumption here–that public preschool programs cover slightly more than half of Rhode Island’s four-year-olds–is not correct. However, from the links, it is clear what mistake Taveras’s policy team made. They subtracted the total number of preschoolers, ages zero through four, enrolled in Head Start (2,966), Preschool Special Ed (2,565), and the Rhode Island Prekindergarten Program (108) from the expected number of four-year-olds (10,800). Essentially, they confused figures for four-year-olds with figures for all preschoolers.If you just look at four-year-olds, only 21% are covered by a public program, leaving 5,940 new pre-kindergarten slots needed to meet Taveras’s goal of 76% coverage. Using the plan’s assumed annual per child cost of $9,300, correcting the numbers raises the real annual cost to $55.2 million, up from the original $24.6 million.

Universal preschool for four-year-olds is a fantastic idea that would meaningfully improve the lives of thousands of Rhode Island families. Unfortunately, Angel Taveras’s “Ready Rhode Island” plan does not present a realistic proposal for achieving that goal. Because of a math error, it understates the cost by more than a factor of two.

It is disappointing that this admirable idea was presented to Rhode Island in the form of a proposal that was not yet ready for prime time. Hopefully, the Taveras campaign will release a new proposal that corrects the math error and includes a viable revenue stream to pay for the true cost.

I spoke with Taveras’s team about this yesterday morning, but as of press time, they have yet to get back to me with their response.

I just had my second child. Due to this, my childcare bill is now over $2000 a month. As a result, almost half of my family’s take-home salary is spent on childcare and childcare related expenses. It does not surprise me when people ask why we are sending our children to daycare instead of staying home.

I usually have to take the time to explain to them that short-term economic planning in this case makes little long term sense. Every year that one of us is out of the workforce, our long term earning potential is decreased. That means that 20 years from now when our kids are grown, we will make less than we would have if we had stayed in the workforce. We also would not earn any social security credits, or have the ability to put away for retirement. That means that if one of us stays home today because it makes financial sense to do so, we are more likely to be poor when we are older.

Unfortunately, most people don’t make these types of long term decisions.

Perhaps more importantly, I know several people in which it would actually cost them more to have their kids in day care than it does for one parent to stay home. In every situation in which this has been the case, one parent has decided to stay home until their kids are in school despite the long term consequences. They simply can’t make ends meet on a day to day basis if their kids are in daycare.

So, why is this the case? Lilian Faulhaber makes a great argument in her recent NYT op-ed. She argues that the tax system systematically discourages middle class women from working. The thing is, while it is normally women, it is not always women. The tax system simply discourages middle class families from having both parents in the workforce.

While she does not address this, in his State of the Union address, the President called for funding for universal public pre-school. Having a high quality public preschool program would at least decrease the amount of time that parents stay out of the work force even if the tax code stays the same.

Tag: preschool

Math error in Taveras’s pre-K plan

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