Free pre-K: Strong early gains, but long-term questions

Part 4 of the "Equity or Bust: Are Ontario's Public Schools a Model for Pennsylvania" Series: Ontario is widely lauded for its education system. But, like Pennsylvania, evidence in Toronto suggests that Ontario has struggled to close achievement gaps between historically underserved minorities and their peers. Many believe universal pre-K will prove to be the decisive factor in bridging that gap.

Despite comprising a third of the population, poor and minority students are drastically underrepresented in gifted education programs across the nation, even if their academic performance is on-par with their white peers. Federal Way Public Academy in Washington has re-examined its methods for finding academically talented kids and is changing the numbers.

A national study revealed that expulsion rates of preschool students - especially Black males - were startlingly high, especially compared to any other K-12 grade. The pattern was also shown to create a vicious cycle, exacerbating the likelihood of suspension in later grades. But a remedy was already in place in Connecticut, where a mental-health professional was kept on-hand to provide behavior coaching for teachers, drastically reducing expulsion rates. Seattle looks to replicate their model.

Parents are enrolling children in outdoor preschool programs where most of the schooling happens outdoors as an alternative to traditional preschools.

Part 1 of the "Equity or Bust: Are Ontario's Public Schools a Model for Pennsylvania" Series: Ontario has become widely lauded for its education system, celebrated for both high performance and relatively smaller achievement gaps between wealthy and poor students, thanks to the concept of "equity." This manifests, in essence, as more funding per-pupil to the school boards that serve students who face the greatest obstacles. The model contrasts starkly to the school system in Pennsylvania, regarded as "the most inequitable in the nation.”

Missing days at school, even when excusable, starts children on a pattern of falling behind. A new U.S. department of education initiative has districts tracking all absences, even in kindergarten, to identify and help kids with chronic absenteeism sooner.

The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools, and is now producing some of the highest graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and average test scores in public schools in the nation.

With arts funding on the cutting board across the country, students can lack motivation to go to school and the creative resources for critical thinking skills. In Brooklyn, Ascend Learning is an inner-city network of public charter schools that offer a rich arts environment to teach Common Core and the student academic performance has surpassed other schools in the neighborhood.

Washington’s Transition to Kindergarten initiative provides state-funded pre-K programming for 4-year-olds, helping them learn classroom expectations, social emotional skills, and foundational academic concepts before starting kindergarten. More than 7,000 spots were available this year, but recent state budget cuts have slowed the program’s expansion.

Small rural schools in New Hampshire achieved some of the state's highest reading scores by leveraging their size to create multi-grade classrooms, provide individualized support to all students, and build long-term student-teacher relationships. In result, these lower-income districts have outperformed expectations by the widest margins in the state.