Public Pre-K in New York City Keeps Getting Better

NEW YORK — A well-placed, orderly sandbox. Teachers who laugh often. Plenty of miniature tables and chairs.

Those are markers of an excellent pre-K classroom. And New York City, home to the largest citywide prekindergarten initiative in the country, has these features — and many more — in the vast majority of its programs, according to new data shared with The New York Times.

In 2018, about 94 percent of the city’s pre-K programs met or exceeded a threshold that predicts positive student outcomes after pre-K, according to a national evaluation system, the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, developed by a coalition of experts.

This means that as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature initiative — public pre-K for all 4-year-olds in New York City — gets bigger, it is also getting better.

In 2013, there were only 19,000 New York City children enrolled in pre-K; de Blasio’s initiative launched in 2014 and now enrolls about 70,000 pre-K students.

The new data represents a big jump from the first time the mayor’s pre-K system was evaluated in 2015, when just 77 percent of the programs were found to be up to par. So it is not just that existing programs are improving; many of the new pre-Ks joining the initiative are already high quality.

“The hardest thing is getting instructional quality at scale across thousands of classrooms,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of Bank Street College of Education and a former top education official under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

New York appears to have succeeded so far.

When city inspectors enter pre-K classrooms, they are looking for things a parent who simply sees a room of exuberant toddlers might miss.

There should be a clear nap schedule, students who know how to wash their hands by themselves and lots of opportunities for children to talk. There should be few instances when the entire class is gathered together on the rug, and instead children should be playing in small groups.

And when children misbehave, the teacher should not yell or berate them. Instead, teachers should tell students what they did wrong and what they should do better next time.

New York City’s pre-K programs scored especially high on students’ language and reasoning skills and interaction among children, and scored lowest on the “personal care routines” category.

The work is far from over, both in New York and in cities experimenting with large pre-K programs around the country. Research has shown that if students move from excellent pre-Ks to mediocre kindergarten and first-grade classes, the gains achieved in pre-K can evaporate. As New York’s pre-K expands and becomes more successful, the city should focus on improving its early elementary school instruction, Polakow-Suransky said.

“If we’re going to be a model, we need to pay attention to the places other folks have struggled,” he said.

This year, the city added more reading coaches in an attempt to assist teachers instructing elementary school students.

In the meantime, universal pre-K has provided de Blasio with his clearest political win and perhaps his best shot at the national prominence he has long sought. The program was implemented relatively smoothly, is broadly popular and continues to pay dividends for a mayor who has not reached the same level of success with the rest of his education agenda.

De Blasio’s high-profile plan for struggling schools, known as Renewal, was a disappointment and is set to end in the coming months. He has faced criticism from advocates who want him to take more forceful action to racially integrate city schools.

The second phase of the mayor’s early childhood education plan is just beginning. In 2017, de Blasio announced the expansion of pre-K into a program for 3-year-olds, now commonly known as 3-K.

The program currently serves about 5,000 children in six mostly low-income neighborhoods. 3-K will be available throughout the city in 2021 — if City Hall can secure $700 million in funding from the state or federal government before then.

Expanding city schools into a system that runs from 3-18 years old will present big challenges.

As part of the 3-K expansion, de Blasio’s administration will have to find suitable space for thousands of toddlers. In addition, the program will confront a long-standing issue: salary disparities among early childhood teachers in different types of schools. Plus, the mayor will have to bring much of the city infrastructure that supports infants and toddlers under the Department of Education, rather than the Administration for Children’s Services.

But 3-K offers significant opportunities, said Kendra Hurley of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, who has studied the issue.

Under pre-K and now 3-K, she said, New York “can follow kids from birth onto high school.”