Before School

By David L. Kirp

This article appeared in the November 21, 2005 edition of The Nation.

November 2, 2005

The scene at San Francisco's Grace Child Development Center could have been lifted straight from a feel-good movie. On a perfect summer day the cameras rolled and reporters crowded around as filmmaker and preschool activist Rob Reiner joined a table of 4-year-olds. He found himself talking about movies with a precocious girl named Diamond, who has ambitions to be a movie star--both Reiner and Diamond are fans of The Cat in the Hat--and April, a would-be doctor who can almost spell her name.

Reiner was on hand to celebrate the launch of the city's universal pre-kindergarten program. Flanked by local politicians, he turned the occasion into a rally for a proposed measure that would guarantee access to a high-quality preschool for every 4-year-old in the state. The initiative will be on the June 2006 ballot. "Even though preschool isn't a sexy issue, it's a critical issue," he said. "If we don't make an investment in young children, we have no chance of reaching the society we want."

In recent years this message--that early education isn't something that should be left entirely to families; that the government also has an obligation to improve the lives of young children--has started to resonate with parents, voters and taxpayers. Publicly supported pre-kindergartens are proliferating nationwide. Four states (Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia and New York) now formally guarantee universal preschool, and thirty-seven others support some preschool programs.

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About David L. Kirp

David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Almost Home: America's Love-Hate Relationship With Community (Princeton).David L. Kirp's dissection of American universities, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, has just been published by Harvard University Press. His latest book, The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics, will be published in August. more...
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