Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Texas' public preschool program serves more 4-year-olds than any state-funded program in the nation, but it has a long way to go when it comes to quality.

Those are among the many findings in a report to be released today by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

The report nailed Texas for failing both to limit its class sizes and to require site visits to monitor the program's success, two of six benchmarks in a 10-point checklist that the state missed.

"Most districts in Texas probably have reasonable class sizes, but who are the children that don't?" said W. Steven Barnett, director of NIEER. "And you can bet that those are the children that need it the most."

Gina Day, deputy associate commissioner for state initiatives at the Texas Education Agency, said class size is a legislative issue. "It's really not something that TEA will take a stand on one way or another. But enabling a district to find solutions is really one way that we try to be of service."

For instance, to avoid crowding school buildings, Day said, public preschool teachers sometimes teach eligible children in private child care or Head Start settings.

She called the snub for failure to adequately monitor its program "misleading" and said "the monitoring that goes on is the same monitoring that goes on for any other grade level," including financial audits and other checks.

Laura Taylor, TEA's deputy associate commissioner for program monitoring and intervention, said the state's education code puts the onus on local school boards to directly oversee their classrooms.

Barnett said Texas, in particular, needs to improve the quality of its program because of the sheer number of children served. Like Texas, seven other states met just four of the 10 quality standards, but none enrolls as many 4-year-olds as the 170,313 in Texas' program last school year.

Day said state officials are working on improving quality. TEA is currently revising its early childhood curriculum guidelines for the first time since their adoption in 1999.

States have been pouring public dollars into preschool programs in recent years, bolstered by economic arguments that pre-kindergarten returns ripe dividends in the form of everything from reduced crime rates to increased homeownership.

Texas started its Public School Prekindergarten initiative in 1985, long before lawmakers began touting research about the development of preschoolers' brains and Federal Reserve economists began making speeches on the financial returns of a good program.

"Texas would be a relatively early starter, and clearly in terms of access it's in the top five," Barnett said. "The issue for Texas, where they've really fallen behind, is their standards. And it's the two together that's so worrying."

The state now enrolls 45 percent of Texas' 4-year-olds in its program — most are from poor families.

"People are going to be more likely to provide a poor-quality program to poor people than one that serves everyone," Barnett said.

Locally, questions have also been raised about the quality of another program for poor children: the federally funded Head Start program. About 10 percent of Texas 4-year-olds are enrolled in Head Start.

Not everyone is eligible for state-funded pre-kindergarten. Texas serves low-income students, as well as those who are homeless or have limited English skills. During the 2006-07 school year, the program opened to children with parents who are active-duty military or who were injured or killed on duty. And this school year, children who are or were in foster care became eligible.

Some Texas districts use their own funds to expand pre-kindergarten to everyone in the district.

Jason Sabo, senior vice president for public policy at the United Ways of Texas, would like to see the Texas program expand further, although he agrees with NIEER's findings that quality could improve.

Sabo said the United Way plans to push legislative bills next year that would open eligibility to children who were born premature and to children of certain public servants, including police officers and border patrol agents.

"Texas does serve a lot of its kids, and the question for all of us as parents and taxpayers and people concerned with the economy is, are we getting the biggest return on our investment for our tax dollars?" Sabo said.

He said he believes the Legislature is prepared to fund both expansions to the program and improvements in quality, such as class size mandates.

"There's just broad-based support for this," Sabo said, "It's unlike anything I've ever seen before."