Georgia’s Universal Preschool Program Achieves High Marks In New Study

Research Provides New Evidence That Quality Matters In Prekindergarten Programs

Georgia's investment in universal prekindergarten has paid big dividends for the state's youngest citizens, according to new research, providing them with strong academic skills by the time they reach kindergarten.

Four-year-olds attending the public preschool program did as well or better than other four-year-olds around the state, showing significant improvements in math, letter and word recognition, vocabulary and oral expression.

"This research obviously provides a very positive picture to any state thinking of starting a universal prekindergarten program," says Gary Henry, professor at Georgia State University and author of the study. "It also speaks to the power of the state to improve quality by setting high standards. That's a very clear message in this study."

The children who did the best, for example, were the ones who attended programs headed by teachers with at least a four-year college degree. "This confirms what we are finding in other research as well," says W. Steven Barnett, NIEER's director. "Teacher training has an important influence on what happens in the classroom, both in the development of content for the kids and the way the teacher interacts with the children. A teacher with a bachelor's degree is better prepared and more positive with preschoolers than other teachers."

Henry and his colleagues followed 630 children during the 2001-2002 school year, and tracked their cognitive skills. "This study provides more ammunition for anyone who wants to champion the value of public prekindergarten," Henry says. "These children made identifiable, concrete gains in many areas, even surpassing national norms in many areas."

Roberta Youngblood, a teacher in Savannah, Georgia, said, "As a teacher, I had already observed the strides children make. But this study provides the scientific evidence. So many children come to me at the beginning of the year with limited vocabulary, no social skills and don't know how to follow directions. By the end of the year, they are completely different, confident, with much bigger vocabularies and they know how to get along, take turns, express their feelings."

Henry found the quality of programs could be traced directly to the standards the state set and the technical assistance it offered to particular programs. "This research shows that providing incentives, such as scholarships to teachers to get more education, pays off," he says. "And that is key to creating quality in the classrooms."

Indeed, Henry found that the state's public preschool programs tended to be of higher quality than private ones. "About 80 percent of the teachers in the public programs have bachelors degrees and that makes a huge difference," he says. "And that's because the state has monitored quality as the program grew, and created incentives to get the best teachers into the classrooms."

Georgia's public prekindergarten program, funded with state lottery funds, now serves 63,500 four-year-olds and is free to all families. "When Georgia started this program, a lot of people wondered if it would work. Many worried that Georgia was taking on too big a bite, and would not be able to set proper standards," says Henry. "But this study shows that a universal program can be of high quality, as long as the state uses its power to set standards and monitor the programs. In fact, this is a really big success story."

To view the full report, visit www.gsu.edu/sps/publications/2003/earlychildhood.htm.