December 6, 2016      5:16 PM

Advocates push to double funding for Abbott's pre-k grants

The TEA budget request only covers one year of a two-year investment; meantime Gov. Abbot is rallying for a convention of states

Advocates are pushing hard for more investment in pre-kindergarten knowing full well that the Texas Education Agency’s budget request only funds one year of a two-year investment.

Grants for quality pre-kindergarten programs were, of course, a top priority of Gov. Greg Abbott during his first session as the state’s chief executive officer. It was so important to him, in fact, that Abbott made a rare appearance before the House Republican Caucus to ask for their support while some Tea Party groups railed against Pre-K as “godless” socialism.

A new Children at Risk study, funded by the Meadows Foundation, is a look at the outcomes of those children who participated in pre-k and their eventual results on the third-grade STAAR assessment. A review of 47,000 children showed that those who participated in full-day pre-kindergarten were 40 percent more likely to be on pace for college readiness.

“The big thing was if you did the high-quality pre-k -- which we defined as full day with student-teacher ratios of 1-to-11 or 2-to-22 and if they had quality K-3, which we defined as our gold ribbon schools, then those kids had significantly better scores,” said Bob Sanborn of Children at Risk, which presented the report on the same day Gov. Abbott was holding a rally at the Capitol for his new top priority: A convention of states to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.

Sanborn’s statement about the kids’ performance needs to be unpacked.

By Kimberly Reeves

Copyright December 06, 2016, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved