Anya Eckert, center, lead teacher at La Casita Preschool in northern Santa Fe, helps extricate 3-year-old Gus Dicks from a swing in February 2022 while he plays outside at the preschool. A national report shows increased access to state-funded prekindergarten programs and growing enrollment.
Anya Eckert, center, lead teacher at La Casita Preschool in northern Santa Fe, helps extricate 3-year-old Gus Dicks from a swing in February 2022 while he plays outside at the preschool. A national report shows increased access to state-funded prekindergarten programs and growing enrollment.
The results are in: New Mexico is nearing the top quarter of U.S. states in terms of access to state-funded preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds and has seen what is likely record-high enrollment.
The National Institute for Early Education Research on Thursday released its annual State of Preschool 2023 Yearbook, a comprehensive look at preschool access, funding and quality across the U.S.
The report lists New Mexico 13th in the nation when it comes to both preschool access and per-child state spending — outpacing national averages and a far cry from the state’s usual spot at or near the bottom of nationwide K-12 education and child welfare rankings.
Some 660 more children were enrolled in preschool in the 2022-23 school year than the previous year, the report states.
“It’s good to see us there in the top 15,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, New Mexico’s Cabinet secretary of the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.
She expects to see another 1,300 children enrolled in 2024-25, she said in an interview Thursday.
Still, neither New Mexico nor the U.S. has completely solved its early childhood education challenges.
New Mexico’s accessibility ranking for 3-year-olds fell from 10th to 13th in the nation between the organization’s 2022 and 2023 Yearbooks, while the rating remained stagnant for 4-year-olds. And after adjusting for inflation, the state’s prekindergarten spending per child fell between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, the report indicates.
Steven W. Barnett, the institute’s senior co-director and founder, summed it up this way in a news conference: “The nation remains very far away from providing a high-quality preschool education to every child at age 4, much less at age 3.”
For the most part, the Yearbook tells a sunny story about New Mexico’s early childhood landscape that comes after a yearslong push by advocates and lawmakers for a surge in investments. They argued high-quality early learning would give the state’s children a boost that would help improve educational achievement, graduation rates and college readiness.
The effort yielded the creation of the Early Childhood Education and Care Fund and a state constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2022 that’s intended to send over $150 million annually to early childhood programs from New Mexico’s multibillion-dollar Land Grant Permanent Fund.
Across the state, 45% of 4-year-olds and 11% of 3-year-olds were enrolled in pre-K in 2022-23 — figures that outpace the national averages of 35% and 7%, respectively, the report found.
Those enrollment figures represent at least a 20-year high, indicating improvement within the state as well as recovery from pandemic-era reductions in preschool attendance.
“We are emerging from a time when the pandemic really hit preschool, vastly reducing enrollment, reducing attendance for kids who were enrolled,” Barnett said. “The good news is, as a nation, we have largely recovered from that.”
New Mexico met nine of the Yearbook’s 10 benchmarks for quality preschool programs, which consider components like class sizes and student-teacher ratios to assess the quality of care provided to each state’s youngest residents.
The only benchmark New Mexico was missing, the report states, is a requirement that all teachers have or are working toward a bachelor’s degree.
Groginsky said New Mexico implemented the requirement this year for pre-K teachers. Assistant teachers must have an associate degree.
“Quality matters,” Allison Friedman-Krauss, the report’s lead author, said during a news conference. “Studies have shown that not all state-funded programs are moving child outcomes in learning and development, likely because these programs don’t have adequate quality standards in place.”
The one place where New Mexico doesn’t quite stack up: Per-child state funding. During the 2022-23 school year, New Mexico offered up $8,008 per pre-K student. Twelve state programs spend more than that per student, with the District of Columbia topping the list by spending more than $22,000 per child on pre-K.
Adjusted for pandemic-era inflation, New Mexico’s per-child spending fell by $816 between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, the report states.
That’s not unique to New Mexico, Barnett noted.
“Adjusted for inflation, spending is … about in the same place it was 20 years ago,” he said. “They’re very few things you can say that about in education. We have a long way to go.”
Still, the report notes more early childhood education growth may be in New Mexico’s future.
Though it primarily draws from data from 2022-23, the report heralds state lawmakers’ nearly $100 million investment in early childhood programs during the 2023 legislative session and new child care assistance rules, promulgated in July, that increase per-child spending.
Groginsky also noted the state’s recent surge in early childhood spending. “We’re excited because we keep the investment and we keep increasing the amount that we’re paying for pre-K so that those salaries can be competitive and that we can make sure that our children are supported in high quality settings,” she said.
Now is the time for all states to continue to pursue accessible, quality and adequately funded early childhood education for all, Friedman-Krauss said.
“As states have mostly recovered from the challenges of the pandemic at this point, they can turn once again to addressing long-standing challenges for preschool education,” she said.
