California Promised ‘Preschool For All.’ What I Got Was $120,000 in Tuition Fees.

For a Generation, the Golden State Has Failed to Educate Its Youngest Citizens

Since the 1990s, California’s leaders have promised to make preschool universal for every child.

Maybe they’ll do it by the time I have grandchildren.

It’s already too late for my own kids. The youngest of my three sons graduated from preschool last week. I celebrated by writing my final preschool check—for monthly tuition of $1,165. With that check, my spending on preschool tuition for all three boys, over the last seven years, totaled more than $120,000.

All that tuition, alongside a 21st-century Southern California mortgage, has wiped away most of my family’s …

California Pre-K Is Doomed

The State’s Lack of Ambition Will Kill Universal Preschool Before It Starts

Hard to believe that only a decade ago—back in the fall of 2014—the future of pre-kindergarten looked so promising in California.

State leaders were congratulating themselves on passing a budget …

From Head Start to Harvard

How the Federal Program Connected a Nebraska 4-Year-Old, And Her Immigrant Parents, to the Country

“Did anyone here go to Head Start?”

It was an innocuous question, asked by my statistics professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. It might have been a rhetorical question, …