Report: Florida ‘somewhat hospitable’ to charter schools offering pre-K

Florida’s Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten program serves four in five four-year-olds, making it one of the largest public preschool programs in the country and one of the state’s most popular forms of school choice.

The scale and accessibility of VPK help make the state one of the more hospitable in the country to charter schools who want offer preschool, according to a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. But there is still room to improve.

In a few states, charter schools have found it relatively easy to offer state-funded pre-K. These include Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, as well as Washington, D.C. None of these jurisdictions provide the perfect environment for charter schools interested in offering pre-K, but they offer the best existing opportunities.

The report finds nearly a third of the Florida’s charter elementary schools offer preschool in some form — either as private providers, which can receive VPK vouchers, or as public schools. The latter route requires approval by district school boards, which is also true if charter schools want to expand to serve other grade levels.

That regulatory hurdle, coupled with Florida’s relatively low preschool funding, help explain the state’s less-than-perfect score.

Why does this matter? As Fordham’s Mike Petrilli and Amber Northern point out in their introduction, the Obama Administration and advocates around the country are pushing to expand the quality and accessibility of pre-K programs.

What the Left and Right can get behind are pre-K programs that deliver the goods: nonprofit institutions able to prepare young children, and especially low-income children, for the rigors of education today. What could be a more ideal solution, both politically and substantively, than high-quality charter schools?

Both private and traditional public schools have found offering pre-K can help them grow enrollment by attracting students who might later sign up for kindergarten, while helping to ensure those five-year-olds are academically prepared. Both those incentives, it would seem, also to apply to charters.