School districts and communities across the nation are doing a poor job of keeping track of how many children attend publicly funded preschool and kindergarten programs, leading to an inability to gauge whether those programs are meeting students’ needs, according to an issue brief from the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative.
The report released last month says the diversity of funding including local, state, and federal for pre-K programs increases the challenges of collecting data about them. And disparities in enrollment requirements, length of programs, and ages of enrolled children only add to the problem.