In defending the Obama administration’s record on early education, officials have occasionally mentioned early education’s role in the Race to the Top competition. But in an analysis over on the Hechinger Report, we found that mentions of early education were more associated with losing applications.
We counted the number of times that finalists in the second round included the terms early education, early learning, early childhood, preschool and prek (which also captured prekindergarten) in their RttT applications. On average, we found that losing states included those words 49 times. Winning states, on the other hand, included the terms about 46 times.
By contrast, other popular words, like charter or standards, appeared hundreds of times in most applications. Some states were more enthusiastic — we counted 84 early ed mentions in Hawaii’s winning application, for example. Rhode Island, which won, and Louisiana, which lost, included the terms less than 20 times.
Our little study was, of course, superficial — beyond counting words, we did not examine the other content of the applications when it came to early learning. So it will be interesting to see whether this trend holds out in the implementation.