New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has fulfilled his campaign promise of increasing access to pre-kindergarten. While his initial plan to tax residents earning more than $500,000 a year was rejected after much negotiation with Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators, New York City secured $300 million to fund pre-K programs. De Blasio has promised to have the program ready within the next two years, and parents are responding positively with a 36% increase in applications compared to last year. While I applaud de Blasio’s efforts to make pre-K more accessible, there also needs to be a focus on providing high quality and equitable education to all students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, as social inequalities continue to exacerbate.

Education has long been touted as the great equalizer, but black and Hispanic students continue to have lower academic performance when compared to their white counterparts. This is due to the structural inequities in the public education system. Black and Hispanic students in New York City are more likely to attend high need, low performing schools; they tend to have lower standardized tests scores, lower high school graduation rates, and lower college enrollment rates. The Center for Research on Children in the United States (CROCUS) at Georgetown University conducted research on Universal Pre-K in Oklahoma, a pioneer of early childhood education, and showed black and Hispanic students make the most statistically significant gains. This means black and Hispanic students, typically the most disadvantaged, have the most to gain from pre-K enrollment. Pre-K serves to level the playing field and allows for greater educational opportunities. In addition, multiple studies have shown that high quality pre-K, measured by teacher quality, has positive effects on future outcomes like college graduation, income level, and home ownership.

It’s clear that pre-K programs have a positive impact on disadvantaged students, and now that de Blasio has the finances to gear his plan into action, the focus of education policy should be on ensuring pre-K programs are of a consistent high quality and that effective teachers are placed into pre-K classrooms. Although he plans to raise teacher salaries as a means of attracting early education teachers, it is not a cure all means of adequately preparing teachers to positively impact their students. While higher salaries may serve as an incentive, greater care needs to be placed on recruiting, training, and retaining teachers so they are adequately equipped to be effective in the classroom. This is particularly true of de Blasio’s pre-K program if he is to be our city’s first progressive mayor working towards ending social inequality. Like most things, it starts with properly educating our children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, the future of society.