Georgia Pre-Kindergarten Program Receives High Ranking
Georgia’s Pre-Kindergarten program received the highest possible ranking in a new national study. It’s the first time the state has met all ten standards established in the “State of Preschool Yearbook.”
The report is published by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. The program’s executive director, Dr. Steve Barnett, says Georgia met all the criteria.
“Do you require teachers to be well-educated?” Barnett asks, “Do you have reasonable class sizes and ratio? And also do you send people from the state out there to look at what’s going on in the classrooms and make sure that the resources are actually being used effectively?”
But due to cuts to the program, Georgia isn’t expected to maintain that showing in 2012. Barnett says the lottery-supported program would benefit from an additional funding source. Mindy Binderman, executive director of the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, agrees. But she says Georgia’s program has done a lot with what they have.
“It’s very hard to fund as many children—85 thousand children—as Georgia does—adequately fund those slots and still meet all ten benchmarks, so I do think we have a lot to be proud of,” Binderman says.
Nationally, Georgia is one of five pre-k programs that met all of the benchmarks in 2011.
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