New Data Shed Light on Pre-K Enrollment Numbers and Discipline Patterns

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights recently released long-awaited data from the 2020-2021 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), an extensive survey of all public schools and districts across the United States. The Office of Civil Rights has been collecting this data since 1968 to track issues related to equal educational opportunity and has been adding data points over time. The CRDC measures everything from course offerings to enrollment to bullying; the last data released was from 2017-2018. Starting with the 2011-2012 collection, the CRDC has been administered every two years, but the pandemic postponed the 2019-2020 collection. With this latest release of data, the Office of Civil Rights reminds readers to use caution when comparing the new data to previous years due to the impact of the pandemic.

In this blog we’ll highlight what the data tell us about early learning in the United States.

Pre-K Enrollment

The pre-K data collected as part of the CRDC refers to programs that are offered through public school districts for children between the ages of three and five. During the 2020-2021 school year, 61 percent of the nation’s 17,821 public school districts offered public pre-K programs and services, serving a total of 1.2 million children. The majority (66 percent) of children enrolled in these programs were four years old, with three-year-olds making up 21 percent of children served and five-year-olds making up the final 14 percent. Out of the 1.2 million children enrolled in public pre-K, 24 percent were students with disabilities and 10 percent were English learners.

It’s important to remember that just because a district offers pre-K does not mean that it is reaching all young children (35 state pre-K programs have an income eligibility requirement, for example). Also, the availability of public pre-K programs can vary greatly depending on where a child lives within the country. For example, 65 percent of Vermont four-year-olds were enrolled in the state pre-K program during the 2021-2022 school year compared to only 10 percent in Ohio. According to the most recent NIEER Preschool Yearbook that examines state-funded pre-K programs, six states still lack any state-funded pre-K program at all and access varies widely in the states that do offer public pre-K.

Pre-K Discipline

Harmful disciplinary practices such as suspensions and expulsions persist in ECE, the data show, even though the federal government notes that such practices are associated with negative life outcomes. Nearly 1,000 children enrolled in public pre-K received one or more out-of-school suspensions and approximately 220 were expelled. Rates of suspension and expulsion were disproportionate for Black and White children, children of two or more races, Black and White boys, and students with disabilities. This means that they were higher than one would expect based on their enrollment rates.

Pre-K programs have historically disciplined Black children at far higher rates than their enrollment rates, a trend that continued in 2020-21. Black pre-K children’s rate of out-of-school suspensions (31 percent) was nearly double their enrollment rate (17 percent). The data show especially high disproportionality for Black boys; their rates of suspension and expulsion (23 percent and 20 percent, respectively) were more than double their enrollment rate (9 percent).

Pre-K boys overall faced higher and more disproportionate disciplinary rates than girls. Boys accounted for 54 percent of pre-K children but 81 percent of suspensions and 85 percent of expulsions. On the other hand, disciplinary rates for girls overall were lower than their enrollment rate.

Pre-K children with disabilities accounted for 62 percent of expelled children, even though they only comprised about one quarter (24 percent) of enrollment. They also represented about one-third (34 percent) of suspended children. These high rates of harmful discipline reflect a history of removing children with disabilities from the classroom despite their legal right to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment, per the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Given that the last data collection of this kind occurred before the COVID-19 crisis, it is difficult to draw straightforward conclusions about how this new collection compares. However, it remains constant that too few districts provide pre-K, especially when it comes to access for three-year-olds. And of the children that did attend public pre-K programs, too many were blocked from truly accessing it due to inappropriate suspensions and expulsions. It will require robust investment at the state and federal level to ensure that all young children have access to pre-K settings that are high-quality, developmentally appropriate, and free from exclusionary discipline.