Obama's pre-k advocacy: agenda-setting vs. polarization

When President Obama boasted during the State of the Union address that 30 states had started preschool initiatives, I mentally gave him some credit for agenda-setting. But some contiguous corner of the mind added that there's got to be caveats to that.  A Times article today by Richard Perez-Pena and Motoko Rich about the national drive toward state-funded preschool brings the caveats into focus.

First, while momentum in the last year has been impressive,  with new initiatives in Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, and San Antonio, the movement has been picking up steam for at least a decade, with the number of children in state-funded preschool more than doubling since 2002.  And as this year's initiatives illustrate, the effort has been bipartisan. Perez-Pena and Rich outline the political imperatives:

Few government programs have broader appeal than preschool. A telephone poll conducted in July for the First Five Years Fund, a nonprofit group that advocates early education programs, found that 60 percent of registered Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats supported a proposal to expand public preschool by raising the federal tobacco tax.

“Preschool is, generally speaking, a crowd pleaser,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group.