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Overview

The National Prekindergarten Center at the FPG Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was established to help local, state, and federal leaders develop and implement high quality prekindergarten programs through research, policy analysis, technical assistance, and communication.

NPC focused most of its efforts on three primary areas: finance, governance, and professional development.
Prekindergarten Policy Framework
Use NPC’s Pre-K Framework to find research-based information on how to build high-quality programs, examples of state programs, and links to state prekindergarten websites and other useful web resources.
  • Finance: The burning question for most policymakers is, "How much will a prekindergarten program cost?" Cost is a major barrier to providing voluntary, universal prekindergarten services. States need accurate cost information and models for how to blend various funding sources to support such services.
  • Governance: Governance concerns the role of federal, state, and local governments in administrating prekindergarten programs. Simply put, "Who is in charge of what?" For K-12 education, state and local governments are primarily responsible for educating its children and the federal government provides some support and technical assistance. In the prekindergarten arena, the roles are still unclear.
  • Professional Development: Less than half of the current teachers of three- and four-year-olds in this country have a BA degree. If we want every prekindergarten teacher to have a BA degree, then we will have to work hard to train a sufficient number of teachers to meet the growing need.

All three of these areas are critical to the success of the US in providing high quality prekindergarten programs to preschoolers. NPC has worked with others across the country to tackle these important issues and to move the country closer to providing high quality education services to all of our preschoolers.

NPC was led by Richard Clifford and Kelly Maxwell. Dick was Co-Director of the National Center for Early Development and Learning, which conducted a six-state study of prekindergarten services. Kelly directed North Carolina's statewide school readiness assessment, co-led the evaluation of the NC Smart Start early childhood initiative, and served on the NC More at Four prekindergarten evaluation team.

The National Prekindergarten Center was primarily funded by the Foundation for Child Development.