A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Shelby County School District’s Voluntary Preschool Program: The Challenges of Equity,Choice,Efficiency,and Social Cohesion

Abstract

In this article, the Tennessee’s Voluntary Prekindergarten (TN-VPK) program in general and the Shelby County Schools’ VPK program in particular are analyzed using the policy instruments of regulation, finance, and support services. The geospatial analysis (Geographic Information Systems or “GIS”) indicates that many of VPK’s site locations are unable to provide access to all qualified applicants. For both TN-VPK and Shelby County Schools, it is useful not only to analyze the varied aspects of state and federally funded public-choice Pre-K programs, but also to evaluate the consequences to equity, freedom of choice, productive efficiency, and social cohesion in a geospatial context.

Keywords

Pre-K school choice early childhood education spatial proximity

Introduction

Tennessee’s Voluntary Prekindergarten (TN-VPK) program within the Shelby County School district is an example of a state-sponsored early childhood education program designed to serve economically disadvantaged, at-risk and English Language Learners (ELL) students. As in many cities in the United States with a high proportion of minorities, Memphis and Shelby County suggests that the promise of equal opportunity and social mobility through education will have a profound impact on underresourced schools in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods. The relationship between poverty and education is more complex than simple cause and effect, and can be mediated by interventions such as quality Pre-K programs (The Urban Child Institute, 2006). Advocates for early childhood education programs (both universal and targeted programs) believe that families need opportunities that will decrease the disparities in educational experiences among children (Barnett, 1998, 2008). Many types of schools, including private providers, will compete for children and their per-pupil allocation. Presumably, competition for children will lead to a greater range of choice and rising efficiency in Pre-K programs as schools have financial incentives to attract and retain their enrollments (Levin, 2002). However, some critics believe that state-sponsored early childhood education programs will not solve the opportunity gap in education attributable to neighborhood context, lead to minimal if any improvements in the productive efficiency of schools, and are not sufficient for sustained positive social outcomes needed for social cohesion of a democratic society (Levin, 2002). Others counter that early childhood providers serving the most economically disadvantaged and at-risk children will be more likely to be seen as low-performing regardless of the program’s productive efficiency, thereby leaving providers less inclined to serve these children with the greatest needs, thus limiting freedom of choice and equity of opportunity.

In this study, the TN-VPK in general and the Shelby County Schools’ VPK program in particular are analyzed using the policy instruments of regulation, finance, and support services. The likely consequences of the TN-VPK program on the criteria of freedom of choice, productive efficiency, equity, and social cohesion based on specific benchmarks are predicted using the analysis of the policy instruments. The policy analysis follows primarily the work of Henry Levin (2002), who developed a comprehensive framework for evaluating universal Pre-K programs and other public-choice mechanisms including educational vouchers. Although Tennessee’s VPK programs are not universal, the components of Levin’s research in other states that offer publicly funded parental choice options are worth applying to assess other choice-based systems, since most of his research is based in the same areas that currently impact TN-VPK in terms of public funding and the issue of vouchers currently being debated in the state legislature. Levin’s (1991, 2002) comprehensive framework has been supported by other researchers, including Friedman (1962), Jencks and Areen (1970), Chubb and Moe (1990), Metcalf and Legan (2002), Belfield and Levin (2005), Levin and Schwartz (2005), and Hoenack (1997).

This study addresses the following questions:

How do the features of the TN-VPK program and within the Shelby County Schools stand according to the policy instruments on finance, regulation, and support services?

What are the consequences of the TN-VPK program and within the Shelby County Schools with respect to Levin’s four criteria for evaluation of publicly funded preschool programs, namely, freedom of choice, equity, productive efficiency, and social cohesion?

Having argued for the use of Levin’s framework, this study considers the goals and criteria for evaluation of publicly funded preschool programs within an urban context. The likely consequences of voluntary Pre-K programs based on comprehensive evaluation criteria (i.e., Levin’s framework) are a pressing research and policy issue that is relatively unstudied in the sociodemographic context of urban settings, particularly with a focus on neighborhoods and other small urban subunits. We argue that because the benefits conferred by proximity or geographic accessibility to urban preschools contribute so much to the provision of Pre-K services, spatial/locational issues often form the focus of conflict and tension within any proposed education reform, thus giving the spatial/locational perspective a key role in the analysis of voluntary preschool programs. In this study, we use a geographic information system (GIS) to frame Levin’s four criteria for the evaluation of a voluntary, publicly funded preschool program (VPK) within urban spatial context. Our study seeks to contribute to the emerging research on early childhood education and care services in urban contexts (Jeynes, 2012), by using the elements of a framework to analyze public-choice programs in tandem with a spatial perspective.

The discussion suggested in this policy review will be useful to state representatives, researchers, policy makers, and any stakeholders (i.e., district officials, principals, and teachers) in Shelby County Schools (SCS) who are interested in the implementation of early childhood accountability systems as a tool to improve children’s learning opportunities. States with public Pre-K programs are increasingly improving their early childhood accountability systems by measuring program quality, incentivizing improvements, and providing parents with information about preschool quality so they can make informed choices. While the information gleaned from this study will be beneficial specifically to SCS, other large urban school districts can use the results of this study to understand the importance of freedom of choice, efficiency, equity, and social cohesion in establishing an effective district-run, Pre-K program.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section “Research Context” provides the research context of the study. Section “Conceptual Framework” presents the policy analysis of the paper, primarily using the work of Levin (2002) as a framework. Section “Data and Method” describes the data and analysis methods. Section “Analysis of the TN-VPK program: Regulation, Finance, and Support Services” analyzes the policy instruments, while Section “Spatial Analysis of VPK Programs in SCS” provides the geographic locations of the VPK programs in the context of racially and economically segregated neighborhood environments. Section “Consequences of the VPK Program: Freedom of Choice, Productive Efficiency, Equity, and Social Cohesion” applies the assessment criteria for the Shelby County Schools’ Voluntary Pre-K (VPK) program. Section “Conclusion” concludes the article.

Research Context

SCS in Context

Tennessee is the 37th most urban state in the nation, with almost 67% of the population residing in urban areas.¹ According to research study done by the Institute of Education Science, the majority of the state’s VPK programs are located in four major urban areas (Memphis, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Nashville). With a population of 927,644, Shelby County is the largest county in the state of Tennessee.² It is located on the southwest corner of the state, at the east bank of the Mississippi River, considered a geographically mixed community with the city of Memphis as the county seat and joined by six surrounding suburban municipalities and rural unincorporated areas.³ Countywide, the racial breakdown of Shelby County is 41% White, 52% Black, 2% Asian, and 5% of some other race or two or more races (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014). The percentage of Hispanic or Latino people (of any race) is approximately 6%. Shelby County has seven independent school districts—SCS (located in Memphis), six suburban municipal school districts (a product of a successful suburban-led demerger effort that concluded in 2014) and Achievement School District (a state-run school district; Rushing, 2017). As a school district, SCS covers a 461 square mile area, nearly twice the size of the average school district geographic size in the nation (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], n.d.). The district is evolving from its merger and demerger of municipal districts in the past 3 years. The city of Memphis and its surrounding suburbs have a long history of White-minority residential segregation by socioeconomic status or “SES” (income, education, and poverty). As compared to their counterparts in most suburbs outside of the city limits, Memphis is a high-needs community with a median household income of US$39,593, a poverty rate of 22.6%, a child poverty rate of 42.3%, and a majority African American population.⁴ According to the 2010 census data, the Memphis metropolitan statistical area is one of eight cities in the nation in which minorities make up a majority of the population. Presently, SCS has a need that significantly exceeds its current number of high-quality preschool seats: it has 5,420 seats to serve 16,900 4-year-olds (Roberts, 2014).

Although the TN-VPK program is recognized as a national leader in Pre-K quality, achieving nine out of 10 standard benchmarks set by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), many of the state’s large urban school districts such as SCS are unable to provide access to all qualified applicants. Because funding a high-quality Pre-K program is extremely expensive, having adequate federal and state support is critical to the success of a large urban Pre-K program. For both TN-VPK and SCS, it is useful not only to analyze the varied aspects of state and federally funded public-choice Pre-K programs, but also to evaluate the consequences of the lack of access to qualified participants in large urban school districts whose demographics and socioeconomic profile reflect the state’s diversity. Although this policy analysis is state- and county-specific, high-quality compensatory Pre-K programs (i.e., universal Pre-K programs) are now also strongly encouraged nationally and even required for states to be competitive for federal funding.

Early Childhood Programs in Urban Context

Despite the fact that preschool programs for 4-year-olds are the fastest growing category of public spending on education (Barnett & Yarosz, 2004), both states and federal government have fallen short of what is needed to ensure that children from lower income families and children from urban areas can access a high-quality early education that will prepare them for success. There are important consequences for children and schools that are relevant for policy makers and residents of urban areas. Research from longitudinal studies of high-quality preschool programs provided to children from economically disadvantaged families indicates that these interventions generate significant social benefits in terms of higher earnings of participants, higher tax revenues, and lower costs to the public for criminal behavior and income-support programs (Heckman & Masterov, 2007; Temple & Reynolds, 2007).

For example, the High/Scope Perry Preschool Study, which began in 1962, has been the focus of an ongoing longitudinal study of 123 high-risk African American children to assess the effects of a high-quality preschool program on varied educational outcomes (Schweinhart et al., 2005). A 2005 cost–benefit analysis of the original participants at age 40 indicated that those who had the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have preschool (Nores, Belfield, Barnett, & Schweinhart, 2005; Schweinhart et al., 2005).

Another study, the Abecedarian Project initiated in 1972 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, provided educational child care and high-quality preschool from age 0 to 5 to children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. A follow-up study of the group at age 21 showed that those who had received early childhood education services were more likely to pursue higher education, postpone having children, and perform well on intelligence test.

Finally, the Chicago Child-Parent Center (CPC) Program was established in 1967 through Title I of the the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) (the Act’s largest funding program). The program was designed for children in poverty who lived in Chicago’s west side neighborhoods: children who were born into poverty and the corresponding cyclic relationship to socioeconomic disadvantages that depress student performance (Reynolds, 1991).⁵ The Chicago Longitudinal study (Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2001) began in 1986 with 1,539 low-income minority students from 26 Chicago public schools. Initial results indicated that the program had positive effects on children’s academic and social outcomes (Reynolds, 1991, 1995; Reynolds et al., 2001). A follow-up study conducted in 2001 revealed that students who participated in the preschool program had higher earnings, better health (i.e., less likely to be identified for special education services), were more economically independent, and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system (Reynolds et al., 2001).

Of the three major studies highlighted above, the urban context of the CPC Program is the most relevant to this study. Like Chicago, SCS (located in the city of Memphis) operate in heavily populated areas. Compared to suburban and rural school districts, urban school districts are often marked by entrenched poverty, greater racial/ethnic isolation, larger concentrations of immigrant populations, and more frequent rates of student mobility (Kincheloe, 2004). The challenges facing early learning programs cannot be divorced from its sociodemographic context. According to Orfield (2004), segregation and poverty underlie grander issues in urban education systems: It is wrong to assume that segregation is irrelevant, and policies that ignore that fact simply punish the victims of segregation because they fail to take into account many of the causes of the inequality. Sociodemographic attributes have a significant impact on how urban schools are structured. The concentration of poverty and racial isolation matters in that it is directly related to school processes that significantly influence school readiness as early childhood precursors (Rumberger & Palardy, 2005). As this study argues, the challenges of freedom of choice, equity, productive efficiency, and social cohesion cannot be divorced from the sociodemographic context of urban school districts like SCS.

Urban Pre-K Programs in Spatial Context

There is a range of ways in which urban neighborhoods and schools are defined (Dappen & Isernhagen, 2006), including delineation using physical spaces (Castells, 2005), following segregation levels in school catchment areas (Sohoni & Saporito, 2009), the social-structural inequities in education (Lewis, James, Hancock, & Hill-Jackson, 2008), using or aggregating census areal units, and so on, and definitions that reflect residents’ perceptions about neighborhood schools (Chapman, 2014; Shealey, 2006). In recent years, the use of meaningful units of analysis in geographical research has been popularized (Tate, 2008), recognizing that the distribution of service providers across the urban landscape, and in close proximity to the urban poor, plays as much of a role in the construction of opportunity. Urban geographers and sociologists have noted that social inequality (i.e., higher proportions of African Americans, poverty, unemployment, female-headed households, and public assistance income) is also divided along spatial lines (Reay, 2004; Van Zandt & Wunneburger, 2011). In fact, Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer (2007) encourage the reconstitution of sociological inquiry into “who gets what where?” Other education researchers caution that excluding spatial analysis from studies of urban education and educational policy would, at best, be a narrow analysis (Gadsden & Dixon-Román, 2017; Gulson & Symes, 2007; Tate, Jones, Thorne-Wallington, & Hogrebe, 2012). Therefore, this study’s policy analysis of the VPK program is examined in tandem with a spatial perspective.

In this study, we use tract data from the U.S. Census to describe the neighborhoods in which voluntary Pre-K programs in Shelby County school district are located. In particular, the school district-relevant urban census tracts are used as unit of analysis. By definition, a census tract is a small, fairly homogeneous neighborhood with about 4,000 people living in it. The Census Bureau classifies “urban” as all territory, population, and housing units located within an urbanized area (UA) or an urban cluster (UC). Following prior locational/spatial studies and the supply-side configuration of service provision in urban areas (Lubienski, Gulosino, & Weitzel, 2009), we overlay the point location of VPK programs to neighborhood-level demographic indicators (i.e., percent of persons in a census tract who are in the 3- and 4-year-old age group enrolled in schools) and other social risk factors, such as female-headed households, minority population and below poverty.

Much research has been conducted on questions of voluntary public school choice, particularly in urban areas (Henig & MacDonald, 2002). First, in terms of enrollment patterns, reformers had hoped that choice-based systems would promote integration, since parents and their children would choose choice programs based on their interests, preferences, and goals, rather than based on neighborhood proximity or assignment schemes that reflect residential segregation patterns. Early research and commentary on voluntary public school choice echoed this expectation, and noted that choice programs are on average serving a higher proportion of minority students than are other traditional public schools (Finn, Manno, & Vanourek, 2001; Nathan, 1996). More nuanced analyses of within-neighborhood and within-school patterns suggest reasons for concern. Several studies have noted that many voluntary public school choice programs appear to be serving as vehicles to enable White flight from predominantly minority school districts, or avoiding higher needs students (Lacireno-Paquet, Holyoke, Moser, & Henig, 2002). More recent studies of the geographical context of school choice have found increased segregation in specific cases where excess capacity is limited (school’s supply of spaces available) and when schools control their own enrollment. Another commonly cited equity-related barrier to school choice participation is differential access to transportation (Archbald, 2004; Bifulco, Ladd, & Ross, 2009).

However, there is a paucity of information that considers the goals and criteria for evaluation of publicly funded preschool programs in a spatial context. However, in the general literature of local service provision, Penchansky and Thomas (1981) described the obstacles to human services using five dimensions: availability, accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and accommodation. The first two dimensions are spatial in nature. Availability consists of the number of providers to choose from in a neighborhood. Accessibility pertains to proximity, convenience, or speed/time to the human services location. The dimensions of availability and accessibility are especially useful in the urban context where Pre-K service providers may be limited or have capacity constraints, as in the case of VPK programs in Shelby County school district. In addition, we find that the dearth of school transportation services for VPK programs in Shelby County school district highlights the importance of proximity for parents choosing between different VPK options available, whether in or outside of their immediate neighborhood. Such proximity patterns of service provision of VPK programs highlight important parallels with the research on the geography of educational opportunity. For example, Tate’s (2008, 2012) work with geospatial data examines ways in which geographic concentration has both reinforced and compounded the opportunity gaps that are based on students’ class and race. The central premise of the geography of opportunity framework is that children and families of a metropolitan area are situated within a context of neighborhood-based opportunities that shape their quality of life and spatial access to service providers (Barthon & Monfroy, 2010; de Souza Briggs, 2006), in this case their Pre-K options. Several scholars have explored this line of thinking in the school choice context, and suggested that school choice in the urban context involves navigating the number of schooling options parents have and the realities of urban neighborhoods as physically bounded spaces (Bell, 2009); thus, families’ Pre-K choices are bounded within the sociodemographic context of neighborhoods and the limited number of options available to them (Reay, 2004).

Conceptual Framework

To guide our work, we draw on Henry Levin’s (1991, 2002) framework for evaluating and designing educational vouchers in the economic context of markets. Levin’s framework introduces a set of policy instruments that are used to design market interventions in terms of the provisions for finance, regulation, and support services, as well as discusses their consequences for promoting such outcomes as freedom of choice, efficiency, equity, and social cohesion. Regulation refers to the rules that must be adhered to by participating parents and collaborative classroom partner sites (also known as providers). Support services refer to services facilitating the participation of families (i.e., family engagement), providers, multiple actors, and agencies. Finance refers to the value of each spending per child, total program spending, and sources of funding.

The criterion of freedom of choice refers to the full range of choices available to parents that can be covered by the VPK program including special needs; and the range of available educational options that can meet children’s interests and preferences, skills and experience, and needs. The productive efficiency criterion includes measures of student outcomes and costs for similar students and student services to produce these outcomes. High productive efficiency entails that for every unit of input into the VPK program, the amount of output is also high. The criterion of equity includes fairness in access to educational opportunities, resources, and outcomes by student background. Finally, the social cohesion criterion includes an attempt to provide a common educational experience with peers from diverse backgrounds.

In this study, we use GIS spatial analysis as a lens to complement Levin’s comprehensive policy framework for evaluating Shelby County school district’s VPK program within urban spatial context. Applying GIS spatial analysis provides education researchers and policy makers with policy tools in understanding how these voluntary prekindergarten (VPK) programs are “bounded” within particular neighborhoods. Using data from multiple sources, we examine the spatial relationship between the number of VPK sites in a local area (census tracts) and the characteristics of the surrounding population.

Data and Method

Data for this study are drawn from multiple sources. First, school-level data encompassing locations of VPK sites are taken initially from a wide range of VPK providers. These data are then checked against state, district and other local sources, and geo-coded to get a 100% match rate. Drawing on neighborhood (census tracts) and district-level U.S. Census information on the demographic (i.e., racial/ethnic, economic) characteristics of households in specified census tracts, the analysis uses GIS to examine the locations and enrollment patterns of the VPK program relative to the demographic characteristics of surrounding communities. Desktop mapping makes it easy and straightforward to visualize Pre-K location data in different spatial representations and under various spatial scales. Also, some spatial operations, such as data aggregation and calculation of socioeconomic need index, can be easily implemented using readily available functions in GIS (Gulosino & d’Entremont, 2011; Martin, 1996; Sohoni & Saporito, 2009). In particular, the need index is the unweighted sum of the average percentages for each of the socioeconomic need variables (namely, percent poverty and female-headed households with children) at the census tract level (Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011). The shades of color represent the range from the lowest (light) to the highest (dark) need index values (Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011). Finally, nonspatial data collection such as VPK funding and enrollment statistics for the VPK providers in Shelby County district are obtained through annual profiles of district and state VPK program, as well as public data available from the Tennessee Department of Education, the Shelby County school district, and Porter-Leath (the district’s sole service provider of the VPK program). We draw on Levin’s (1991, 1998, 2002) comprehensive policy framework to synthesize the spatial and nonspatial aspects of the VPK program.

Analysis of the TN-VPK Program: Regulation, Finance, and Support Services

Regulation

Collaborative classroom partner sites (also known as providers) are an integral component of the TN-VPK program. Programmatically, the TN-VPK programs are to be administered locally by traditional public schools. However, school districts may contract with community partners (e.g., private child care agencies, Head Start agencies, institutions of higher education, public housing authorities, and any three-star (Quality Rating and Improvement Systems) QRIS-rated program in a community-based or private child-serving agency) that operate under the jurisdiction of the school district.⁶ As a case in point, in 2013, SCS and Porter-Leath became the sole grantees of the Head Start Program in Shelby County. Both agencies worked together to expand the Shelby County early childhood education program (TN-VPK) to include three components: Head Start, Early Head Start, and Pre-K. In 2014, Tennessee was selected as one of the 18 states to receive Preschool Development Grants from Race to the Top–Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) competition, aimed at expanding all children’s access to high-quality early education. The Tennessee Department of Education selected SCS and its Porter-Leath Head Start partner (a nonprofit service provider) to expand preschool programs within the district. The goal is to increase the percentage of kindergarten students that receive Pre-K services prior to the kindergarten school year from 27% to 57%. In addition, the Achievement School District (ASD)⁷ receives state dollars to manage its own VPK program (Head Start and Pre-K) as part of the state mandate to take over and turn around failing schools. Consequently, the ASD utilizes VPK funding allocated for the district to operate VPK classrooms for schools that have been taken over (Mead, Mitchel, & Education, 2015).

The top section of Figure 1 illustrates the locations of Pre-K program, Head Start program, and Early Head Start program across the city. These VPK programs are offered in 155 school locations. The bottom section of Figure 1 shows the three major providers of these programs. The Early Head Start program is run primarily by Porter-Leath in five locations. The Head Start program is managed by SCS in 44 school sites, while the remaining 11 sites are operated by Porter-Leath. One Head Start program is housed at a school taken over by the Achievement School District (ASD). Table 1 provides a more detailed breakdown of total student enrollment by provider type. In sites operated by Porter-Leath, the average total enrollment is 116.5 with a standard deviation of 69.08. In schools under SCS, the average total enrollment is 28.75 with a standard deviation of 16.54. In VPK programs housed at the ASD, the average total enrollment is 26.45 with a standard deviation of 13.09.

Figure 1.

Map of the study area and the distribution of VPK programs by program type and provider type for 2016-2017.

Table 1.

Enrollment by Provider Type (2016-17).

	N	Maximum	M	SD
Providers
SCSs	87	120	28.747	16.536
Porter-Leath	16	200	116.500	69.080
Achievement School District	1	52	26.455	13.087
Total	114

Source. Shelby County School District.

Note. This table presents the summary enrollment statistics for the Voluntary Prekindergarten (VPK) providers in SCS. SCS = Shelby County Schools.

As a state compensatory Pre-K program, the TN-VPK in general and the Shelby County Schools’ VPK program in particular is interesting because of its design features, which are intended to promote educational equity and inclusion, such as using a tiered admission process and instituting first come, first serve admissions to children from low-income families. Any remaining seats in a given location are then allocated to otherwise at-risk children including those with disabilities and limited English proficiency. The push for state-funded Pre-K in Tennessee began in 2005 as part of legislation that allocated excess lottery dollars to early childhood programming (Grehan et al., 2011). This program was established to provide high-quality early childhood education services in accordance with the Tennessee Early Childhood Education Plan as adopted by the State Board of Education and stated in T.C.A. Section 49-6-101. To be eligible to this program, the child must qualify for free or reduced-price lunch income poverty guidelines (issued each year by the Department of Health and Human Services).

Figure 2 shows the distribution of school enrollment for each type of VPK program that is offered at 125 locations across the city. Student enrollment in Pre-K programs in 54 locations ranges from fewer than nine to more than 120. Head Start program enrollment in 55 locations ranges from fewer than 26 to more than 200. Shelby County School System serves approximately 33,300 students in 39 school locations. Porter-Leath’s Early Head Start program serves between 24 and 64 students in 39 different locations.

Figure 2.

Map of the study area and the distribution of school enrollment for each type of VPK program (2016-17).

Support Services

The TN-VPK program includes empowering families as one of its leading principles. Family engagement is a component that must be addressed through consultation, conferences, and purposeful outreach (Tennessee Department of Education, 2014a, 2014b). Statewide, the TN-VPK has guidelines and standards for family outreach. Tennessee coordinates preschool programs and services as part of interagency collaboration across entities with overlapping jurisdictions and shared responsibilities to serve preschool-aged children. The best example of this is joining the Tennessee Early Intervention Services (TEIS) with Voluntary Pre-K, School-based Support Services, and Head Start, which are all housed in the Office Early Learning, which operates the VPK program.⁸ SCS has used the established VPK standards for family engagement and support.⁹ A Community Pre-K Advisory Council (C-PAC) is given the task to support efforts to reach out to families. Parent surveys are conducted in the spring semester of the school year. Parent surveys are useful tools to help to make voluntary Pre-K choice options such as VPK more transparent to lawmakers and taxpayers. Parents can use a survey to report how well the state, district, and its partner agencies are implementing the VPK program; use a scale to rate their satisfaction with different parts of the program (i.e., curriculum and teacher quality); and report specific challenges as they make choices for their children. The results are useful to policy makers as they amend laws and add or remove regulations that govern educational options like VPK.

In addition, SCS’s contracting partner for Pre-K, Porter-Leath, provides comprehensive services to students and their families.¹⁰ These wrap-around services provide each child with individualized early childhood development resources, health, and developmental screenings (speech, hearing, vision, lead exposure), medical, dental, and mental health services. The parents receive nutritional counseling, involvement and educational support, in-home assistance, and counseling. These services allow Porter-Leath to attend to the needs of the whole child and his or her family.

However, the TN-VPK program does not provide funds for transportation. Local school districts may choose to offer transportation to families; thus, the funding must come out of the school district budget. Unfortunately, SCS does not provide transportation to children who are enrolled in the VPK program. This transportation hurdle is telling since children and families in the Memphis metropolitan area face endemic street crime and safety problems than their counterparts in the surrounding suburbs and municipal school districts, thereby potentially limiting their access to VPK choice options outside of their immediate neighborhood. Minority and low-income students, most of whom live in urban areas, tend to report higher incidents of crime and public safety concerns than their affluent or suburban counterparts (Morgan, Musu-Gillette, Robers, & Zhang, 2015). A choice program with no public transportation options amid safety concerns could limit their choice of VPK programs only in their immediate neighborhood.

Finance

The number of eligible children served in the last 4 years rose for 16,685 in 2011 to 21,039 in 2014. TN-VPK’s funding rose from US$83,747,595 to US$85,807,267 in the same period. TN-VPK programs depend largely on general education funds, and have in the past used lottery revenue and federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) funds (NIEER, 2014). While the budgets have included inflationary adjustments, there have been no additional financial resources for expansion (See Table 2). Although the use of lottery funds has allowed program enrollment to expand, the TN-VPK program remains the primary funding source of state preschool and it has remained flat funded for several years. As Table 2 shows, the state has operated without an increase in the operating budget for VPK funding each of the last 2 years. This trend supports the overall trend of decline in investment on Pre-K. According to Education Week Research Center (2016a, 2016b), 2.3% of the 4.3 million 3- and 4-year-old who are not enrolled in school across the nation live in Tennessee. The state ranks 15 among the states with the largest share of students not enrolled in preschool.¹¹

Table 2.

Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten (TN-VPK) Program Funding, 2011-2015.

School year	TN-VPK FY funding	# of classes	Students served	Districts served	Counties served
2011-2012	US$84,637,749	934	18,609	137	95
2012-2013	US$85,807,268	935	18,621	137	95
2013-2014	US$86,552,900	935	18,000+	137	95
2014-2015	US$86,552,900	935	18,000+	137	95

Source. Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten (TN-VPK) program Fact Sheet. https://www.tn.gov/education/early-learning/voluntary-pre-k.html

Tennessee state taxes and local school districts spend on average US$5,668 per child for each of the 18,000 children served. SCS leverages local, district, and philanthropic funding support combined with state and lottery funds to finance VPK classrooms. For example, SCS worked collaboratively with the state to win up to US$35 million in federal funds for Pre-K expansion. Indeed, recent years have seen some signs of policy convergence. The federally funded Head Start programs have moved to increase the length of its day and launched Early Head Start Programs for children under 3 years who are ready to transition to Head Start or another Pre-K program. Porter-Leath is the grantee for Early Head Start in Shelby County and is the sole contractor for Head Start for SCS. Increasingly, many Early Head Start programs have been funded to partner directly with existing infant and toddler child care programs to operate for 6-hour days and provide wraparound child care services. In SCS, local agencies have worked together to expand the VPK program into three components (Head Start, Early Head Start, and Pre-K) to bridge the gap between child care and compensatory early education policies. Table 3 illustrates the diverse range of funds that are used to fund the district’s VPK program.

Table 3.

Shelby County Voluntary Prekindergarten (VPK) Program Funding 2014-2017.

School year	Head start	Pre-K—Expansion—Federal funding	—Non-Pre-K—federal funding	Pre-K—Shelby County Government funding (state)
2014-2015	US$20,619,740 (F)	—	US$9,883,548	US$2,053,251
2015-2016	US$24,638,275 (F)	US$6,830,821 (F)	US$10,565,248	US$2,458,345
2016-2017	US$24,523,979 (F)	US$7,841,811 (F)	US$10,478,074	US$2,284,543

Source. Shelby County, Tennessee. Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. https://shelbycountytn.gov/Archive.aspx?AMID=39

Adequacy is a useful starting point for looking at VPK funding levels, as an adequate amount can be seen in response to how much is enough, or that amount needed to provide a given level of quality. The Basic Education Program (BEP), the state funding formula, serves as the basis for calculating the level of funding for each school system, so that districts like SCS are able to pay for basic Pre-K instructional programming. The BEP is a minimum foundation program based on the previous year’s average daily membership (ADM) and also includes an index of fiscal capacity aimed at providing for true equalization that benefits less affluent districts. Tennessee’s Pre-K model allocates a portion of the total classroom funding to a school system based on the BEP. In recent years, the state has been able to tap into local and federal funding streams, thus raising its ability to increase funding for VPK to keep up with the demand. An adequate VPK would allow service providers like Porter-Leath and SCS sufficient funds to provide Pre-K services to reach a reasonable standard.

Given what we know about the influence of social class on school readiness and social inequality in the city, it seems to require that considerably more resources be spent on educating disadvantaged children and/or groups to meet actual demand for VPK seats in high-need areas. To illustrate, the 2014 State Report Card for SCS notes that 79.8% of school-age children are living in poverty (Tennessee Department of Education, 2015). The 2010 to 2014 American Community Survey (ACS) estimates the proportion of families in Shelby County who are living in poverty at 16.8% and the number of individuals at 21.3%. The proportion of children living in poverty is estimated at 32.4%. These figures are all worse in the Memphis metropolitan area, with ACS reporting a poverty rate of 22.6% for families, 27.4% for individuals and 42.3% for children. The population of persons below 5-year-olds in SCS is estimated at 67,594 (7.2% of county population in 2014).¹² Considering all age groups under 5 years old as equal, the 4-year-old population would be approximately 16,900. SCS and its Head Start partner Porter-Leath are currently offering the VPK program in 120 school sites, serving 5,420 children in the greatest need (Roberts, 2014). Dividing the number of VPK participants listed above by the approximated population of 4-year-olds reveals the VPK program in SCS is currently serving only 32% of 4-year-olds in the greatest need. This is an equity and choice argument for increased resources and more urban service providers of publicly VPK programs.

The next section examines the geographic patterns of preschool locations (VPK program) in SCS. Geospatial analyses allow us to examine questions of physical space—the geography of schools, homes, neighborhoods, and districts— as a primary consideration. The nature of the sociodemographic characteristics in the district (SCS) where this study takes places provides a compelling background to study the use of compensatory preschool education programs (VPK) to address deep-seated inequities in educational opportunity. Within Shelby County, where because of the socioeconomic segregation of housing patterns on one hand and the system of neighborhood schooling on the other, schools are highly segregated by levels of socioeconomic need. Socioeconomic disparities within the county (SCS and the new suburban districts) have historically been linked to both resource and educational opportunity gap (Rushing, 2017).

Spatial Analysis of VPK Programs in SCS

For our spatial analysis, census socioeconomic need attributes are summed with ArcGIS software to form a socioeconomic need index at the census tract level. The breakdown of the five socioeconomic need variables that make up the socioeconomic need index is shown in Figures 3 to 6. The need index is the unweighted sum of the average percentages of various community socioeconomic and demographic characteristics at the census tract level vis-à-vis point data representing the VPK program sites. The census-based socioeconomic indicators that are included in the analysis are: percent of African American population, median household income, percent of the county’s total population in the 3- to 4-year-old age group enrolled in school, percent of the population below poverty, and percent of female-headed households with children. A breakdown of the need indicators reveals a consistent pattern of VPK site locations with similar percentages of need indices.

Figure 3.

Map of VPK programs in 2016-17, with the percentage of African American population and median household income shown at the census tract level.

Figure 4.

Map of VPK programs by program type in 2016-17, with the percentage of the population ages 3-4 enrolled in public and private schools at the census tract level.

Figure 5.

Map of VPK programs by program type in 2016-17, with the percentage of the population below poverty and female-headed households with children at the census tract level.

Figure 6.

Map of VPK programs by program type in 2016-17, with census tract socioeconomic need indices shown.

The top part of Figure 3 shows the percent of African American population as our demographic measure of need across the district. The bottom part of Figure 3 shows the spread of median household income, considered in the literature as a good proxy for funding equity. A median household income measure, through its relationship to median property values, separates property poor and property rich neighborhoods. Figure 3 reveals that VPK sites are located close to predominantly African American neighborhoods, as well as in areas with lower median incomes.

Figure 4 shows the percent of the county’s total population in the 3- to 4-year-old age group enrolled in school, broken down by private and public enrollment. The distributional patterns of the VPK locations reveal that they “ring” areas with the highest total population in the 3- to 4-year-old age group.

Figure 5 illustrates a strong spatial correlation between the percent of the population below poverty and the site locations of the VPK programs. The percent of female-headed households with children follows similar spatial patterns, shown in the bottom part of Figure 5.

Finally, Figure 6 corresponds with the GIS results in Figures 3 to 5. Figure 6 reveals that most sites that host VPK programs are present in highly disadvantaged census tracts in the city, with a mean socioeconomic need index of 0.812 to 1.30. However, a limited number of VPK sites locate near, but not in, areas with high concentrations of socioeconomic need index.

Consequences of the VPK Program: Freedom of Choice, Productive Efficiency, Equity, and Social Cohesion

Freedom of Choice

Freedom of choice in educational opportunities refers to the choices of alternative offerings available to students. This criterion requires access to various types and large numbers of service providers to meet the needs of all eligible students. The Shelby County Schools’ VPK/Head Start program does not meet this criterion. The combined programs are only able to serve 32% of the eligible 4-year-olds in Shelby County (see Figures 2 and 3), an indication of Pre-K capacity constraints issue. This is inconsistent with the original vision of the TN-VPK program which states that parents should have a wide range of VPK providers to choose from including private centers, community-based Pre-K, and family day care centers.¹³

In addition, the funding model for the Shelby County Schools’ VPK/Head Start program does not include funds for transportation of students to and from program sites. For some parents, this is likely to severely limit their choice of program providers. They are more likely to only able to choose programs near their immediate neighborhood, and hence the potential integrative effects of the VPK program (making a move from one neighborhood to another) as a school choice is limited. This means that VPK programs in areas with low socioeconomic need index may be out of reach for low-income families, who may also face significant hurdles in the form of transportation costs. From this perspective, a VPK program that is limited only to one’s neighborhood may only encourage enclaves of poverty and racial isolation, exacerbating trends that undermine the freedom of choice. In addition, if the number of VPK applications exceeds the number of spaces available in their immediate neighborhood, disadvantaged families are faced with the onerous task of seeking alternative VPK seats outside of their neighborhood.

Productive Efficiency

Levin and Schwartz (2005) identify the criterion for productive efficiency as any given level of resource committed to be maximized in terms of academic impacts. In examining this relationship it is important to consider both the costs and the outcomes of the VPK program. Tennessee currently invests nearly US$90 million to support 935 classrooms in 135 of 136 districts across all 95 counties (Lipsey, Farran, & Hofer, 2015a, 2015b). With more scrutiny of tax dollar spending and accountability to those funds, it is important for school systems to evaluate both the costs and outcomes of the VPK program. In general, cost effectiveness and resource allocation analysis is challenging to study largely because of a paucity of data stemming from the lack of disaggregated district and school-level expenditures. Districts like SCS have not historically kept track of categories of expenditures and are unable to aide researchers in their quest for estimating the costs for SCS to reach particular child outcome standards in VPK programs (i.e., academic school readiness and socioemotional readiness). For example, a cost function relates the VPK spending to child academic school readiness, prices of inputs, student characteristics, and other relevant sociodemographic characteristics of SCS. Such insights can be particularly helpful to policy makers interested in integrating school readiness measures (performance standards) into the district’s spending plan or budget, and ensuring that school districts like SCS have the resources to meet the desired Pre-K outcomes. The current evidence from early childhood studies shows that preschool programs with positive and long-lasting effects are also the most educationally intensive and expensive (Barnett, 2008).

However, underlying the argument that choice options will lead to increased productive efficiency is the assumption that parents make decisions that benefit their children academically and will “vote with their feet” in selecting the best VPK program for their children. As Levin and other choice critics have noted, such a claim is ultimately an empirical issue that would, in large part, be determined by data collected over a period of time (Goldhaber, 1999; Levin & Schwartz, 2005). At this time, however, limited formal or measureable evaluations of the VPK programs in SCS have been conducted (Sell, 2009, 2013). For SCS, efforts are largely aimed at Pre-K expansion and compliance with the current TN-VPK regulations in its Pre-K classrooms. Since there is no state required assessment for early grades in Tennessee, limited evaluation and measurement have been conducted. Thus, it is problematic to ascertain how much a particular VPK classroom has contributed to a child’s test scores in kindergarten and beyond (i.e., kindergarten readiness, links to first grade literacy readiness, standardized TCAP achievement tests). The dearth of assessment data raises significant concerns about parents’ ability to correctly identify high-quality VPK classrooms. However, several school choice scholars have noted how parents weigh other nonacademic factors when selecting schools and how these choices intersect with factors such as race, class, and residential location (Tedin & Weiher, 2004).

Equity

One of the most important equity concerns about the Shelby County Schools’ VPK/Head Start program is whether or not it has accentuated or perpetuated differences in educational opportunity between participants and those in conventional schools and private schools (Levin & Schwartz, 2005; Reardon, 2011). The TN-VPK guidelines offer accessibility first to children who qualify as economically disadvantaged per the Income Eligibility application and guidelines set by the Federal Department of Health and Human Services (Tennessee State Government, 2016). As discussed in the section on freedom of choice, families with limited access to transportation may be forced to choose from providers near their place of residence (see Figure 4). Nonetheless, constraints on transportation are balanced by the spatial proximity of different VPK options to heavily disadvantaged neighborhoods. Figures 3 to 6 show that most of the VPK programs in the district do target areas with high socioeconomic need, so they would not tend to increase segregation in large areas of the district that are already quite segregated.

The notion that public school choice programs such as Tennessee’s VPK program is fundamental to equity is premised in the view that many low-income and minority students are trapped in inferior schools and broken urban neighborhoods. Perhaps part of the proximity of VPK providers to socially disadvantaged areas is to make them more responsive to the community. Fully realized, VPK providers that provide wraparound services such as Porter-Leath have the potential to empower urban neighborhoods by redistributing educational resources and reshaping the geography of equity and opportunity to high-quality Pre-K services. The education reform strategy of service providers that are implementing so-called wraparound programs is driven by a sense of national crisis in the conditions of life in urban areas and by widespread evidence of highly fragmented public services that threaten the quality of life of children and families in the inner city (Dryfoos, 2002). Scholars have explained that allowing for nonprofit participation within the public school system alleviates tensions between public school objectives and local interests, allowing families and communities to expand learning opportunities in the context of local opportunities and constraints (Warren, 2005). The VPK program may be seen as serving this purpose. While there is an extensive literature on the role of nonprofit providers of affordable early childhood programs in harder-to-serve populations (Adelman & Taylor, 2002), a spatial analysis of the scope and geographic spread of nonprofit early childhood providers in prime urban centers has been studied much less frequently.

It remains unclear, however, whether the number of VPK providers and their existing Pre-K capacity will actually deliver new educational opportunities, especially in heavily segregated urban areas, or if neighborhood-specific demand imbalances will prompt VPK providers to seek out locations that enable more seats where there is unmet demand. For example, the fact that a limited number of VPK sites locate near but not in high-need areas may be an attempt to “cherry-pick” potential students in less socially disadvantaged neighborhoods (i.e., locate in need areas with need index values from .0 to .41 in Figure 6). In addition, the distributional patterns of the VPK locations reveal that they “ring” areas with the highest total population in the 3- to 4-year-old age group that are enrolled in private and public school settings, indicating where potential “market shares” of VPK seats may lie. Another possibility is that VPK providers may choose to attract the broadest possible range of potential customers in more mixed income neighborhoods. Emerging evidence suggests that school choice service providers (both profit and nonprofit) frequently take into account nearby socioeconomic and demographic characteristics when choosing school locations and avoid neighborhoods with high-proportions of at-risk students who are more costly and challenging to educate (Gulosino & d’Entremont, 2011; Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011; Henig & MacDonald, 2002; Lubienski, Gulosino, & Weitzel, 2009).

Social Cohesion

Social cohesion is an important topic due to the short duration of the VPK program for children and the fact that the benefits (real or perceived) of preschool education are carried over to primary school. It is important to consider the effects that differences in VPK quality may have on short- and long-term educational outcomes. For many children in SCS, VPK will serve as their academic foundation, especially for the more disadvantaged children. There is a widespread belief among educators that early childhood education facilitates the process of socialization and self-control necessary to make the most of classroom learning (Currie, 2001).

Levin and Schwartz (2005) premise social cohesion on the notion of common experiences in both learning activities and outcomes and social interactions among students from different backgrounds. In many high-poverty neighborhoods such as the Memphis metropolitan area, children and families grapple with problems related to conditions of race and class segregation, educational failure and isolation, street crime and disorder, all of which are threats to social cohesion. The spatial proximity of VPK providers to high-need areas may help families overcome these barriers by offering access to safer and integrated student support, increasing parental involvement, and inviting greater democratic participation.

Conclusion

Summary

Unlike suburban and rural school districts, urban school districts like SCS operate Pre-K programs (VPK) in heavily disadvantaged areas. As earlier noted, the challenges of freedom of choice, equity, productive efficiency, and social cohesion cannot be divorced from the sociodemographic context of urban school districts like SCS. It is a challenge for school districts like SCS to ensure availability and accessibility while creating a system of high-quality VPK programs that is cost effective and responsive to local needs.

First, attention to equity means making publicly funded Pre-K investments accessible to socially disadvantaged neighborhoods that have historically displayed a low demand or are constrained by a lack of transportation and other barriers to Pre-K participation. The absence of school transportation services for VPK programs highlights the importance of geographic proximity for parents choosing between different VPK options available. Constraints on transportation are balanced by the spatial proximity of VPK providers to high-need areas. Second, Pre-K children living in poverty truly require more resources (i.e., provision for transportation and additional seats where there is unmet demand) to educate to the same standards as their more advantaged peers in the suburbs. This is an equity and choice argument for increased funding. Third, on top of state guaranteed Pre-K funding from the BEP, local philanthropic dollars and federal competitive grant opportunities go much further because they only need to fill the gap between the state’s basic funding to support VPK programs and cost of other services (i.e., wraparound services). Those dollars could be easily targeted directly for productive efficiency. If a substantial increment can be built in, those dollars could also play a critical role in reducing equity/choice problems and expanding the geography of educational opportunity. Finally, nonprofit VPK providers such as Porter-Leath could be incentivized to address demand imbalances and enable more seats where there is unmet demand. Wraparound services within a Pre-K program have the potential to foster social cohesion. The immediate benefits for individual children will vary (i.e., various school and nonschool factors including productive efficiency), but they will certainly include liberties of choice, which is a good in its own right. However, since the district’s VPK program is in need of additional Pre-K capacity, it remains unclear whether existing providers will be able to widen availability and accessibility in high-need areas, and thus may limit equity and choice.

This study applies GIS spatial analysis and Levin’s comprehensive policy framework in understanding how voluntary prekindergarten (VPK) programs are “bounded” within particular neighborhoods. We contend that the benefits conferred by proximity or geographic accessibility to urban preschools contribute to the provision of Pre-K services, thus highlighting the role of spatial/locational perspective as an important lens for evaluating public school choice programs in low-opportunity neighborhoods. This study thus echoes long-standing concerns about how choice might create a nearly closed loop of systemic disadvantage in cases where there is limited capacity and choice is essentially limited to the immediate neighborhood, thus deepening inequality of educational opportunities. In the school choice literature, both opponents and supporters of public school choice programs recognize that some districts lack adequate capacity to offer viable options to parents of children in socially disadvantaged neighborhoods. Several researchers have noted that capacity constraints are especially severe in large, urban low-opportunity neighborhoods. This differential experience of place greatly affects the geography of educational opportunity. Exposure to socioeconomic conditions such as extreme poverty, street crime and violence, and income and racial segregation are the norm for most low-income and minority students in urban neighborhoods.

The Shelby County Schools’ VPK program is still a new and emerging education reform, and it is important to note that service provision may still be evolving. In emerging markets, VPK providers may place greater emphasis on securing VPK sites that are perceived as safe learning environments and appropriate locations for promoting kindergarten readiness and academic success, and as markets mature and VPK providers establish themselves within communities, nearly all providers may be more willing to seek out areas with the highest socioeconomic need index. Our GIS findings show that most of the VPK providers target areas with high socioeconomic need, so they would not tend to exacerbate neighborhood patterns of racial and income segregation. Fully realized, wraparound services within a Pre-K program have the potential to foster social cohesion by redistributing educational resources and addressing distinct social inequalities of access that manifest themselves in terms of the geography of educational opportunity (Singleton, 2012). Our findings help to fill gaps in understanding the provision of publicly funded Pre-K in the context of socioeconomic need levels and neighborhood-level characteristics, the potential impacts (promises and pitfalls) of VPK providers related to the geography of educational opportunity in urban areas, and the possible constraints on Pre-K program options for children and families using the dimensions of availability and accessibility.

Limitations and Future Research

While the current study presents GIS spatial data suggesting that VPK programs are more likely to locate within census tracts of highest socioeconomic need, it does not have the capacity to make causal claims about why this occurs. We also do not know to what extent the lack of transportation and limited service providers and spaces available for Pre-K seats represents an absence of real options for children and families, despite their proximity to VPK programs. Future research on this topic could examine these separate, but related, issues.

One area for further research would be to develop a better understanding of how VPK providers select locations, and how a VPK location is then associated with the geography of educational opportunity would be highly relevant to the present context in SCS. By gaining an understanding of how VPK providers make important decisions such as the selection of a location, this line of research could provide insights into how policy makers could encourage and facilitate the opening of VPK slots in the highest need areas. The other topic warranting additional research is the question of who actually attends VPK programs, in terms of family structure, parents’ employment and education, child’s health profile, and mode of transportation. This line of research could examine student-level data from SCS to understand the geospatial movement of children and families between home and VPK site locations, as well as their mode of transportation and other constraints acting on their choices. These child-level data could be used to describe who attends VPK programs and how far children and their parents typically travel from home to school, and would give additional insight into the question of how VPK providers may impact availability and accessibility. Another potential follow-up research would be to examine neighborhood-specific supply and demand imbalances, such as existing VPK seats and neighborhoods where parental demand exceeds available space for Pre-K slots.

The spatial distribution of VPK providers is a crucial issue in an urban school system characterized by deep socioeconomic disparities compared to their suburban and rural counterparts. This study has broad implications for the development of socially and spatially comprehensive VPK program and for subsequent research on the geography of educational opportunity. Continuing in the vein of GIS spatial analysis, a great deal of additional research is needed to understand how the location dynamics of Pre-K providers among disadvantaged urban neighborhoods contribute to school choice placements in VPK programs, and the extent of spatial mismatch between the geographic distribution of Pre-K program providers and the needs and choice constraints of children and families living in urban neighborhoods.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Charisse Gulosino received her doctorate in education from Columbia University and is currently an associate professor in the Leadership and Policy Studies Program at the University of Memphis. Prior to her current position, Charisse was a postdoctoral research associate and a faculty member of the Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. Her area of interest is in policies affecting students, their families, teachers, and communities in urban K-12 settings.

Phoebe Maxwell currently serves as an assistant principal at Dexter Middle School in Memphis, Tennessee. She earned her doctoral degree in education at the University of Memphis. She is interested in school equity, universal Pre-K, and principal effectiveness.

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