President Obama’s call to action on early education is a watershed moment that has the potential to improve education for millions of American students. Ensuring all students have the opportunity to attend high-quality preschool, regardless of income and geography, is a key component of an effective education system that prepares students for success in school and society.

State-funded pre-K has grown substantially over the last decade to serve 28 percent of 4-year-olds, up from 14 percent in 2001. Yet, this is only part of the picture. As many as 40 percent are served by public programs when Head Start and preschool special education are counted, though the latter may consist of only a few hours of therapy a week. Over 80 percent are in some type of out of home arrangement including private programs and family home child care. Unfortunately, research now makes it clear that the quality of many of these arrangements as assessed by direct observation is far too low to promote educational opportunity. Some are so poor they may actually increase children’s risk of school failure. Head Start’s weaknesses have been noted by many as debate over this proposal has unfolded, but Head Start is far better than many of the private centers and day care homes children attend.

That is why it is so important to understand that the President’s pre-K proposal will raise quality and educational effectiveness, not just increase the number of seats available. And, it will do this by lifting up the entire field. The models of successful pre-K for all already operate show the way. Oklahoma, New Jersey’s “Abbott” program, and West Virginia all integrate private providers and Head Start into state-funded pre-K. What does this mean? Head Start teachers nationally are paid barely more than pet sitters and dog walkers. This is Head Start’s Achilles Heel. Teachers in private child care make even less. To use the New Jersey example, when integrated into state pre-K these teachers were given the opportunity to go back to school and get stronger preparation, they were assigned teacher coaches who worked with them as partners to improve their teaching, and their salaries were doubled. Of course, this came with accountability for results, but the vast majority delivered. Teaching quality in all classrooms, private and public, was raised from poor/mediocre to good/excellent.

Planning for this reform process has already begun in most states through their state early learning advisory councils. In addition, 35 states and the District of Columbia developed reform plans when they applied for funds to expand early education through the federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge in 2011. However, only nine states were awarded funds. These applications demonstrate a clear interest and capacity by state governments to partner with the federal government to start all children on the right path. States have never been better poised to prioritize early education and the federal government’s role is welcome support.

The White House preschool proposal has a few key words that are important in understanding how this would play out: “federal-state partnership” and “cost-sharing.” This isn’t the federal government signing a blank check to foot the entire bill for early education; it is limited support based on the number of low-income children in a state and tied to a small number of standards already adopted by many states. If other states do not want to raise quality, they do not have to participate. If they do participate, they will be in charge, not the federal government, which could list its requirements on a single page. The list of states that we believe might qualify with little or no change to state policy includes not just Oklahoma and Georgia, but also Alabama, Alaska, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia. Mississippi is currently advancing legislation that would meet the test, as well.

Once it is understood, the President’s pre-K plan should be endorsed by practically everyone. It supports equity and excellence in the pre-K policies advanced by governors of both parties. Both critics and supporters of Head Start should welcome it as Head Start reform that will strengthen that program and improve its effectiveness. Those who want to see more choice and competition should applaud federal support for state programs that incorporate private providers. To return to our New Jersey example, two-thirds of the children are served by private providers supported by local school districts responsible for ensuring quality through teacher coaching and supports to help children with special needs succeed in regular classes.

Given all of its advantages, the primary objection in Congress to the President’s proposal is likely to be that we can’t afford new spending when deficits loom so large. Yet, this is fundamentally a pro-growth, deficit reduction proposal. The biggest returns to this investment will kick in years down the road when the deficit is projected to become a more serious problem. And, it addresses root causes of the deficit--slow growth and rising costs of government including health care costs. Quality pre-K will enhance productivity to increase growth, decrease the costs of school failure and crime, and reduce smoking and other risky behaviors that harm health. Sure its just one small contribution to deficit reduction, but a $50 billion investment over 10 years could contribute a few hundred million dollars to deficit reduction.

Rejecting the President’s pre-K plan is the far more costly alternative. We cannot afford to leave so many children behind with more than a third not ready to succeed at kindergarten entry. We cannot afford the lost growth and increased costs to government when they subsequently fail. We cannot afford failing to recognize that this is not just a problem for the 45 percent of our children who live below 200 percent of poverty, but for the vast majority of families. Deficit hawks, education reformers, and civil rights activists should unite to lead the charge for this proposal in Congress. States--red and blue--have already shown the way forward. Congress should follow.

The President’s early education plan is a step in the right direction. It puts forward a vision of learning along a continuum, starting with pregnant mothers gaining assistance from visiting nurses, moving to expanding families’ access to public programs for babies and toddlers, adding more emphasis on preschool for 4-year-olds and continuing up through the next year, with a recognition of the need for more full-day kindergarten seats.

President Obama’s proposal recognizes that while preschool is certainly an important investment, its impact on children’s long-term success could be greater if it were linked with the rest of the education pipeline. His plan gives weight to the idea that we should no longer think of education as a K-12 system, but instead as a PreK-12 system. This is where I would like to see his plan go even further, by encouraging states to find ways in kindergarten to build instructionally on the knowledge and skills children gain in pre-K, ensuring that those benefits are sustained.

For years, we have seen forward-thinking states run by both Democratic and Republican governors make investments in pre-K. Georgia’s program, for example, is open to all 4-year-olds in the state. It began more than 15 years ago with 44,000 children. In the 2010-11 school year, enrollment nearly doubled, serving more than 85,000 children, approximately 61 percent of 4-year-olds in the state. Georgia’s program requires bachelor’s degrees for pre-K teachers. Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s public pre-K programs enroll more than 70 percent of the state’s 4-year-olds and require college-educated teachers. Oklahoma also pays pre-K teachers on the same scale as K-12 public school teachers. Additionally, Oklahoma is expanding access to quality baby and toddler programs.

States and localities have control of public schools. What they do across PreK-12 systems is what will keep children’s gains from preschool programs from fading out. For example, many people may not realize that free public full-day kindergarten is not available for every child across the country. Forty states do not require school districts to provide full-day kindergarten at all.

Consider, though, what is happening in North Carolina, where policymakers have decided that full-day kindergarten is a priority. Through its Power of K program, North Carolina has invested in a project to help kindergarten teachers and their principals create classrooms that are designed especially for five year-olds, offering opportunities for exploration, investigation and socializing while also providing a rigorous academic curriculum for all children.

Other states, such as New Jersey, Maryland and Washington, have made kindergarten, first, second and third grades a priority, by creating a seamless transition from preschool to elementary school. They have done so by developing preK-3rd grade standards and curriculum that are challenging and make sense for kids, and that build on the knowledge and skills they previously learned; and by helping teachers share information and plan together within and across grade levels.

These kinds of initiatives help sustain the knowledge and skills children have gained throughout their schooling. For too long, proposals to improve children’s chances for success in school and beyond have focused on intervention, remediation or turning around schools that are failing students, instead of on improving the experiences of our youngest learners in birth through age 5 early learning programs, making full-day kindergarten available and ensuring that early childhood programs have effective, well-trained teachers who provide students with a challenging, well-rounded curriculum and opportunities to learn from their peers and from the world around them.

President Obama’s plan is a step toward realizing this vision. His plan does not create a new federal program nor does it add new mandates for states or requirements for parents. Instead, it provides a way for Washington to collaborate with states and enhance the work that many of them are already doing.

Using just over 100 words in his State of the Union address, the president signaled last week that early childhood education is near the top of his second term legislative agenda. The fact that this administration has publicly jumped on the early childhood education bandwagon is not surprising. The issue is poised for legislative success given a few key factors: (1) There is enough research tying early childhood education to individual economic factors that both Republicans and Democrats care about (2) Red states like Oklahoma and Georgia (as the president noted) have invested heavily in early childhood education and, last but not least, (3) Who’s willing to wage a war on preschoolers?

The president has given the early childhood community a rare opportunity, but that opportunity will be fleeting if advocates don’t step up to the plate. Now is the time to get organized and stay energized in order to fully capitalize on this fortuitous moment. As Kris Perry noted in her Education Experts post this week, a “seismic coalition” will be required. To that end, I believe the early childhood education community will need to come together over a well-articulated common agenda that puts aside differences in the pursuit of a larger goal.

And advocates still have time to shape this early childhood education initiative and make it their own. The president has offered a framework, but advocates hold the real expertise; they should be at the table making sure we get the details right and ensuring our efforts will truly make an impact in the future. If advocates of high-quality early childhood education can speak with a unified voice to highlight what this plan should and should not entail, the administration will recognize an equal, eager, but formidable partner in their efforts. And after all, the administration, Members of Congress, governors, and state legislators will surely need such a partner to successfully pass and launch a high quality early childhood education initiative in this country.

Advocates can provide policymakers with stories of success, powerful data, and specific policies that together will push the plan over the legislative finish line and ultimately make it successful on the ground.

This week’s introduction says that, when it comes to President Obama’s preschool proposal, "the only problem, as always, is that these investments cost money." These proposals certainly would cost money – dollars Washington doesn’t have – but even discussing cost is seriously jumping the gun. The fact is that right now, regardless of cost, there is almost no meaningful evidence to support massive expansion of federal pre-school efforts. Indeed, the evidence calls much more loudly for the opposite.

Start with the biggest federal pre-K initiative, Head Start. It costs about $8 billion per year, and what are its lasting effects? According to the latest random-assignment, federal assessments, there essentially aren’t any. The program has demonstrated no meaningful, lasting benefits, and is therefore a failure.

How about Early Head Start, which involves children ages 0 to 3? It is a much newer program than its big brother, but it, too, provides no evidence of overall, lasting benefits. As a 2010 random-assignment, federal study concludes:

"The impact analyses show that for the overall sample, the positive effects of Early Head Start for children and parents did not continue when children were in fifth grade…. It appears that the modest impacts across multiple domains that were observed in earlier waves of follow-up did not persist by the time children were in fifth grade."

There were, to be fair, some lasting positive effects found for some subgroups, but there were also negative effects. And for the "highest-risk" children – the ones the program is most supposed to help – the outcomes were awful:

"Finally, for children in the highest-risk group, six impacts were statistically significant, all of which were at the child level and all of which favored the control group. Children in the program group scored significantly lower than children in the control group on the PPVT-III (ES = −0.21, p < .10) and the mathematics test (ES = −0.33, p < .05) and had lower scores on the academic success index (ES = −0.29, p< .05). Parents reports indicated that chronic absenteeism was higher in the program group than the control group (ES = 0.37, p < .10). Children in the program group also scored higher on the cumulative risk index (ES = 0.35, p < .10) and lower on the cumulative success index (ES = −0.31, p < .05) than children in the control group. There were no significant impacts on parenting and family-level outcomes in the highest-risk group."

The federal government, quite simply, has demonstrated no ability to scale-up pre-k programs and achieve positive, lasting effects. Knowing that, it is impossible to convincingly argue that the current efforts should even be maintained, much less greatly expanded.

What about state programs? The evidence is hardly conclusive that even highly-touted programs such as those in Oklahoma or New Jersey are effective. The quality of the research – which is rarely random-assignment – isn’t what it needs to be to confidently conclude that the programs work. Indeed, pre-K advocate James Heckman said that in a Washington Post interview:

"Dylan Matthews:

The Abecedarian and Perry experiments provide pretty definitive evidence that individual preschool programs have strong effects, but Obama’s been touting certain statewide programs like Oklahoma’s. What’s the evidence for those like?

I would be cautious. I’m instinctively cautious because I’m an academic. The Perry and ABC (Abecedarian) and some others, the nurse-family partnership, have not only had randomized trials, but have also followed people up for decades. The Perry people are now 50 years old. The ABC people, now they’re close to 40. We actually can follow them in a way that the other programs don’t follow their participants. The state programs have relatively short-term evaluation plans.

And I think, you’re right, they’re not randomized controlled trials, so I’m a little cautious. I don’t find them as convincing. As far as I know they’re not of the same quality. I have not personally relied on them. That’s not to say they’re bad programs, they just haven’t been evaluated as thoroughly."

So state programs haven’t been adequately evaluated to demonstrate their effectiveness, yet some act like it is obvious that the federal government – which has demonstrated an inability to run effective pre-K programs – should scale all this up. Illogical. What they should be insisting is that Washington follow the Constitution and stay out of this, letting states experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, and replicate programs on their own – or do nothing – if they think the evidence justifies it.

When you get down to it, there are only two or three pre-K programs that have solid enough research bases that advocates can confidently say they had lasting, positive effects. As Dylan Matthews’ question makes clear, the two most prominent are the Abecedarian and Perry Preschool programs. But here’s what you need to know: Both were hyper-intensive programs with very dedicated staff. Indeed, Abecedarian treated just 57 children at a price of about $17,700 per child, and Perry worked with 58 kids at roughly $12,500 per child. For all intents and purposes there is no way any government is going to scale those up and get the same effects, much less the bloated, ineffectual federal government.

It is much too early to say the only reason not to expand federal per-K is the lack of funds. Before anyone gets even close to that, they need to address the huge dearth of evidence that big pre-K – especially federal – would be anything other than a failure.

A call from the nation’s chief executive to expand access to early childhood education to our most at-risk children has created a much-needed national spotlight on the power of early learning. While the president’s plan undoubtedly brings new questions to bear, participation and purse strings should not be among them.

The president’s proposal rightfully signals that early childhood is the next frontier in American ingenuity — a stance that policymakers from red and blue states alike have embraced in recent months. As proposed, the president’s plan should have significant appeal to Democratic and Republican governors, many of whom having worked tirelessly to find workable solutions to their state’s biggest educational, health and economic challenges. Aside from policymakers, President Obama also joins a growing chorus of economists, advocates and business leaders who agree that quality early childhood education is the key to building human capital and strengthening our economy.

In the spirit of partnership, the president’s plan for early childhood stems from proven and affordable models in conservative strongholds, including Georgia and Oklahoma. This is not a presidential mandate with unwarranted federal oversight a la No Child Left Behind. This is a voluntary model wherein the federal government simply sets standards based on known best practices and incentivizes states to continue their innovation in early childhood as they see fit.

The proposal would strengthen our families, eliminate waste and mitigate dependency. President Obama’s plan for early childhood is less about developing new federal programs and more about cultivating existing ones through ensuring continuity, quality, efficiency and effectiveness. New monies would be fully-strategic investments as much of the infrastructure is already there in federal funding and state innovation. This plan would ultimately streamline disparate programs while incentivizing states to fill in the gaps through a variety of measures that works for them.

This is a measure that we simply cannot afford to delay. The president’s proposal may require a seismic coalition, but it shouldn’t require a superhero’s strength.