Breaking down this document to see where it lines up with Research.
• Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten: Helping more Families Afford Early Learning.
 Discusses closing the achievement gap and moving the state closer to Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten.
 Research shows that this will have little impact on the Achievement Gap because age 4 is just too late for impoverished children and those not in poverty gain little from this.
• Tackling the Achievement Gap
 Poverty is the cause of the Achievement Gap
• Helping More Children Succeed in School and Life
 Only 60 percent of kids from middle-income Minnesota families start Kindergarten fully prepared to learn. Even if every low-income child in Minnesota attended preschool and was fully-prepared for Kindergarten, approximately 30 percent of all Minnesota children would still not be prepared for school.
 It is difficult to determine the validity of this statement as Kindergarten Readiness Stats are available to the public.
• Catching Up to Other States – Programs across the country, including in Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, Georgia, Michigan, and Oklahoma, have shown that when families have access to high-quality, voluntary Prekindergarten, all kids benefit.
 This statement leads to comparing not only the states the Governor and Lt Governor suggested but a range of other states (the additional comparison is provided at the back of this document).

Results of UPK in other states
If UPK was successful, it would show up in statistics ‘further down the road’, such as standardized 3rd grade and 8th-grade testing.
Comparing states based on the following selection process:
Governor Dayton’s Fact Sheet/On Early Learning indicates Minnesota was falling behind other states and it lists. Those states are New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Michigan. I added Minnesota to this group to determine if we were behind or not.

For each state we compared:
• State rank
• Graduation Rate
• Spending per pupil
• 4th Grade Scores
o Math
o Reading
• 8th Grade proficiency percentage
o Math
o Reading

Grad. Rate 4th g reading 4th G math 8th G math 8th G reading
Gov. Dayton’s Refer. Nation 229 Nation 240 Proficiency Proficiency
New Jersey 90.1% 229 245 46.2% 40.6%
Maryland 87.6% 235 251 34.7% 37.4%
North Carolina 85.9% 226 244 32.6% 30.4%
Minnesota 82.2% 223 250 47.8% 39.7%
Oklahoma 81.6% 222 240 4th % 29.4%
Georgia 79.4% 222 236 28.4% 30.2%
Michigan 79.2% 223 236 28.5% 31.8%

• Saving Minnesota Families Money –
 Minnesota has some of the highest childcare costs in the country. In Minnesota, it can cost over $11,000 to send a four-year-old to child care for just one year.
 This may be correct; Pre-K is tied to the school year, which is 175 days and is only ½ days. Families the require full daycare would have to find and pay for the other ½ day.
 Is this a daycare program? If so it needs to be identified as such.

• Leveraging a Huge Return on Investment – Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis have found that every $1 invested in high quality early learning can yield up to a $16 return on the state’s investment.
 The operative word here is CAN. This is a blatantly misleading statement. Research done on this subject was about children in impoverished households and certainly does not apply to the VAST MAJORITY of children in Minnesota.
 ‘Nor does universal preschool provide a wise public investment. The oft-touted $16 return for every $1 invested in early education applies only to high-quality programs for at-risk children.’ Karen Cadigan was the founding director of the Minnesota Office of Early Learning