Good morning. It’s back-to-school week, and the daily ritual (or, perhaps, panic) begins as uniforms are being donned and lunchboxes packed across the UK to start a new year. My sympathies to you teachers setting early morning alarms, and parents dragging children out of bed after six weeks of lie-ins.

Last year, Keir Starmer promised to leave “no stone unturned to give every child the very best start at life”, but how is that going? More than half a million GCSE students in England will start the year with no physics teacher, while many kids from poorer families feel they cannot afford to have their children study geography or languages, new Guardian reporting shows.

These are just a few things that reveal bigger issues about the lack of opportunities for millions of bleary-eyed children getting up for school this week. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Guardian education correspondent Sally Weale about how inequality is embedded into the system, and whether Labour is doing enough to tackle it. First, the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Afghanistan | The Taliban has called for international aid as Afghanistan reels from an earthquake that killed more than 800 people and left thousands injured.

2. Israel-Gaza war | A plan circulating in the White House to develop the “Gaza Riviera” as a string of high-tech megacities has been dismissed as an “insane” attempt to provide cover for the large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory’s population.

3. Politics | Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has been moved to a new senior role in Downing Street as Keir Starmer attempts to get a grip on delivery before what is likely to be a tumultuous autumn for the government.

4. Health | A three-minute brainwave test can detect memory problems linked to Alzheimer’s disease long before people are typically diagnosed, raising hopes that the approach could help identify those most likely to benefit from new drugs for the condition.

5. UK news | Prominent women including cultural figures, politicians and campaigners have signed a letter criticising rightwing attempts to link sexual violence in Britain to asylum seekers. Signatories include the musicians Paloma Faith, Charlotte Church and Anoushka Shankar.

A significant challenge for some schools starts not in the classroom but with recruitment. One-quarter of English state schools have no specialist physics teachers, with maths, biology or chemistry teachers typically being roped in to do the job, according to research by the Institute of Physics. Many of these teachers have not studied physics beyond the age of 18, and may themselves have only studied the subject to GCSE level.

“Recruitment of new teachers, and then retention of teachers you’ve already got, has been very difficult for quite a long time,” said Sally Weale. Take physics: people with science degrees are likely to have a lot of better-paid employment opportunities in the private sector. “Certain school subjects have been particularly badly affected, and physics is a big one. Most head teachers I talked to said the physics teacher is a big issue for them. Very often they haven’t got one.”

Pay for teachers is typically poor, and it’s a tough job with long hours, and generally no opportunities for working from home. “You are in front of 30 students, you have to be at the top of your game all the time,” said Sally.

Students in schools without specialist physics teachers are half as likely to go on to study A-level physics. More than 300 schools in England have none taking it, the report found. Unsurprisingly it is typically kids in the poorer areas who are worst affected.

Not only does this negatively impact opportunities for individual students, it also make it difficult to recruit scientists and innovators in key sectors such as quantum, photonics, nuclear and semiconductors, the report found.

‘Baked-in inequality’

Secondary school pupils from low-income families are “bounced out” of studying subjects like geography and languages because of concerns about the cost of field trips and excursions abroad, according to a survey of children in England. Fears about extra costs prevent almost a quarter of children on free school meals from choosing certain GCSE subjects.

“The reality is that some subjects just are no-go areas for lower-income families,” said Sally. “I remember when there would be school trips and parents would just say, ‘Sorry, we can’t afford it.’ I think it’s always been part of what’s going on in schools, but these differences have become much more acute.”

Other subjects with additional costs are music, which can require lessons and instruments; food and nutrition, due to the cost of ingredients; and PE, because of extra kit and equipment. Nine per cent of pupils who did not receive free-school meals said the cost – or concerns about the cost – prevented them from studying these subjects, according to Survation for the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG).

“Kids from the poorest backgrounds are always at such a huge disadvantage. It’s not just what subjects they can study and it’s not just physics teachers,” said Sally. “They could be living in areas where it’s hard to attract good teachers, or they don’t have access to the same enrichment, or their families have less capacity to support them. This is something that I’m writing about all the time, and have been ever since I started this job over 10 years ago. It’s a kind of baked-in inequality that is very hard to deal with, and it’s basically about poverty.”

What is the attainment gap?

This year, A-level results in England reached a record high outside the pandemic era, However, the stark regional divide between London and the rest of the UK, particularly the north-east and East Midlands, has widened. This is down to a range of factors, including investment in London schools during the Blair government, the higher pay and attractiveness of working in London for teachers, and gentrification of the city.

The attainment gap between poorer students and their wealthier peers had been closing from about 2010 onwards, but that progress began to stall in 2018, probably because of funding pressures on schools, said Sally. Since Covid, the gap has grown and though there have been small signs of improvement recently, the gap remains far bigger than before the pandemic.

“Covid blew it all out of the water. The government would say there’s some evidence the attainment gap is closing slightly, but it’s still absolutely huge,” Sally said. “Disadvantaged four-year-olds are already on the back foot by the time they start school.”

What is Labour doing?

Since Labour has come in it has expanded free school meals, including introducing free breakfast clubs into all primary schools in England. From this week, working parents who earn up to £100,000 a year will be entitled to 30 hours’ free childcare a week during term time for children from the age of nine months until they start school. “Critics would say it barely scratches the surface,” said Sally.

Labour’s flagship child poverty strategy will not be published until autumn. The decision to push back the strategy comes amid concerns about the cost implications of ending the two-child limit on universal credit. Experts say scrapping the benefit limit would be the single most effective way of reducing child poverty – an estimated 100 children are pulled into poverty every day by the limit, meaning up to 20,000 could be affected by a six-month delay.

“Everybody is waiting to see the sort of child poverty strategy. I think that will be key to how their success is regarded,” said Sally. “At the heart of that is the two child benefit cap. The general feeling is that it needs to go, and it’s responsible for keeping too many families in poverty. Poverty is an enemy of opportunity.”

What else we’ve been reading

• Is Donald Trump a dictator? Adam Gabbatt surveys the US president’s inflammatory actions – from deploying the national guard to his compulsive use of executive orders. He speaks with political scientists about where Trump currently sits on the spectrum of between democracy, authoritarianism and outright dictatorship. (From more by Adam, sign up to his Week in Trumpland newsletter here.) Craille Maguire Gillies, newsletters team

• More and more people are blocking out the news because it fills them with dread. This piece examines the emotional toll of “doomscrolling”, and gives tips on how to stay engaged and not fall into a pit of negativity – if you can face reading it. Phoebe

• Dr Velislava Hillman is persuasive about how AI in education is a lot less revolutionary than big tech companies might make it seem. “What is sold as the ‘democratisation’ of education may be entrenching further inequality,” she writes, as the elite opt for human tutoring and the less-privileged are offered mass, app-based instruction. Craille

• Some great news from conservationists who have found Mexico’s jaguar population has increased 30%. The main thing they’ve done is protect natural areas to keep these beautiful cats away from cattle ranchers. “Mexico and the world need good news,” said one of the conservationists. Here’s to that. Phoebe

• Perhaps I am not a better cook after listening to episode 20 of the four-part podcast Home Cooking, but I am certainly charmed by the sibling-like camaraderie of its hosts, Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway. Craille

Sport

Football | Liverpool broke the British transfer record to sign Alexander Isak for £125m from Newcastle on deadline day but were foiled in an attempt to end a stunning window with a deal for Marc Guéhi. Transfer roundup

Golf | Europe will defend the Ryder Cup later this month with 11 of the 12 players who saw off the United States in Rome two years ago after captain Luke Donald unsurprisingly opted for experience with his wildcard picks.

Tennis | The All England Club is not looking to change the format of the Wimbledon mixed doubles competition for future editions of the Championships despite the success of the “reimagined” tournament at the US Open.

The front pages

Ryan Arnoldy started community college with the goal of eventually transferring to a four-year university and getting a degree in chemical engineering.

Soon Arnoldy started running up against the same exasperating bottleneck faced by a majority of university and college students: Classes required for his major were often not taught during the semesters he needed them, or filled so quickly there were no seats left.

Colleges and universities manage to provide these required courses when their students need to take them only about 15 percent of the time, new research shows — a major reason fewer than half of students graduate on time, raising the amount it costs and time it takes to get degrees. 

Now, with widespread layoffs and budget cuts on campuses, and as consumers are already increasingly questioning the value of a college education, the problem is expected to get worse. 

“What is more foundational to what we do as colleges and universities than offering courses to students so they can graduate? And yet we’re only doing it right 15 percent of the time,” said Tom Shaver, founder and CEO of Ad Astra, a company that provides scheduling software to 550 universities and whose research is the basis for that statistic.

Three years into his time at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, Arnoldy has completed so few required credits that he changed his major to computer science, almost lost his financial aid, considered dropping out and wasted time in classes he found irrelevant but were the only ones available. 

And he still has at least a year to go.

Though he’s determined to finish, and has narrowly held onto enough scholarships and grants to stay in school, being shut out of courses he needed to graduate means “I am going to literally spend four years in a community college to get a two-year degree,” said Arnoldy, who is 21. 

At one point, when he went to his counselor’s office for help with this, he remembered, “I was bawling. It seems like things should be simpler. A lot of my peers are frustrated, too.”

This kind of experience is, in fact, widespread. Fifty-seven percent of students at all levels of higher education end up having to spend more time and money on college because their campuses don’t offer required courses when they need them, according to a study last year by Ad Astra. 

Though its scheduling work means the company has a vested interest in highlighting this problem, independent scholars and university administrators generally confirm the finding.

“We’re forcing students to literally decelerate their progress to degrees, by telling them to do something they can’t actually do,” Shaver said. 

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

Scheduling university and college courses is complex. Yet rather than use advanced technology to do it, some institutions still rely on “old-school” methods that include producing hard-copy spreadsheets, according to administrators trying to address the issue.

Mounting layoffs and budget problems in the wake of enrollment declines and federal spending cuts threaten to make this problem worse. 

Colleges and universities have collectively laid off thousands of faculty and staff in the last six months, with more downsizing expected. Others are further trimming their number of courses. 

The cash-strapped California State University system has eliminated 1,430 course sections this year, across seven of its 23 campuses, or 7 percent of the total at those campuses, a spokeswoman, Amy Bentley-Smith, confirmed. These include sections of required courses. At Cal State Los Angeles, for example, the number of sections of a required Introduction to American Government course has been reduced from 14 to nine.

“I would expect that course shutouts will start to get worse,” said Kevin Mumford, director of the Purdue University Research Center in Economics, who has also studied this.

In addition to taking longer and spending more to graduate, students who are shut out of required courses often change their majors, as Arnoldy did, or drop out, Mumford’s and other research has concluded.

Together with economists at Brigham Young University, Mumford found that when first-year students at Purdue couldn’t get into a required course, they were 35 percentage points less likely to ever take it and 25 percentage points less likely to enroll in any other course in the same subject. 

The students were part of a freshman class in 2018 that was 7 percent larger than expected, and more than half could not get into at least one of their top six requested courses.

Many changed their majors — especially away from science, technology, engineering or math, often abbreviated STEM. Every required STEM course a student couldn’t get into lowered the probability that he or she would major in one of those fields, according to the study, which was released in May. 

Women, already underrepresented in STEM, were particularly likely to quit, the study found. 

“There’s already a lot of pressure on women in STEM fields, and this appears to be just one obstacle too many,” Mumford said. 

Related: The Hechinger Report’s Tuition Tracker helps reveal the real cost of college

For every course they couldn’t get into, in any subject, women — though not men — were also more than 7 percent less likely to graduate within four years, with a financial toll averaging $800 for additional tuition and housing plus $1,500 in forgone wages.

Students at U.S. colleges and universities already spend more time and money getting their degrees than they expect to. Though 90 percent of freshmen say they plan to finish a four-year degree within four years or less, according to a national survey by an institute at UCLA last administered in 2019, federal data show that fewer than half of them do. More than a third still haven’t graduated after six years.

At community colleges nationwide, students who can’t get into courses they need are up to 28 percent more likely to take no classes at all that term, contributing to those delays in graduation, a 2021 study by scholars at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the nonprofit Mathematica concluded. Two years later, they found, the students were up to 34 percent more likely to have transferred to a different school, a decision that typically costs even more time and money.

Shaver, of Ad Astra, called course scheduling “one of the most mathematically complex optimization problems out there.” 

It requires balancing student demand with the availability of classrooms, labs and full- and part-time faculty, who are typically limited to teaching a maximum number of courses per term, take sabbaticals and sometimes prefer that their classes meet on Mondays through Thursdays in the middle of those days. 

Related: To fill seats, more colleges offer credit for life experience

An increase in the number of students with double majors, minors and concentrations further complicates the process. So do the challenges confronted by part-time and older students, who typically don’t live on campus and have to juggle families and jobs. Such students are expected to comprise a growing proportion of enrollment as the number of 18- to 24-year-olds declines. 

“There are so many obstacles students face, from transportation to work schedules to child care. Some can only take classes in the afternoon or on the weekends,” said Matt Jamison, associate vice president of academic success at Front Range Community College in Colorado. 

Meanwhile, “we have instructors that have [outside] jobs and aren’t always available. And faculty can teach only so many courses.”

But Jamison found that students were being shut out of required classes at his college for other reasons that seemed harder to explain. 

Front Range offers in-person courses on three campuses and others that can be streamed online in real time, for instance. But class periods on the separate campuses and online had different starting and ending times. 

“Students couldn’t get courses they needed because they were scheduled over each other,” Jamison said.

Now the college has synchronized the schedules on all of its campuses and for courses taught live online. It’s adding course sections to better keep up with demand.

None of this is simple, Jamison said. The response from some faculty and staff on his campus about changing long-standing routines, he said, is “ ‘This is the way we’ve always done it.’ But it’s not necessarily the best way to do it.” 

Front Range is one of several colleges and universities trying to improve the chances that its students can get into the courses they need to graduate. Others are using more online courses to help students meet requirements. 

In California’s rural Central Valley, for example, community college students struggled to get into the advanced math courses they need toward degrees in STEM; only a third of the 15 community colleges in the area consistently offer the courses. So the University of California, Merced, launched a pilot program during the summer to provide these required classes online.

At Johnson County Community College, where Ryan Arnoldy goes, executive vice president and provost Michael McCloud acknowledged that students sometimes can’t get into classes they need. A big part of the problem, he said, is that they don’t meet with advisers who can help them plan their routes to degrees — a behavior he said he has seen increasingly among younger generations of students.

To address this, the college has begun requiring students to meet with advisers who can help them better plan which courses to take, and when. A small-scale pilot program showed that this, along with added tutoring and other student supports, improved success rates, McCloud said. The idea is being rolled out to all students.

“The hope is that this will help us on the scheduling end of things,” McCloud said. 

Related: A new way to help some college students: Zero percent, no-fee loans

Texas A&M University-San Antonio is using data to better track how many students are in each major, how many new students are expected, how many students fail and need to repeat required courses and whether there is capacity to increase class enrollments, said Duane Williams, associate vice provost of student success and retention.

“We have to be making the best decisions, and we can’t make them blindly,” Williams said.

The surprising fact that departments haven’t always done that, he said, is partly because “some folks may not have received the proper training. You would think higher ed as a whole would have systems for this, but some do, some don’t. Some are still doing it old school, where they’re just going to keep something on a sheet of paper.”

That may have been enough when there seemed to be an unlimited supply of students. But as public scrutiny of universities and colleges intensifies, and with enrollment projected to decline, institutions are pressed “to help students get in and get out and with the least amount of debt as possible,” Williams said.

Improving the scheduling of required courses seems a comparatively simple way to do this, Mumford said.

“For universities that have all these goals about getting students to graduate or to get more students into STEM,” he said, “this seems like a much cheaper thing to solve than many of the other interventions they’re considering.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about shortages of required courses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

This story about Abbott districts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

UNION CITY, N.J. — By 7:30 a.m., Jackson had started rushing his father, José Bernard, to leave their house. “Dad, we’re going! We’re going, come on, let’s go.” 

The 4-year-old was itching to return to his favorite place: Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center for Early Childhood Education, a burst of orange and blue on the corner of Union City’s bustling Kennedy Boulevard. 

These small moments stick out for Jackson’s father. A year and a half earlier, as a young toddler coming out of daycare, Jackson was nonverbal.

“It’s life-changing, I’ll be honest with you,” said Bernard, who grew up in Union City in Hudson County. The city is home to one of the urban districts in New Jersey with universal and free preschool, created as part of a slate of remedies meant to make up for uneven funding between rich and poor districts in the state.

At the center, young voices try out vowel sounds in Spanish, English and Mandarin, present projects about fish and sea turtles, count plastic ice cream scoops and learn rules of the classroom through song. 

“They are the absolute best school that I’ve ever known,” Bernard said. “It’s a chain reaction from the principal all the way down … I made the best decision for my son, 100 percent.”

Starting in the 1980s, courts hearing the landmark school funding case Abbott v. Burke sought to equalize spending across New Jersey’s schools. Districts located in areas with higher property values were able to spend more on their schools than poor urban districts could — a disparity that was found to violate the state’s constitutional requirement to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for all of New Jersey’s schoolchildren.

The Abbott litigation spawned several decisions by the state Supreme Court, one of which was a 1998 ruling that mandated free preschool for 3- and 4-year-old children in 28 of its highest-poverty urban school districts. That number has since grown to 31.

The state department of education set an ambitious goal of enrolling 90 percent of eligible children in each district, and opened classrooms in private, nonprofit and public settings in the 1999-2000 school year. At that time, New Jersey was the only state to mandate preschool, starting at age 3, for children facing social and academic risk.

“The court recognized that to get kids caught up they need to start off by somehow leveling the playing field from the very beginning, and the best way to do that was with early childhood education,” said Danielle Farrie, research director at the Newark-based Education Law Center, which represented districts for decades in the long-running case. 

Related: Young children have unique needs, and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

As the program continued into its 25th year, researchers have found that the endeavor worked to reduce learning gaps and special education rates between rich and poor children — for those it has reached.

However, over 10,000 children eligible for the program are not enrolled, particularly 3-year-olds, according to a recent assessment of the program by The Education Law Center. 

Supporters worry that the state’s recently established focus on expanding preschool throughout the state could draw attention and resources away from the early-learning program created by the Abbott litigation.  

When it comes to reaching at least 90 percent of the low-income children in the 31 districts targeted by the lawsuit, “we haven’t come anywhere close to meeting those goals,” Farrie said. “To us it’s a question of priorities.”

Designed by early learning experts, the preschools were intended from the start to offer a high-quality program. Class sizes are limited to no more than 15 students, and each class has a certified teacher and an assistant. The school day is six hours, and transportation and health services are offered as needed. Teachers are paid on par with K-3 teachers in their district, and the program’s curriculum conforms to New Jersey’s standards of quality in early education.

“Our special sauce is that we provide opportunities for the families,” said Adriana Birne, director of Union City’s early childhood offerings and principal at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center, where parents are invited in as jurors for special class projects, readers for storytime, or as guests for school plays.  “We enforce the idea that it’s a collaborative effort — moms, dads, teachers, children all working together for success for their little ones.” 

The preschool programs have tried to serve as many eligible kids as possible by providing slots at public schools as well as private childcare providers, Head Start programs, YMCAs and nonprofits that agree to meet the state’s standards.

By many measures, the targeted preschool program has been successful in boosting long-term academic gains for their students. The state ranks in the nation’s top 10 for child well-being and second for education after Massachusetts, based on fourth grade test scores and high school graduation rates. 

However, in the 2024-25 school year the program enrolled only 34,082 kids, about 78 percent of those eligible, across public, private and nonprofit providers. Last year, only five of the 31 districts reached the 90 percent target for enrolling eligible children, compared to 18 districts in 2009-10. Enrollment has been steadily declining, a trend accelerated by the pandemic, the Education Law Center report states.

Related: OPINION: The pandemic wiped out decades of progress for preschoolers. It’s time to get them back on track

Experts say it can be difficult to find eligible kids because many have only recently moved into the state and their parents haven’t yet heard of the program through word of mouth. Some families believe 3 is too young for school, or are immigrants fearful of raids now being conducted at school sites. 

A few district-run programs like Perth Amboy’s require parents to show a government-issued ID or Social Security number to enroll their children. The district enrolled only 63 percent of its eligible 3-year-olds in the 2023-24 school year. The ACLU of New Jersey has previously challenged such requirements, saying they are unconstitutional. 

Programs also aren’t recruiting as aggressively as they did when the program began. Cindy Shields, who led a preschool site in Perth Amboy from 2004 to 2013 and is now a senior policy analyst for Advocates for Children of New Jersey, said she used to recruit at playgrounds, churches, laundromats, supermarkets and nail salons — anywhere families were. 

Districts once advertised preschool in the plastic table settings of local restaurants, said Ellen Frede, who helped design the Abbott preschool program and ran the state’s implementation team. Frede is now co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, or NIEER, based at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

In its heyday, the large team of experts that formed the state pre-K office could also enforce corrective action plans for failing to reach enrollment targets, Frede said.

But during Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s administration from 2010 to 2018, pre-K was reduced to barebone levels. In 2011, New Jersey’s early childhood budget — already only a small fraction of overall education dollars in the state — was slashed 20 percent, causing recruitment efforts to dwindle. 

Though funding and political support for preschool was restored under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy — who recently signed a budget that invests about $1.3 billion in statewide preschool over the next fiscal year — funding for the state department of education’s early childhood arm overseeing the endeavor hasn’t grown in tandem.

Today, “we have a much smaller early childhood office that is actually attempting to expand this program across the entire state without that same kind of attention to detail,” said Farrie, with the Education Law Center.

Related: Pre-K at budget crossroads

While New Jersey stands out in an early childhood landscape that can be grim in terms of quality and pay, investing roughly $16,000 per pupil, high quality preschool is very costly to operate. The state-funded preschools in the districts named in the Abbott litigation require pay parity with public school teachers, yet many districts and private providers operate on low wages and razor thin profit margins. Increases in liability insurance costs for child care providers and preschools is another strain.

The state has also cut back on incentives like bonuses and college scholarships for teachers to enter the program. Such incentives were common in the early years of the state-funded program, resulting in a teaching population that is more diverse and reflective of the student body than K-12 teachers at large. In the 2024-25 school year, 22 and 25 percent of preschool teachers in the 31 districts with universal preschool were Black and Hispanic, compared to just 6 and 9 percent of K-12 educators in New Jersey, respectively. 

State board of education scholarships helped pay college costs for Euridice Correa, a teacher at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center. Correa, affectionately called “La Reina” or “queen” by some parents, is Jackson’s teacher. She’s now in her 18th year as an early childhood educator. 

Correa, who moved to New Jersey from Colombia at nine years old, earned degrees from New Jersey City University thanks to incentives offered in the early years of the court-mandated preschool program.

“I was very poor. I was still working as a cleaner and helping in the daycare,” she said. The state “paid for my whole B.A. and for half of my Master’s with bilingual certification.” 

New Jersey, said Shields, the analyst with Advocates for Children of New Jersey, used to offer “college money, they had incentives, they had sign-on bonuses. They were giving teachers laptops, and we know that it worked. They created this beautiful diverse workforce of teachers that looked just like the children. But we don’t have that anymore.” 

A spokesperson for the state department of education said that paths to bring teachers into the profession “remain a priority in New Jersey to support early childhood educators, particularly in community-based settings.” They cited the Grow NJ Kids scholarship program, which offers scholarships for family care providers and preschool teachers to get additional training. 

Despite expansion and sustainability challenges, research shows the preschools created through the Abbott litigation have helped close the educational gaps that Black, Latino and low-income children were facing. 

By fifth grade, students who were part of the preschool program scored higher on math, literacy and science tests than New Jersey kids who did not attend. Through 10th grade, researchers found their grade retention and special education rates were down 15 and 7 percent respectively.

Researchers found double the impact on scores for kids like Jackson who are enrolled for two years — enough to make up for a third of the achievement gap between Black and white children. Thousands of kids have entered K-12 more prepared. As a result, Union City moved its algebra offerings from ninth to seventh grade. 

Related: States spending more overall on pre-K, but there are still haves and have nots 

“It gives a baseline. You can change things all the way up,” said Steven Barnett, NIEER’s co-director and founder, who is now researching higher education outcomes for Abbott preschoolers. There’s evidence from other communities that quality preschools can affect children into adulthood: Oklahoma’s universal pre-K for 4-year-olds, one of the nation’s oldest, is linked to a 12 percent increase in college enrollment. 

The programs have also been able to offer enrichment for their students that would otherwise be impossible to fund. 

At Noah’s Ark Preschool, a private provider in Highland Park in Middlesex County, 3-year-olds hold full conversations, sharing about their trips to see family out of state or weekend plans to go to local pools. They’ve learned to write their names and read signs. 

Early learning years are so much more than just learning ABCs or shapes, said founder Karen Marino. “It’s really about their independence,” she said, adding that she started Noah’s Ark after looking for affordable care for her own three children years ago, one of whom now runs the site. Her school has contracted with New Brunswick schools in Middlesex County to offer seats since the program began. 

Farther north in Passaic, the nonprofit Children’s Day Preschool serves over 120 kids learning social and fine motor skills through play. With fundraising, the school, in Passaic County, was able to afford renovations, a full-time art therapist and a nurse for their community of mostly Mexican, Peruvian, Colombian, Puerto Rican and Dominican families. 

Children’s Day feels for many like an extension of home, with family recipes lining the walls and bilingual instructions for parents on how to ask about their child’s day at school: “Did you learn something new? Who made you smile today? Did you help someone today or did someone help you?”

Many of their educators have been teaching at the site for 15 to 20 years. James Acosta, who attended the center as a child and is now is not a digital media assistant, said returning to work was “like seeing like aunts and uncles saying, ‘you’re so big now!’” 

Abbott supporters hope more families will join the program. Parent Candy Vitale’s  6-year-old son, Mateo, is reading at a second-grade level and learning how to solve for an unknown “x” in math equations.  

Vitale spent the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment so her older daughter could attend a comparable half-day pre-K at the Jersey Shore. She learned of the offerings in Union City from her partner, whose older children had attended. 

“This is the foundation of loving learning, and loving school, and feeling loved at school,” Vitale said. “Knowing that I was dropping him off every day, and he was in a place that he absolutely was enamored by — I think that there’s no price tag you can put on that.”

Contact the editor of this story, Christina Samuels, at 212-678-3635, via Signal at cas.37 or samuels@hechingerreport.org. 

This story about Abbott districts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.