Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton announced in a New York Times' story widely carried that part of the education agenda in her campaign would be a $5 billion federal committment to promote state investments in pre-kindergarten programs. The federal government's role in early childhood education has been primarily in supporting Head Start. (And funding for Head Start has never been sufficient to serve all children eligible.) But pre-k is seen differently--it's not just for poor kids, it's perceived to be more explicitly educational, and designed to get kids ready for school. Clinton's proposal doesn't offer up a federal program but instead offers to match dollar-for-dollar the state commitment to pre-k, and states would not be allowed to reduce their spending if they wanted federal money.

States are upping their spending, adding $1.2 billion on new dollars over the past three years. So far this year, 29 governors have proposed increases--20 Democratic governors and nine Republicans. Biggest state to sign on this year is Iowa.

It will be interesting to see how the coverage of this goes. If only political reporters cover it, the stories are likely to focus on political strategy and positioning. That's not unimportant, because the politics of an expanded federal role in a program serving young children are tricky, even more so than other federal efforts, such as the No Child Left Behind act. But the outline of the Clinton program--requiring all teachers to have bachelor's degrees and special training, standards, use of certain curricula and so forth--have educational implications. (Just one: where will all the well-trained teachers come from? There isn't much a of a pipeline to produce such teachers.) So, one hopes that education writers will jump in as well.

Clinton isn't out there on her own. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding a forum on pre-kindergarten and early childhood education this week; the New America Foundation is holding a symposium; and many prescriptions from think tanks and others for improving education are calling for more attention to younger kids. Lots of work for journalists!