Over the past three years Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen has steadily increased his state's spending on high-quality pre-kindergarten classes. Last week the governor addressed a group of editorial writers who gathered at Teachers College in New York City for a two-day seminar sponsored by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media that dealt with early education issues. Pre-k advocates talk a lot about the studies that tout the long-term returns for investing in pre-kindergarten. But Bredesen, who has a degree in physics from Harvard, said those studies were not what persuaded him to push pre-k. What did the trick, he told the editorialists, was conversations with teachers around his state.

I went around the state and I talked to teachers and I asked them, "If you had one more dollar to spend on education, how would you spend it." When you forced people to pick one thing, it's amazing how many pick pre-kindergarten. It seems like there's a broad consensus.

Bredesen also said he found it believable that high-quality pre-k programs would help more children be reading by the third grade. Finally, he said, it was a matter of fairness. "Some kids are extraordinarily well-prepared when they start school. You meet other kids who don't know their real names, only their nicknames, they don't know their primary colors, and you just say to yourself, 'it's not fair.' "

Rather than plunge into a universal pre-k program all at once and launch poor quality programs with the intent to improve them later, Bredesen decided to establish high-quality programs and roll them out slowly. The Tennessee program employs only certified teachers, keeps class sizes small, and uses only approved curricula. Surprisingly, Bredesen said, the biggest political fight had to be fought over quality. Day care centers and private pre-k programs did not employ certified teachers or pay decent salaries and so they saw the state program as a "threat to their livelihood."

Bredesen said that he hopes that any parent in Tennessee who wants to send their child to a state-funded pre-kindergarten will be able to do so. Right now, he said, the state is about 40% of the way there. But he said it was a "realistic goal" that can be reached in about three and a half years.

More about the seminar over the next few days.