The Washington Post's Maria Glod used Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine's decision to downsize his "universal" pre-k program to a targeted one as a news hook for a solid roundup of what's going on with the expansion of publicly funded preschool nationally. The article, which ran on A-1, had a glimpse of a good classroom, regional specifics, national sweep, details of Kaine's new approach, research, and quoted the strongest voices on both sides of the "universal" vs. "targeted" debate.

All in all, a fine example of going beyond a news development to provide readers with a useful context in which to understand that event. It wasn't necessary to go into it in this story, but one aspect of it made me think about what the next story on this might be for the Post.

Kaine says he decided to scale back on his idea because he was advised to "take the existing network and focus on the goals of increasing access and increasing quality" rather than start a new program from scratch. That's inevitable when a state expands its spending on preschool. It's not as if three and four year olds are not already going somewhere. But Kaine also may have been responding to pressure, because it is often existing private providers that lobby the hardest against expanding public spending, for fear that they'll be forced out of business by the competition. But Kaine's public-private approach creates another challenge. The state has to figure out how to push existing low-quality programs to improve. That's a hard job. Money helps but, as in New Jersey, public money poured into private centers sometimes leads to more money in the pockets of operators without any improvement in quality. Kaine suggests a rating system that parents will be able to use in choosing a preschool, in effect trying to tap market forces to maintain quality. The fact is, though, parents usually want their young children as close by as possible so the market forces are going to be weaker than they would be if true competition were unleashed. Kaine's right that it's the quality of programs not necessarily who provides them that's most important. But it's harder to ensure that quality in the private sector.