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I’ve long argued that ongoing political gridlock and make education unlikely to matter much for presidential politics. But early education has, from time to time, . This is great! There are considerable, substantive reasons to invest in quality early education programs. But not all of these investments are designed, created, or implemented .

Why? In , I try to explore one of the major causes of this gap between quality early education politicians promise and the weaker programs they often build:

 The usual case for early education is already well established in American public discourse. that low-income children fall behind their wealthier peers’ language development . By age three, the children from the poorest American families than children from the wealthiest families. These gaps only grow in the years before elementary school.

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[E]arly word gaps can’t just be closed . Quality matters. Rich, robust language use builds vocabulary and literacy. But pre-K programs’ capacity to deliver that sort of language varies considerably. This should be relatively intuitive: these programs work by exposing children with low linguistic development to the speech of highly-literate adults. So a program’s effectiveness fluctuates along with the literacy levels of its teachers.

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