The following piece was adapted from testimony submitted to the New York City Council for an Oversight hearing on “Advancing Diversity and Equity in NYC Public Schools” held on June 18, 2025.
Early childhood education and child care in New York City have seen remarkable transformation over the past decade. During his two terms as mayor from 2014 to 2022, Mayor Bill de Blasio made Pre-K for All his signature policy achievement, guaranteeing a free pre-K education to all four-year-olds in the city and rolling out a plan to reach all three-year-olds over time. These programs have fundamentally changed how the city approaches early education.
Since then, progress has been uneven. Mayor Eric Adams has generally been much less supportive of early education, distancing his administration from the 3-K and pre-K policy proposals of the de Blasio administration, slowing 3-K expansion, threatening to cut funding, and failing to deliver payments to early childhood providers on time. But earlier this year, in response to pushback from constituents, Mayor Adams changed his tune, restoring funding for early education that he had proposed to cut and holding a press conference with an unlikely guest—his predecessor, former Mayor de Blasio—to tout the importance of early childhood programs together. While the city’s early childhood programs still face funding challenges, the mayor’s about-face is a testament to the work of families, providers, and advocates who rallied to explain why the administration’s actions to roll back early childhood funding would be harmful, as well as to the popularity of public early childhood programs once families experience their benefits.
Now the city could be poised for another major leap forward. Last month, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s stunning Democratic primary victory brought new energy to early childhood policy, with his platform promising free child care for all New Yorkers from 6 weeks to 5 years old—a proposal that, if enacted, would represent the most ambitious expansion of early education access in the city’s history.
These past policies and forward-looking proposals have rightly focused on access and affordability, and there is more work to do on those fronts, ensuring pre-K and 3-K programs have enough seats that match families’ needs and investing in programs for children 0–2 years old. But the next chapter for early education in New York City also needs to include much more focus on diversity. Right now, New York City is missing a critical opportunity to create the diverse, integrated learning environments that support developing young hearts and minds and lay the foundation for lasting school integration throughout students’ educational journey.
Why Diversity in Early Education Matters
The racial and socioeconomic diversity of preschool classrooms is a key component of their educational quality. Decades of research on K–12 education show that low-income students see gains to their reading and math skills from learning in socioeconomically integrated environments as opposed to attending schools with high concentrations of poverty. Racially integrated classrooms also help foster critical thinking skills and reduce racial biases—important traits in today’s complex, multicultural world.
New research finds that the benefits of diverse learning environments begin before kindergarten. One study using data from eleven state pre-K programs found that preschool children in classes with higher average socioeconomic status learned more on average than those in low-SES classrooms—regardless of the children’s own backgrounds. A follow-up analysis found that racial diversity of pre-K classrooms was independently associated with children’s outcomes, offering advantages for all students.
Even after controlling for instructional quality in the classroom, children in diverse preschool settings still show increased learning outcomes. This suggests that peer effects may be at work—children learn by interacting with peers in the classroom. Because children’s exposure to math and language skills outside the classroom is highly correlated with their socioeconomic background, low-SES children benefit, on average, from having some middle- or high-SES classmates.
Perhaps even more importantly, diverse preschool classrooms can help young children learn to empathize and coexist with people from other races and classes. Children typically develop awareness of racial and social categories by kindergarten, and exposure to peers helps shape these perceptions. Research suggests that children in racially integrated classrooms may be less likely than those in homogeneous classrooms to show racial bias toward other groups. Creating more racially and socioeconomically diverse settings for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in New York City will help unlock these important cognitive and social-emotional benefits for more children and lay a foundation for diversity in K–12 classrooms.
New York City’s Strengths and Challenges
New York City has many of the right ingredients in place already to create diverse early learning environments. The city has a diverse population and has made large public investments in early learning. New York City is ahead of the curve nationally in providing universal access to early childhood education for four-year-olds and three-year-olds. As of 2023–24, 59,841 children were enrolled in pre-K and 43,914 were enrolled in 3-K. The city also has a robust subsidized early education program for eligible low-income infants and toddlers using federal child care funding and Head Start programs. And with all of these programs now operated through New York City Public Schools, there is the opportunity for a coordinated approach.
However, despite these investments, New York City’s early childhood options, even those that are touted as universal, are still highly segregated by race and class. According to analyses published by The Century Foundation, pre-K and 3-K classes in public schools are typically as racially segregated as kindergarten classes in those schools, while pre-K and 3-K classes in community-based programs show significantly higher levels of racial segregation. Publicly available data from the most recent year available, 2018–19, shows that half of all children in community-based pre-K programs were in fairly racially homogeneous settings where 71–100 percent of the student body comes from a single racial/ethnic group, and only one in five were in highly diverse settings with no racial or ethnic group comprising more than 50 percent. (Unfortunately, more recent data is not publicly available because the demographic data published by NYCPS from 2019 to 2024 no longer includes data on pre-K and 3-K in community-based organizations, which are the majority of pre-K and 3-K programs.) For children under age 3, the landscape of early care and education is largely divided between public programs that offer access to eligible low-income families and a private market serving higher-income families as well as lower-income families that are not served, due to lack of eligibility or availability, by public programs.
This segregation occurs at the same time that the city is losing families with young children who are moving away because the city’s cost of living—and the cost of child care—is too high.
The Path Forward
We need policy changes and increased public investment in early education to expand access to diverse early learning environments for more of our youngest New Yorkers and help keep more families with young children in the city. In particular, the city should take the following steps:
- Ensure enough seats for Pre-K and 3-K to serve all families that want them, with locations and program hours that match their needs. This will require expanding options for enrolling Pre-K and 3-K children in programs before school, after school, and during school breaks.
- Fund a new Universal 2-Care program and a pilot of non-income-tested care for children ages 0–12. These programs would build off the work started with Pre-K For All and 3-K to extend the benefits of universal access to even younger children and create more opportunities for integration.
- Work toward simplifying systems to allow and encourage providers receiving different public funding streams to blend their programs in order to integrate classrooms. These funding streams include Head Start and Early Head Start, universal-eligibility school-day-and-year pre-K and 3-K seats, and extend-day-and-year pre-K and 3-K seats with additional eligibility criteria. The administrative burden of blending programs should shift more to the central office rather than placing it on individual providers. The complexity of managing multiple funding streams with different requirements currently creates an undue and often unmanageable burden on many early childhood providers, particularly single-site programs or family child care programs with limited administrative staff.
- Encourage more early childhood providers to house public programs as well as private-pay seats, and require blending of programs for those that do. Creating these opportunities for socioeconomic integration requires individual day care centers to receive different funding streams and then mix children from different programs in individual classrooms.
- Include discussion of and data on birth-to-five programs in broader conversations about socioeconomic and racial diversity across grades in the public school system. The work on school integration and early education should not remain separate. Integration efforts need to be coordinated from birth through high school graduation, and NYCPS’s demographic snapshots should include data on all 3-K and pre-K programs, including those in community-based programs.
Conclusion
Diversity is a key aspect of program quality for early childhood education. The path to a racially just and thriving future for the next generation must include creating high-quality early education programs for all families who want them, where children of all backgrounds can learn together.
New York City has important building blocks already in place, but it will take considerable problem-solving and intentional work—from policymakers and providers—to capitalize on existing opportunities for integration as well as open additional opportunities. If we work merely to expand a system of siloed opportunities, the city runs the risk of cementing lines of segregation that perpetuate inequality, even when we achieve universal access. Instead, as the city continues to expand and improve early childhood education, we must seize opportunities for diversity where they exist and lay the groundwork for broader integration throughout the education system.
New York City Transformed Education with Pre-K For All. School Integration Should Be Next.
The following piece was adapted from testimony submitted to the New York City Council for an Oversight hearing on “Advancing Diversity and Equity in NYC Public Schools” held on June 18, 2025.
Early childhood education and child care in New York City have seen remarkable transformation over the past decade. During his two terms as mayor from 2014 to 2022, Mayor Bill de Blasio made Pre-K for All his signature policy achievement, guaranteeing a free pre-K education to all four-year-olds in the city and rolling out a plan to reach all three-year-olds over time. These programs have fundamentally changed how the city approaches early education.
Since then, progress has been uneven. Mayor Eric Adams has generally been much less supportive of early education, distancing his administration from the 3-K and pre-K policy proposals of the de Blasio administration, slowing 3-K expansion, threatening to cut funding, and failing to deliver payments to early childhood providers on time. But earlier this year, in response to pushback from constituents, Mayor Adams changed his tune, restoring funding for early education that he had proposed to cut and holding a press conference with an unlikely guest—his predecessor, former Mayor de Blasio—to tout the importance of early childhood programs together. While the city’s early childhood programs still face funding challenges, the mayor’s about-face is a testament to the work of families, providers, and advocates who rallied to explain why the administration’s actions to roll back early childhood funding would be harmful, as well as to the popularity of public early childhood programs once families experience their benefits.
Now the city could be poised for another major leap forward. Last month, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s stunning Democratic primary victory brought new energy to early childhood policy, with his platform promising free child care for all New Yorkers from 6 weeks to 5 years old—a proposal that, if enacted, would represent the most ambitious expansion of early education access in the city’s history.
These past policies and forward-looking proposals have rightly focused on access and affordability, and there is more work to do on those fronts, ensuring pre-K and 3-K programs have enough seats that match families’ needs and investing in programs for children 0–2 years old. But the next chapter for early education in New York City also needs to include much more focus on diversity. Right now, New York City is missing a critical opportunity to create the diverse, integrated learning environments that support developing young hearts and minds and lay the foundation for lasting school integration throughout students’ educational journey.
Why Diversity in Early Education Matters
The racial and socioeconomic diversity of preschool classrooms is a key component of their educational quality. Decades of research on K–12 education show that low-income students see gains to their reading and math skills from learning in socioeconomically integrated environments as opposed to attending schools with high concentrations of poverty. Racially integrated classrooms also help foster critical thinking skills and reduce racial biases—important traits in today’s complex, multicultural world.
New research finds that the benefits of diverse learning environments begin before kindergarten. One study using data from eleven state pre-K programs found that preschool children in classes with higher average socioeconomic status learned more on average than those in low-SES classrooms—regardless of the children’s own backgrounds. A follow-up analysis found that racial diversity of pre-K classrooms was independently associated with children’s outcomes, offering advantages for all students.
Even after controlling for instructional quality in the classroom, children in diverse preschool settings still show increased learning outcomes. This suggests that peer effects may be at work—children learn by interacting with peers in the classroom. Because children’s exposure to math and language skills outside the classroom is highly correlated with their socioeconomic background, low-SES children benefit, on average, from having some middle- or high-SES classmates.
Perhaps even more importantly, diverse preschool classrooms can help young children learn to empathize and coexist with people from other races and classes. Children typically develop awareness of racial and social categories by kindergarten, and exposure to peers helps shape these perceptions. Research suggests that children in racially integrated classrooms may be less likely than those in homogeneous classrooms to show racial bias toward other groups. Creating more racially and socioeconomically diverse settings for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in New York City will help unlock these important cognitive and social-emotional benefits for more children and lay a foundation for diversity in K–12 classrooms.
New York City’s Strengths and Challenges
New York City has many of the right ingredients in place already to create diverse early learning environments. The city has a diverse population and has made large public investments in early learning. New York City is ahead of the curve nationally in providing universal access to early childhood education for four-year-olds and three-year-olds. As of 2023–24, 59,841 children were enrolled in pre-K and 43,914 were enrolled in 3-K. The city also has a robust subsidized early education program for eligible low-income infants and toddlers using federal child care funding and Head Start programs. And with all of these programs now operated through New York City Public Schools, there is the opportunity for a coordinated approach.
However, despite these investments, New York City’s early childhood options, even those that are touted as universal, are still highly segregated by race and class. According to analyses published by The Century Foundation, pre-K and 3-K classes in public schools are typically as racially segregated as kindergarten classes in those schools, while pre-K and 3-K classes in community-based programs show significantly higher levels of racial segregation. Publicly available data from the most recent year available, 2018–19, shows that half of all children in community-based pre-K programs were in fairly racially homogeneous settings where 71–100 percent of the student body comes from a single racial/ethnic group, and only one in five were in highly diverse settings with no racial or ethnic group comprising more than 50 percent. (Unfortunately, more recent data is not publicly available because the demographic data published by NYCPS from 2019 to 2024 no longer includes data on pre-K and 3-K in community-based organizations, which are the majority of pre-K and 3-K programs.) For children under age 3, the landscape of early care and education is largely divided between public programs that offer access to eligible low-income families and a private market serving higher-income families as well as lower-income families that are not served, due to lack of eligibility or availability, by public programs.
This segregation occurs at the same time that the city is losing families with young children who are moving away because the city’s cost of living—and the cost of child care—is too high.
The Path Forward
We need policy changes and increased public investment in early education to expand access to diverse early learning environments for more of our youngest New Yorkers and help keep more families with young children in the city. In particular, the city should take the following steps:
Conclusion
Diversity is a key aspect of program quality for early childhood education. The path to a racially just and thriving future for the next generation must include creating high-quality early education programs for all families who want them, where children of all backgrounds can learn together.
New York City has important building blocks already in place, but it will take considerable problem-solving and intentional work—from policymakers and providers—to capitalize on existing opportunities for integration as well as open additional opportunities. If we work merely to expand a system of siloed opportunities, the city runs the risk of cementing lines of segregation that perpetuate inequality, even when we achieve universal access. Instead, as the city continues to expand and improve early childhood education, we must seize opportunities for diversity where they exist and lay the groundwork for broader integration throughout the education system.