A little more than a decade ago, Bill de Blasio, then the New York City public advocate preparing a run for mayor, sat at a window table in Bar Toto in Park Slope with his policy adviser Ursulina Ramirez. The two batted around an idea: What if every child in the city could attend pre-K? De Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, had faced the lack of pre-K schooling firsthand, struggling to find care for their eldest child when she was 4 years old. They experienced “that sense of hopelessness so many parents have,” de Blasio told me this fall. “Either you don’t have the money or you can’t find a seat anywhere that possibly fits your life.”
At the time, just 28 percent of the country’s 4-year-olds were attending a state-funded preschool program in 2013, despite a huge body of research showing how formative those years are for children’s development. The 4,000 pre-K seats created under Mayor Michael Bloomberg were reserved for low-income children, leaving some 70,000 kids without a public option.
Ramirez sketched out what the numbers might look like on a napkin. It was a lot of money — in the ballpark of $300 million a year — but it wasn’t impossible. To be taken seriously, however, they would have to prove they could summon the funds. It was just a year after Occupy Wall Street, and they hit on financing the program with a tax on the wealthy.
The idea became the central promise of de Blasio’s “Tale of Two Cities” mayoral campaign: The city should provide free, full-day pre-K to every family, funded by a 1 percent tax on income over $500,000. When de Blasio informed his campaign staff that he intended to run on universal pre-K, they balked, pointing out that there wasn’t even polling on it. But he and Ramirez argued city residents were desperate for early childhood education. It was an issue that “resonated so deeply with so many different communities across the city,” said Josh Wallack, who served as chief strategy officer in the Department of Education and was a staffer for de Blasio when he was on the City Council in the aughts. “It’s a rare issue that does that.”
Riding a wave of popular discontent with Bloomberg, who had strong-armed his way into a third term while turning New York into a playground for plutocrats and closing schools, de Blasio ran away with 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote, handily beating his eight opponents. His victory was, he believed, a mandate to enact his big campaign promise. Even so, “nobody thought Mayor de Blasio would be able to pull this off,” said Richard Buery, who served as deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives under de Blasio.
The largest challenge was the funding, which would have to be approved by Governor Andrew Cuomo, a mentor to de Blasio who would go on to become his nemesis and tormentor. And even if de Blasio’s administration got the money, the logistics were daunting. They needed tons of space to accommodate tens of thousands of new kids entering the system. They needed to train and license an army of new teachers. And they had to coordinate an alphabet soup of agencies, from the Administration for Children’s Services to the Department of Buildings. Looking back now, it is a near-miracle that de Blasio’s team accomplished all of this — and within two years of taking office in 2014.
While New York would eventually grow tired of de Blasio, the program remains incredibly popular. It has since benefited from the retroactive glow that comes from comparing de Blasio to his successor, Eric Adams, who has not just deprioritized universal preschool but has been indicted on bribery and fraud charges. As the Onion quoted a fictional de Blasio crowing, “Well, well, well, not so easy to find a mayor that doesn’t suck shit, huh?”
New York’s successful universal pre-K program is also a testament to the ability of city government to execute ambitious and seemingly durable policies that help families across class and race and borough. The sense of pride among de Blasio’s team is palpable even a decade later. A few people cried remembering the experience. “I’ve worked on a lot of big projects and important initiatives,” said Alexis Confer, the outreach director who had previously been on President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. “This is one of the things I’ll definitely be proudest of.” De Blasio’s pre-K triumph is a lesson for the Democrats lining up to challenge Adams as he prepares for reelection next year, as well as those across the country casting about for governance models in the next phase of the Trump era.
Shortly after de Blasio won the general election, he created a working group of early-childhood experts, including Wallack and Sherry Cleary, at the time the executive director of the New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute at CUNY. By his swearing-in in 2014, the group was meeting as often as ten times a week. “His mandate was, ‘How fast can you do it?’” Ramirez said. At first, the group pushed for three years, which seemed “aggressive but also achievable,” Ramirez said. But de Blasio decided they had to go faster, launching in the fall of that year and achieving full universality by September 2015. Most of the staff would, at one point or another, question that timeline and whether they could really pull it off. “He was just very dead set on it,” Ramirez said. The going joke was that the team could have anything it wanted except for more time.
When we met at a café in Park Slope in October, de Blasio compared the effort to the conquistador Hernán Cortés destroying his ships after arriving in Mexico, leaving his men with no choice but to go forth and conquer. De Blasio’s ruined ships were the public statements promising universal pre-K by the second September of his administration. “By saying that publicly, we put everyone on the hook,” he said. “If you want your bureaucracy to move, make everyone responsible with a public goal that they can’t squirm out of.”
There were five core pieces to getting the program up and running in time: securing the funding, building the capacity, hiring the teachers, ensuring high quality, and putting kids in seats.
Getting the money would prove to be one of the most arduous challenges. Cuomo was dead set against allowing de Blasio to institute a new tax, and he insisted on the program being rolled out over five years. It helped de Blasio that Democrats in the state assembly had been pushing for pre-K for decades. “They had a pent-up desire to do something,” de Blasio said, with Sheldon Silver, then the powerful speaker of the assembly, being a crucial ally who knew how to “outmaneuver Cuomo.” The state senate, at the time controlled by a conservative bloc of lawmakers known as the Independent Democratic Conference, was also “feeling the pressure,” de Blasio said. Even Jeffrey Klein, the head of the IDC, vowed to help secure funding for universal pre-K.
Cuomo didn’t budge on the tax hike, but de Blasio insisting on it gave the mayor a demand he could drop in exchange for the prize of pre-K. In the face of a popular new mayor’s relentless focus, Cuomo did eventually find the money the city needed to get it done, coming up with $300 million a year in the state budget for five years, coupled with more school funding in the rest of the state and a charter-school expansion against de Blasio’s wishes. It was, at the time, a huge increase in education spending that doubled as an expansion of the social safety net, allowing parents to go to work and delivering school meals to their kids.
A fully universal program, de Blasio’s team decided, would enroll 90 percent of the children then in kindergarten, which came to about 73,000 children. Space was thus a huge constraint. It’s scarce and comes at a high premium in New York City. Add to that the fact that there’s a lot of red tape involved in building, and the team had its work cut out for it. Where could they put all those 4-year-olds?
There were already some half-day preschool programs run by the DOE, and private providers offered various kinds of programs for 4-year-olds. At the time, there were nearly 19,000 children in half-day seats and fewer than 13,000 children in free, full-day pre-K. Those programs could be converted into Pre-K For All programs, the challenge being to wrangle them all into the same full-day standard. Beyond that, the team was “finding seats wherever you could,” Buery said, from empty classrooms to empty churches.
They helped private providers build out their spaces and expedited their permitting. They went school building by school building and commandeered vacant spaces; if a school had put aside space to have a fifth grade in a few years, that space was used for preschoolers instead. Rooms that were meant for dance or art class were transformed into pre-K classrooms — not a simple repurposing since the children had to have in-room bathrooms and outdoor play space. Some superintendents and principals balked at the takeovers. “We were perceived as a little bit bulldozerish,” said Xanthe Jory, a senior executive in the Division of Early Childhood Education.
They had to add enough new spots to welcome about 50,000 kids the first year and everyone else the next. About halfway through, the team realized they had underestimated how much space they needed. “That was a terrifying moment,” de Blasio said. So they invited in many more religious and charter schools — the latter a constituency de Blasio had already been battling with in his defense of traditional public schools. To make it work, de Blasio allowed religious schools to institute a “prayer break” in the middle of the day.
They also bought or leased space for standalone pre-K centers, which became especially crucial in year two of implementation with space at existing schools and programs maxed out. The School Construction Authority, rushing to get up to speed on pre-K standards, created a standalone center with 24 classrooms in Sunset Park. They built a center in the parking lot of the New York Hall of Science and another in a former Dunkin Donuts. Those buildings were “super-expensive,” Wallack said. Typically, inspections from various agencies can hang these efforts up, so the city sent teams of people from the relevant departments out together to the sites that needed to be licensed. The Fire Department assigned 20 people to pre-K full time, while the administration deployed the Department of Design and Construction directly to schools that needed last-minute repairs.
In the weeks before school started in 2014, staff spread out over the city, doing walkthroughs to make sure classrooms felt safe and welcoming. The Friday before the first day of school, Buery called Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro and asked him if his people could check out about 400 sites they wanted extra eyeballs on over the weekend. “He pauses for a second and goes, ‘Yeah, we can do that,’” Buery recalled. At a school in Corona, Queens, where the team had commandeered the yard for pre-K, the classroom trailers didn’t arrive until a few days before school opened. Jory and her team worked through the night setting up furniture, unpacking puzzles and games, and hooking up electricity. The teachers walked into their classrooms for the first time along with their students the next day.
It’s one thing to build seats; it’s another to make sure they’re full. The Department of Education typically signed people up by asking parents to visit an enrollment office and fill out paperwork. Department officials wanted to simply add pre-K registration into the existing system. That wasn’t going to fly with de Blasio’s experiment. “We can’t build something and no one shows up to it,” Ramirez said. The stakes were too high to wait for parents to come to them. Parents, particularly those with the least resources and awareness, had to be convinced to enroll — convinced that it would be a good environment for their young children, and that it would in fact be free.
The de Blasio administration built an outreach team, mostly filled with people who came from outside government. Rick Fromberg, who was working at a firm that consulted on political campaigns, was asked to join in May 2014, tasked with enrolling tens of thousands of children in a matter of months. The first step was to build a list of where kids lived and match it with a new database of forthcoming pre-K spots. They acquired private data with any markers that a 4-year-old might reside in a home. They examined data on families that received early-childhood and other public benefits indicating they might have young children. They used data on existing programs for 4-year-olds to find areas that were underenrolled. They reached out to parents who already had children enrolled in K-12 schools to ask if they had 4-year-olds. They even considered birth data but were blocked by HIPAA restrictions.
Then the team mapped out which parks 4-year-olds and their parents frequented and swarmed them with information. They visited barber shops and beauty salons. They set up tables at public events and attended community-board meetings. “We were at every parade,” Fromberg said. They went door to door, just like a political campaign, in neighborhoods with a lot of empty seats and a lot of young kids, something that only the U.S. Census was used to doing. That spring and summer, “you couldn’t go anywhere if you were near a child and not find people in blue outfits to ask you to enroll,” Buery said.
They also didn’t leave it to parents to figure out how to enroll on their own. “Enrollment specialists” were hired to “handhold parents through the process,” Fromberg said. Any parent who indicated interest on the website would immediately get a phone call, text, or email asking if they needed assistance. If the parent still didn’t take the next step, the team would keep contacting them with tips on what programs they could consider. At their doorstep, outreach staff ran through the benefits of signing up, then told them how to complete enrollment on their own. “They were doing persuasion, signup, and then turnout, making sure parents knew exactly where to go and when to be there and what documents to bring,” Fromberg said. The persuasion, though, wasn’t all that difficult compared to more traditional campaigns. “We were selling a service that people really wanted,” Confer said.
They also deployed robocalls, phone and text banking, and sent mailers. They plastered any surface they could find with ads urging parents to go to the website and enroll their children. They hammered home that it was free, that it was full day, and that it would offer a quality education for young brains.
But what’s a quality education without teachers? The Department of Education had to hire about 1,000 new teachers in both 2014 and 2015, and at first staffers were worried they wouldn’t find enough qualified ones to fill all of the classrooms. But they ended up getting thousands of applicants.
The real issue was ensuring the teachers were able to offer top-notch instruction to 4-year-olds. Sophia Pappas, the head of the DOE’s Office of Early Childhood Education, called Cleary one day in the summer of 2014 and told her, “I need you to figure out how to train 4,000 teachers,’” Cleary recalled, both those who were newly hired and those in private, community-based programs. “I said, ‘Oh, very funny.’” Pappas was serious. The city created a summer institute on the CUNY campus that offered hundreds of teachers a weeklong training session. Some were given scholarships to earn both a masters in early childhood education and state certification at the same time in 14 months. “It was really grueling” for them, Cleary said. Once the school year started, teachers underwent follow-up professional-development sessions three or four times a year. “Our mantra was, ‘Free, full-day, high-quality pre-K,’” Buery said. “‘High-quality’ was not a throw away.”
The administration developed its own set of quality standards, combining state standards and national benchmarks. They then significantly expanded a team of certified assessors who performed thousands of inspections every year. The outcomes of the assessments were made public, which acted as an incentive for programs to meet the standards and a way to signal to the public that quality was being taken seriously.
Based on the outcomes of those assessments, the programs that needed more help academically got visits from a fleet of 100 new instructional coaches. The coaches worked directly with teachers, modeling instruction for them and giving them feedback. Schools that needed more support to improve social-emotional learning needs got visits from a new team of 150 social workers who helped teachers work on behavior management, family engagement, and other related skills.
By late 2015, the program was scoring high on quality measurements, matching or surpassing national averages. Third-grade students who attended Pre-K For All later outperformed those who didn’t.
The team was working at a breakneck pace under an intense microscope. People were putting in seven days a week, toiling long into the night. “It was exceedingly successful but a little bloody,” Cleary said. At the time, Jory had two young children, ages 4 and 6. It was “the job of a lifetime,” she said, but added, “I feel like my absence from home damaged my family in lasting ways. I’m not the only one who had that type of experience. It was really hard.”
The speed was a political calculation. De Blasio wanted to prove to voters that this would, in fact, happen and have it up and running before his reelection. Furthermore, if they got bogged down, he thought, Cuomo would yank the money away. He also felt the weight of any kids who would go without pre-K if the timeline were to slow down. He didn’t want a single cohort to “miss the moment that could allow them to reach their potential,” he said.
On that first day of school in 2014, the work paid off. “There were no problems,” Buery said. “Just no problems.” A rapid-response center they had set up to troubleshoot any issues didn’t get any calls.
There was turmoil beneath the outer projection of success, though. The relentless focus on pre-K sucked attention and resources away from nearly everything else in city government, and other parts of the DOE especially were resentful that they weren’t getting the same funding and support. Where were the instructional coaches and extra social workers to support kids in seventh grade, for example?
Inside City Hall, tensions boiled. Jory felt that the work her team did at the Division of Early Childhood Education got little credit, which flowed instead to people like Buery, Wallack, and Fromberg. City Hall and senior members of the outreach team in particular got a lot of plaudits. Her team “felt so unseen and unappreciated after having been there every night until midnight.”
Those involved also admit there were plenty of mistakes made along the way. Nearly everyone pointed to the pay gap between teachers hired by the district and those in community-based, formerly private programs. In 2016, pre-K teachers working for a district school earned at least $49,908 compared to $44,000 for those at community-based ones, even though they were doing the same jobs and held to the same standards. It created “wild instability,” Buery said, as teachers tried to leapfrog into the better-paying jobs.
Another failure was not integrating special education into the program in a better, more comprehensive way from the outset. In the 2019–20 school year, more than 1,000 kids with disabilities didn’t get a seat in a suitable pre-K classroom, and a third of 4-year-olds with disabilities didn’t get the services they were entitled to.
One of the most important factors in the program’s favor, however, was that it was universal from the start. Critics argued that it was a waste of resources and wasn’t fair to the underserved children who needed it most; de Blasio’s team responded that kindergarten and all other grades aren’t means tested, so pre-K, which catches children at an even more crucial developmental stage, shouldn’t be either. It was also a way for everyone to be invested in it, from low-income families to wealthy ones. De Blasio recounted talking to parents in the Bronx and Park Slope and hearing an equal level of support for pre-K in both places. Parents with the most resources were among those who fought hardest for it.
“Whether you like it or not, families with resources have political power,” noted Emmy Liss, who worked at the city’s early-childhood division from 2015 to 2022. “If people who have resources fight for it, that makes a big difference.”
It was notable, then, that the three main factors in Pre-K’s success — money, speed, and universality — were not applied to 3K.
De Blasio’s team figured that since pre-K had gone so well, they could try to replicate it for 3-year-olds. But this time, the administration found it had almost maxed out on space. The manic energy of the first two years was also gone. “You can only sustain that for so long,” Jory said. There was also no state funding. So instead of blanketing the entire city with a new program, they took a more traditional approach, starting in the neediest neighborhoods with hopes of building it out until it was universal. “There was a commitment to keep expanding incrementally every year and push it and see how far we can get,” Liss said. They assumed they would have most of it completed by the end of de Blasio’s second term.
They got it set up in 12 districts — and then the pandemic hit. Work stopped until the federal government sent stimulus money through the American Rescue Plan, and de Blasio decided to use that money to fund 3K. But the funds were temporary, which meant whoever the next mayor was would be handed a program whose funding was about to dry up.
When Eric Adams succeeded de Blasio in 2022, he canceled the effort to make 3K universal, destabilizing the program. Parents have been confused about when they’ll get access, holding back enrollment. This past school year, thousands of parents who applied didn’t receive offers. Eventually more offers were sent out and every parent technically got a seat, but some of the schools “are so far away, 30, 40, minutes or more,” said Rebecca Bailin, executive director of New Yorkers United for Child Care, that they’re “not practical for parents.” Parents have told her they decided to stay in the city or even have another child because they thought universal 3K was coming. “It felt like the rug was completely pulled out from under them,” Bailin said.
Adams has also gutted key roles in Pre-K For All, claiming he had inherited a deeply flawed system that needed to be rebuilt. More than 150 employees on those teams had left by January 2023, and many weren’t replaced; in the fall of 2022, the early-childhood division had about 370 open full-time positions. In the 2022–23 school year, there were 50 percent fewer programs evaluated by the quality assessments de Blasio’s team put in place. Hundreds of the social workers and instructional coaches originally hired to raise and maintain quality were moved out of their roles. The outreach apparatus de Blasio’s team built has seemingly evaporated. Adams has also repeatedly slashed the early-childhood-education budget.
Despite the uncertain future of 3K, it’s clear that universal pre-K is here to stay in New York. And several of the candidates queueing up to take on Adams in 2025 appear eager to build on that legacy. When Bailin recently unveiled a five-year plan to first establish universal 3K for good and then move down to universal free care for the city’s toddlers and infants, four of Adams’s challengers were in attendance, ready to offer their praise. State Senator Jessica Ramos has put universal child care at the heart of her campaign, and even a more centrist newcomer to the race, Michael Blake, supports the idea. If one of them succeeds in toppling Adams, they would do well to learn the lesson that the best way to get it accomplished is to put relentless pressure on Albany, make it universal, and sprint toward it with every ounce of energy they have.
It’s a lesson Democratic lawmakers outside of the city can learn, too. Voters rewarded de Blasio with a second term after he gave them a groundbreaking public good they could actually use. Perhaps deliverism, the idea of mobilizing voters by giving them tangible results, works best if those voters can actually experience them before your term is over. Republicans control the federal government for now, offering few opportunities to put the idea to the test on a national level. That makes it even more urgent for Democrats further down the ticket to make the party’s case that they can tangibly improve people’s lives as quickly as possible.
Reporting for this article was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab.
