Early childhood education in Maryland
A new state education ranking is out, this time on early childhood education, and it shows that Maryland isn't providing as much money as other states for pre-kindergarten programs, but the state has a higher than average percentage of four-year-olds attending school.
The National Institute for Early Education Research ranked states on their efforts to provide good pre-kindergarten. Maryland school systems provide 34 percent of four-year-olds with pre-kindergarten, the 10th best in the nation.
While the amount of state funding for pre-kindergarten went up this past year, the state still only ranks 27th in that catagory. When local and federal sources of funding are added, the state does better, ranking 13th.
The state also met seven out of the 10 criteria for quality programs. More information is available here.
Baltimoresun.com's 
Comments
Thank you for including the rankings including local and federal funding.
Maryland's county piggyback tax distorts its showing in these sorts of state rankings because MD counties have a larger share of revenue and spending than in most other states.
Posted by: Baltimoron | March 20, 2008 12:20 PM