Pre-K for All Has a Lot to Teach about Industrial Policy
With implementation now underway for three major Biden-era laws—the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the CHIPS and Science Act—there’s been renewed enthusiasm about industrial policy’s ability to directly shape markets to better serve Americans.
And policymakers have a great, if unexpected, case study to draw from: New York City’s Pre-K for All program.
Starting in 2014, the program created free, high-quality pre-kindergarten for almost 70,000 four-year-olds in under two years. It was the “forerunner of the ‘new industrial policy,’” says Josh Wallack, who led Pre-K for All implementation efforts at the NYC Department of Education.
In a new Roosevelt report, Wallack looks back at those efforts and draws key lessons for today. And he explores the essential questions of state capacity and democratic participation currently driving industrial policy discourse.
“The tensions of democratic planning in industrial policy play out differently in different domains, with different stakes, actors, and legacy processes,” he writes. “This topic would benefit especially from case histories from those various fields, and an epistemically humble, ground-up approach to conclusions.”
Read more in Childcare as Industrial Policy Blueprint: Lessons from New York City’s Pre-K for All Implementation.
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