Nearly every 4-year-old in Washington goes to pre-K, and the District's lead over the rest of the country keeps growing.
D.C. enrolled 94% of its 4-year-olds and 76% of its 3-year-olds in publicly funded pre-K during the 2024-2025 school year, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research's 2025 yearbook. Nationally, those figures are 37% and 9%. The next-closest state for 3-year-olds, Vermont, reached just 56%.
Sara Mead, deputy superintendent for early learning at D.C.'s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, recently described the enrollment numbers as a triumph for the District in an essay for Capital Commonsense, a local policy publication. She discussed the achievement on City Cast DC's Tuesday, Aug. 25, podcast.
How D.C. got here
D.C.'s investment in early education dates to 1964, when the Anacostia Pre-School Project served as a pilot site for the federal Head Start program. DCPS became one of the first school systems in the country to offer pre-K to 4-year-olds in 1972.
The turning point came in May 2008, when the D.C. Council unanimously passed the Pre-K Enhancement and Expansion Amendment Act. Universal expansion launched in September 2009. Within a few years, 4-year-old enrollment jumped from about 50% to near-universal, and 3-year-old enrollment doubled from 33% to 66%, according to a Center for American Progress study.
The system works through a mixed-delivery model: DCPS, public charter schools and publicly funded community-based organizations all run pre-K classrooms. Programs operate five days a week, at least 6.5 hours per day, for 180 instructional days, the same schedule as K-12 schools.
D.C. also spends more per child than any state. In the 2022-2023 school year, the District invested $22,207 per pre-K student, funded through the same Uniform Per Student Funding Formula that supports older grades.
Paying early educators to stay
In 2021, the D.C. Council created the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, taxing residents earning more than $250,000 to close the gap between pre-K teachers and their K-12 counterparts. Before the fund, early educators with a bachelor's degree earned 33% less than K-8 teachers with similar credentials.
As of June 2025, the fund had distributed $194 million to 365 child development centers across the city, raising early educator wages by an average of $10,000 annually. A 2024 Mathematica study found the program returns $1.23 to society for every dollar invested. An Urban Institute survey found 69% of participating educators said the fund is part of the reason they plan to stay in their current job.
The District's FY2026 budget includes $70 million for the Pay Equity Fund, the same level as the prior year.
The downstream effects
The investment appears to pay off beyond the classroom. Urban Institute research shows DCPS K-12 enrollment has outperformed the national average since 2010, the year D.C.'s first universal pre-K cohort entered kindergarten. The city's schools also held enrollment more steadily than the national average during the pandemic.
The Center for American Progress found that maternal labor force participation in D.C. rose approximately 10 percentage points after the 2009 expansion, reaching 76.4% by 2016. That was the largest increase of any large U.S. city over that period.
As of the 2023-24 school year, D.C. was one of only five jurisdictions offering universal pre-K to all 4-year-olds, alongside Colorado, Florida, Oklahoma and Vermont.
