Making preschool free can change what’s possible for a family, but it doesn’t make choosing the right preschool simple!
A family may need a preschool close to home – or close to work, a bus line, or an older child’s school. They may want bilingual learning, a particular kind of classroom environment, or a place where their child will get a specific kind of support. They may be thinking about school hours, outdoor space, friendships, preparation for kindergarten, and whether the whole arrangement will actually work for their family from Monday through Friday.
A new study about Preschool for All takes a close look at how families navigate those choices, and what their experiences can teach us as we build a universal preschool system.
Published in Early Education and Development in August, a paper titled “Family Perspectives of the Initial Implementation Phase of a Universal Preschool Program” grew out of Preschool for All’s research-practice partnership with Boston University’s Center on the Ecology of Early Development (CEED). The research team included CEED scholars N. Dede A. Addy, Melissa Lucas, Kyle DeMeo Cook, and Stephanie M. Curenton; Portland State University researcher Desiree’ DuBoise; and Preschool & Early Learning Division team members Janice Cole and Xia Zhang.
The study is not only significant because of what families said about Preschool for All – it also contributes something that is still relatively uncommon in research about preschool choice: families describing, in their own words, what matters to them, how they make decisions, and what happens after their children enroll in a preschool program.
Those insights are helping Preschool for All learn and improve as we grow, and it’s offering lessons for other communities working to expand access to preschool in their localities.
Listening to Families From the Beginning
PFA was designed to grow gradually, reaching universal access over time rather than launching at full scale. That approach creates opportunities to learn from families, educators, providers, and data and to make improvements along the way.
This study is one part of that work.
Researchers analyzed conversations with 71 families during the 2023–24 school year, PFA’s second program year. Families were asked what mattered when they chose a preschool, why they chose Preschool for All, and what their experiences had been after enrolling.
Many studies about preschool choice look at large sets of data to find patterns – for example, whether families with certain characteristics tend to choose certain types of preschool. That quantitative information is useful, but it can’t tell the whole story.
By engaging in qualitative research, meaning talking directly with families to understand their perspectives deeply, researchers could learn more about why families chose certain options, and the trade-offs they sometimes had to make.
Finding the Right Preschool Is a Balancing Act
The researchers found three factors that were especially important to families choosing preschool: location, affordability, and opportunities for children to socialize and build social-emotional skills.
For most families in the study, location was the most important individual factor. But “location” meant more than just finding the preschool closest to home. Families thought about how preschool fit into the rest of their lives, including proximity to work, access to public transportation, and the schools their other children attended.
Affordability also shaped families’ options in significant ways. Some families said they could not have afforded preschool without Preschool for All. Others described struggling with the cost of preschool even at higher income levels or earning too much to qualify for other publicly funded options.
And families were also thinking about what they wanted their children to experience. Many wanted preschool to offer opportunities to make friends, spend time with other children, and build the social and emotional skills that would help prepare them for kindergarten.
But one of the study’s most important findings is that families rarely make preschool decisions based on just one thing.
They weighed these priorities alongside school hours, bilingual options, diversity, the physical environment, and their children’s individual needs. A family might strongly value dual-language education, for example, but ultimately choose a different preschool because its outdoor space or classroom environment felt like a better fit for their child.
In other words, choosing preschool often involves compromise. Families are not simply deciding which preschool they like best. They are figuring out which combination of location, affordability, schedule, environment, and opportunities will work best for their child and their family.
That complexity helps explain why a universal preschool system needs different kinds of options in different communities. What works beautifully for one family may not work at all for another.
What Families Said About Their Experiences
The researchers also wanted to know what happened after families made those choices.
Overall, families who participated in the study spoke positively about their Preschool for All experiences. They described the financial relief of free preschool, strong relationships and communication with educators, and opportunities for their children to learn and build relationships with their peers.
Families also valued how their preschools responded to their children’s individual needs. Parents talked about support with toilet training learning, language preferences, developmental differences, and disabilities. Families of children receiving early intervention services described educators and specialists working together to make preschool successful for their children.
These experiences connect directly to priorities built into Preschool for All from the beginning: making preschool more affordable and available, while supporting high-quality learning environments that respond to children’s cultures, languages, development, and individual needs.
Listening Also Means Learning What Could Be Better
Families’ experiences also pointed to an area where the system could improve.
The initial Preschool for All application received overwhelmingly positive feedback in the research, with families describing it as easy and straightforward to complete. Confusion was more likely to come later, after a family received a preschool placement.
Behind the scenes, there is a reason for that transition: Preschool for All manages the application and placement process, while individual preschool providers complete enrollment with families. But families do not necessarily experience those as two separate systems, and they shouldn’t have to understand the structure behind them to have a smooth experience from application through to the first day of preschool.
This is exactly why gathering family feedback while Preschool for All is growing is so valuable.
The researchers note that PFA has already used findings from this study and other evaluation work to make the application and enrollment process clearer. As the program grows, that cycle continues: listening to families, identifying what’s working and what’s not, making changes, and learning from what happens next.
From Family Experiences to a Stronger Preschool System
This study captures the experiences of a specific group of families. The 71 participants had all successfully enrolled in Preschool for All, so the findings cannot tell us about every family’s experience, including families who did not apply, were unable to enroll, or chose not to participate in the research.
But the study offers something that is still too often missing from research about early learning: families explaining their own decisions and experiences in their own words.
Those conversations reveal a more complicated picture than any single measure of preschool access or family preference can provide. A free preschool seat can remove an enormous financial barrier, but a family still needs that preschool to be somewhere they can reasonably reach. A parent may deeply value bilingual learning, but also need hours that fit a work schedule. Families may be looking for kindergarten preparation, but what they value most about that preparation may be friendship, confidence, and learning how to be part of a classroom community.
These are important lessons for PFA as we continue to grow. They may also be useful to other communities working to expand access to preschool across the nation.
For Multnomah County, the research reinforces something fundamental to the way Preschool for All is being built: expanding access is not only about creating more preschool seats. It is about creating meaningful options that work for the families who will use them.
Understanding whether we’re succeeding requires more than counting seats or studying enrollment patterns. It requires continuing to ask families about their experiences and listening closely to what they tell us.