The Administration believes early educational intervention is essential to children being ready to enter kindergarten.

The plan provides incentives through federal grants to states to offer voluntary universal preschool programs. It also provides grants to states that work to enhance their State funded, preschool programs through improvements to teacher qualifications, curriculum and standards, duration of the program and programs for child development.

This legislation, HR 702, the "pre-K act", has 74 cosponsors in the US House of Representatives. The bill is currently in the House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee. There is currently no Senate version.

There are concerns in Christian circles that this bill would put the government in direct competition with Christian preschools. Private Pre-K schools charge tuition to cover the costs of operating their schools. If the State offers no cost, Pre-K instruction (to the parent, but not the taxpayer), these private schools would have difficulty competing against government run programs. The private schools would likely lose students to a free government program. This trend is already occurring in places where free Pre-K is being offered.

This is also occurring with students in grades K-12; parents remove them from private education that costs and place them in free public schools. There are concerns that the government program will dictate the curriculum, forcing faith-based schools to adopt a similar program to be competitive, increasing the cost of private education even more.

The average private Christian school is educating its students at approximately one third of the cost of educating a student in the public school system. College entrance exam scores, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), indicate that the majority of private schools are producing students that score just as well or higher than comparable public school students – at a fraction of the cost. If the government dictates the curriculum, this will result in higher taxes with lower results, as is already evident in the state’s public K-12 school systems.