Give Winston-Salem Journal reporter Travis Fain a ton of credit for trying to tease out spending on early childhood education and services in North Carolina.  Fain writes,

The N.C. Pre-K program has become the focus of a statewide debate over early education, but it represents only a portion of state taxpayer-funded pre-kindergarten classes.

Hundreds of millions of dollars for similar programs flow through separate channels in a complicated and intertwined process that makes it difficult to fully catalog them, even for their government managers.

Local school systems, multiple government offices, nonprofits and private day cares are bound together by rules that don’t always align, meaning extra costs to satisfy the rules of one program but not the rules of a similar program.

In a February 2011 analysis of Smart Start, Andrew Henson of the Civitas Institute tried to depict the flow of federal and state money to various early childhood programs.  Later that year, the NC General Assembly made significant changes to More at Four, but I think the flowchart (below) does a good job of highlighting the mess.

According to Fain, legislators and bureaucrats agree that the programs are “complex to the point of confusion.”  I do not sense urgency by either group to bring order to the chaos.