For 13 years, Kim owned a small preschool — six classrooms serving children ages 2 to 5 — in a still-gentrifying part of Brooklyn. Many of the parents were dual-income white-collar professionals, but in a city where a combined salary of $300,000 leaves families feeling cash-strapped, they often struggled to pay the tuition. So in 2014, when New York first offered free universal preschool to 4-year-olds, Kim (whose name has been changed) opted to convert two of her classrooms for the government-funded program. “Even back then, tuition was hard for people to afford,” Kim tells me. “I wanted to offer it.” This made her school part of the city’s fleet of CBOs (community-based organizations), whose teachers are not necessarily unionized. At the time, the New York City Department of Education signed multiyear contracts with CBOs, promising to pay them an amount based on how many children the school served and how much it spent in fixed costs such as rent and personnel. Today, about half of the city’s public pre-K programs are run through CBOs like Kim’s.

According to Kim, the city never paid her enough to cover the full cost of pre-K. The DoE’s funding assumed that she’d pay her teachers much less than they’d make working at an identical program run through a unionized public school or even a private preschool that hadn’t opted into the program. A 2024 city comptroller’s report backs this up; it found that between 80 and 90 percent of pre-K teachers at CBOs were paid less than their public-school counterparts, often by tens of thousands of dollars a year. A more recent report by the policy and social-change organization United Neighborhood Houses estimates that the gap between what the city pays its CBOs on average and what it costs CBOs to operate is about $12,600 per child.

In order to pay her teachers fairly, Kim raised the tuition for her 2’s and 3’s classrooms, which were still private. But then the city expanded into 3K and Kim felt obligated to join that program too; she assumed that if she didn’t, families would leave and the school might not survive. That left........

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