NEW ORLEANS —A little boy with a plastic dinosaur toddles over to his teacher at Clara's Little Lambs Preschool Academy, in the Algiers neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi. “Oooooh!

The U.S. House has unanimously passed the bipartisan SEED Act, which would extend tax deductions for classroom expenses to pre-K educators, as states take divergent paths on early childhood funding.

The prospect of someone walking into my classroom for four 20-minute observations to assign a score for how I interact with children was initially intimidating. But in the time since we began using ...