As California continues rolling out a $2.7 billion initiative aimed at having kids complete two years of kindergarten by letting all 4-year-olds enroll in those public school programs, some educators are questioning how well the effort will lead to better long-term success for all school kids — and what a resulting enrollment drop at private child care centers will mean for that sector.
Called transitional kindergarten, those government-subsidized free or low-cost classes are to be fully available for California preschoolers by the 2025-26 school year, with an estimated 120,000 students expected to be eligible. While both years of kindergarten are free, the classes are not mandatory.
Of California’s current 1.5 million 4- to 5-year-olds, half are enrolled in preschool or kindergarten.
California’s expanded kindergarten is arriving on the heels of the Biden Administrator’s failure to win congressional support for its $200 billion proposal for free preschool nationwide. It adds California to a list of about a dozen states offering similar types of universal pre-kindergarten. It is a cornerstone of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $123.9 billion plan to revamp preschool and kindergarten through 12th-grade public education, announced in May 2021.
“When we’re finished with this expansion, California will have the single largest, free preschool program in the country,” Newsom said, during the announcement, resting on research heralding the merits of early childhood education for many. “Every 4-year-old in California from here on out can start their schooling on the right track, setting them up for success further down the road.”
Such success, however, is uncertain, argue some academics, early education advocates and childcare providers. They also suggest that overhauling the system could worsen a shortage of preschool workers and reduce enrollment in private preschools for low-and- middle-income families, possibly leading providers to lay off staff and shut down their businesses.
“When we’re finished with this expansion, California will have the single largest, free preschool program in the country.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom
Some research suggests that universal pre-kindergarten is more likely to benefit wealthier children, who disproportionately are white. Researchers such as Bruce Fuller, a University of California, Berkeley education and public policy professor, contend the initiative is unlikely to substantially close an overall gap in educational achievement between poor and comparatively well-off children.
“Are we trying to provide free pre-K for everybody,” Fuller asked “Or are we trying to narrow disparities in kids’ early learning?”
Rushed planning, teacher shortages, funding delays, a lack of knowledge about early learning among many elementary school principals and other challenges hinder the building out of transitional kindergarten classes, according to a February 2023 analysis that Fuller co-authored.
Quality pre-kindergarten “can help lift up lower-income families,” said Fuller, whose team interviewed administrations in four of California’s 345 public school districts for that analysis, “Hampered Growth.”
The problem is that universal pre-kindergarten is not always delivered equitably, he said.
Extra year of kindergarten ‘won’t ‘necessarily narrow disparities’
Between 2014, when New York City expanded its pre-kindergarten by letting kids enroll regardless of their family’s income, and 2019, “quality lagged behind in sites that served mostly Black or Latino children, and those situated in the city’s poorest census tracts.” That’s according to a separate analysis by a team including Fuller.
In Michigan, a 2023 study found that transitional kindergarten programs expanded faster in middle-class and upper-middle-class suburbs and towns than they did in poor, urban communities.
Research, including an analysis published in 2022 in Developmental Psychology, suggests that the academic, social and emotional development gains from pre-kindergarten, an umbrella term that includes transitional kindergarten, start to fade during elementary school.
And sometimes the “kids who went to pre-K look worse” compared to those who didn’t, said Jade Marcus Jenkins, a University of California, Irvine early childhood professor and researcher.
A major gap in research, Jenkins added, is that it has not compared the activities of kids who don’t go to public school pre-kindergarten with those who do. “Were they with grandma watching TV or in high-quality child care programs not funded by the state,” Jenkins said. “We just don’t know.”
For decades now, California has offered free preschool and other educational services for low-income kids from birth through 5 years old through federally funded Head Start and the California State Preschool Program. (A UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment analysis challenged previous researchers’ doubts about the long-term benefits of Head Start, launched during the 1960s War on Poverty.)
Those programs, which will remain available, alongside universal pre-kindergarten, provide transportation for enrollees and are located where those children live. They also offer full-day programming.
“We’re just trying to recover from COVID. And, now, you’re going to add this extra thing on top of us.”
Lisa Wilkin, Child Development Consortium of Los Angeles
Renzo Luján, a parent in the Bay Area, considered putting his 4-year-old in transitional kindergarten classes last year. But it wasn’t feasible. His and his wife’s commute-to-work schedule precluded them from picking up their daughter from transitional kindergarten classes at their neighborhood school.
“By the time we get back home, it’s too late,” he said. “The time just didn’t work out.”
Luján opted, instead, to enroll his daughter in a $20,000-a-year private preschool near his job in San Francisco.
The lack of guaranteed transportation to and from pre-kindergarten may be one obstacle for some families. Another is that three to five hours daily is mandated for transitional kindergarten, rather than the six- to eight-hour day of some existing programs.
And while each district, generally, is mandated to follow state rules for transitional kindergarten, districts also are allowed flexibility, for example, in what types of social services they might offer kindergarteners.
“It is going to be highly variable across districts — even within schools in the same district,” UC Irvine’s Jenkins said. “It’s going to be really important for parents to figure out what’s going on in their district and see if it works for them.”
Families earning too much money to qualify for Head Start or the state’s preschool program for low-income kids, Fuller suspects, may be the ones enrolling their children in universal transitional kindergarten.
“In terms of relieving family budgets, it’s a good economic policy. Because, now, families might have another $1,500 a month” to keep for themselves, Fuller said. “That’s great, but it doesn’t necessarily narrow disparities for poor kids.”
Preschool providers worry about lost enrollment
Given concerns that transitional kindergarten will disrupt preschool providers’ business, many of them are considering enrolling infants through 3-year-olds. Having to make the shift has them feeling uneasy about the future.
“We’re concerned that the economic model that we’ve been operating under for a very, very long time … is no longer a model that we can rely on for financial viability,” said Lisa Wilkin, executive director of the Child Development Consortium of Los Angeles.
Some of the consortium’s 11 daycare centers have lost more than half of their students since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with enrollment at one of those sites declining from 70 kids to a current 25.
“We’re just trying to recover from COVID,” Wilkin said. “And, now, you’re going to add this extra thing on top of us.”
In addition to pandemic-related drops in enrollment, some care providers also worry that their businesses will be further eroded by an overall decline in birth rates and, should it continue, a surge in homeschooling that the U.S. Census recorded during the pandemic.
To bolster childcare centers that will lose income, Jenkins recommends that the state increase reimbursement rates and do more to include childcare professionals in lawmakers’ conversations on how to refine kindergarten programming.
Otherwise, she predicts, “There’s going to be some real downstream consequences.”
For Wilkin, her Los Angeles organization is hoping to serve more 3-year-olds. But parents,” she said, “aren’t jumping or running to fill up those empty spots” because they don’t see the benefits of preschool for kids who are that young.
She’s concerned about the expense of having to advertise to parents of younger children.
“We’ve had crises in the early childhood world before and we got through them, eventually,” Wilkin said “But when you’re in the middle of it, it’s a little scary.”
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Brian Rinker is a San Francisco-based journalist who covers public health, child welfare, digital health, startups and venture capital.
