The Brief

In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers set out a plan to create the largest universal preschool program in the country for 4-year-olds, through a massive ramp-up of an elementary grade known as transitional kindergarten, or TK.

At a news conference, Newsom called it “a commitment that all 4-year-olds will get high quality instructional education,” and said that the investment could close learning gaps. “People aren’t left behind, as often as they start behind,” he added.

The state set a deadline that every district offer transitional kindergarten to all eligible 4-year-olds by fall 2025, and in the intervening years, schools have enrolled more than 175,000 children in TK. They’ve also had to hire new teachers and modify classrooms so that kids have enough space and quick access to smaller-sized bathrooms.

LAist spoke to more than a half dozen early childhood researchers who say a key piece has been missing in the state’s implementation: California itself hasn’t evaluated the program as it's expanded, nor does it have plans to going forward. This, despite studies showing how critical the early years are for a child’s learning, and research from another state’s public preschool program that found students tested lower on state assessments and had more behavioral problems compared to those who weren’t in that program..

“ It is a huge mistake to not evaluate the implementation of TK and whether or not the classrooms are providing developmentally appropriate practice,” said Jade Jenkins, associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine.

The criticism comes as California has invested $1.2 billion to expand TK, and is paying about $3.9 billion this year to administer the new grade level.

“ We need to know whether this investment is actually lifting kids. We know it's a huge economic windfall for parents, and that's a great boost for families. But is it lifting kids without government research?” said Bruce Fuller, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.

A spokesperson for the California Department of Education said money for research has not been allocated in the state budget, and the department would “welcome a legislative appropriation” to “study the impacts of TK on students and families.”

“At this time, the Legislature and Governor have not appropriated funding for the CDE to conduct evaluations,” the agency said.

It’s not the first time the agency has brought up the need for a study — especially as the program was rolling out statewide. A state official told LAist in 2022 that they recommend an implementation study, but they opted not to suggest how it should be funded.

“You could launch a very high quality study at a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the total funding for that program, and that would help people figure out what we are actually offering our families and how to improve it — and that seems really important,” said Alix Gallagher,  director of education policy and outcomes for the research organization Policy Analysis for California Education.

“As a taxpayer, I don't find it acceptable that billions of dollars are being spent with no attention to how our systems can learn to use that in ways that are most beneficial for kids," she said.

TK experiences can look different school to school

The state sets standards for TK classrooms, which can have a max of 24 kids and need a 10:1 student to adult ratio. Teachers must be credentialed with early childhood educational experience or units. And while the state has guidelines on what students should learn in TK, it has no mandated curriculum — meaning programs can vary widely from being play-based to more academic.

Lyse Messmer, a parent of a TK child in northeast L.A., has seen even variation between two schools her son has attended in the same area. His first program relied more on screen time and worksheets; Messmer transferred him to another program with more outdoor play. And the teacher at the former school had not previously taught TK, she said, which made for a harder transition into school.

But she said the overall experience has been beneficial for her child, and a welcome financial relief. “I think the benefits of him getting used to a bigger classroom and like a bigger elementary school and navigating all that stuff for him has been really positive,” she said.

Adding a new grade is a massive endeavor for districts. As in Messmer’s case, it can be especially hard to find teachers with experience teaching kids this age, said Austin Land, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood.

“ You can't require that every kid that wants a TK spot gets a TK spot and then also require this workforce to exist that has all this preexisting training,” Land said.

Land, who has been studying TK before the expansion, said he would like to know basic characteristics of TK classrooms today.

“Do you have a sixth grade teacher that got reassigned leading your classroom or is it somebody who's been working with little kids for a while?” Land said. “ Is the teacher having a one-on-one interaction with a child or a one-on-two interaction with some children? Or are they spending most of their time up at the front?”

Lack of data on quality

Without data, it’s hard to know what children are learning, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

“We want to make sure we're investing in quality for kids. And one way to know that we're doing it is to be able to monitor it… we want to make sure that the state can sort of have a pulse on what's going on in the classroom,” she said.

Transitional kindergarten classrooms can vary school to school, with some more play-based and others more academic.

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The institute scores public preschool programs across the country on a number of benchmarks of quality. According to the institute’s tracking, about two-thirds of public preschool programs in the country have a classroom observation system in place, she said. California’s TK program does not.

Researchers said it’s especially important to know what these youngest students are doing because early experiences can affect their learning later on.

“At the very least, we want to make sure it's not doing harm,” Jenkins said.

Tennessee: A cautionary tale

Researchers point to a study of Tennessee’s public preschool system as an example of where good intentions were not enough to benefit kids. The state has similar standards to what California put in place: max class sizes, low ratios, specialized teachers.

Dale Farran, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, found in her research that children who attended the pre-K program ended up faring worse academically and behaviorally than their peers who didn’t attend. Farran said standards don’t guarantee quality, much less equity between students from different social, economic and racial backgrounds.

“Those structural elements  are the easiest things for states to make rules about, but are they having the kind of interactions in the classrooms that will be positive for children? That’s much harder to put into place,” she said.

Farran has said that one possible reason for this was the overly academic nature of the program and structured settings: kids sitting at desks and listening to a teacher up front, when kids this age need to move around and play.

Katie Flynn, a mom of a TK student in Pasadena, said while she’s had an overall positive experience with her son in TK this year, it still feels more like elementary school than preschool.

At the beginning of the year, her son wouldn’t drink his water all day, or avoided going to the bathroom until he got home, because teachers didn’t remind or prompt him like they did in private preschool.

“ I know it's also his responsibility, right? Like he needs to listen to his body. So it's a mutual, collaborative enterprise, but it just shows how limited this age group is in ensuring that that happens,” she said.

What can the state do?

The California Department of Education said absent funding from the state Legislature for the department to evaluate the program, it convenes a regular group of early childhood researchers in the state to share their work into TK. But researchers LAist talked to from that group said that approach can only go so far.

Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said he wasn’t familiar with the Tennessee study, but funding for evaluation is something he will look into.

“We definitely need to make sure that we're again evaluating our most effective programs so that we can focus on best practices to continue to support those statewide,” he said.

When LAist asked how the state will assess the current program, Muratsuchi and a State Board of Education spokesperson pointed to one large-scale study of TK done by the American Institutes for Research, in 2017. (The governor’s office also directed LAist to the state board.)

That AIR study found that kids who went to TK when it first started in California had stronger literacy and math skills when entering kindergarten compared to similar-age peers who didn’t go to TK at the beginning of the year. (Those differences mostly faded by the end of the year).

Land, the UC Berkeley researcher, and Gallagher, of PACE, said the AIR study was done nearly a decade ago, and on a TK program that looks different from TK today.

That's because when TK started in 2012, they said, it was intended for kids who were nearly 5 years old, but had just missed the cutoff for kindergarten. Today, kids as young as 3 are entering TK in California.

LAist also reached out to Karen Manship, principal researcher of the AIR study. She said they’re still investigating topics related to transitional kindergarten, “but we do not have any funding or current plans to evaluate the program overall now that it is fully rolled out.”

The state education board spokesperson also cited research by economist Rucker Johnson, who looked at TK between 2013 and 2019, which found low-income children had greater reading and math gains by third grade than students who did not attend TK.

“These points tell us that an early start has proven to be beneficial for California students,” said a spokesperson for the board, which sets state policy.

LAist reached out to Johnson, who said that while his study of TK in the early years is promising, it’s “not a sufficient condition.”

“For improvements to be sustained, meaning even if they were good in the past, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to be monitoring the success as they're expanded and expanded that scale to universal,” he said.

Kevin McCarty, Sacramento’s mayor and a former state assemblymember who championed the legislation to expand TK, told LAist funding is a challenge — given other budget priorities — but that he welcomes evaluation.

“We want to make sure that it's effective, that it works, and if there are any issues that we need to address and improve going forward,” he said.

In the meantime, he said the program has given many parents a huge economic relief — and parents have a choice on whether to send their kids.

“This is free, this is — California paid for free universal pre-K,” he added, “which is a big deal because, we reminded people, paying for private preschool costs more than sending a kid to UCLA.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A week after 45-year-old Raz Chowdhury was moved off the streets into interim housing through an Inside Safe operation, he was found dead in his hotel room.

Chowdhury had spent years living on the streets of Koreatown, moving between encampments along Sixth Street and Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.

Sherin Varghese first met him three or four years ago. Chowdhury would reach out to Varghese, a volunteer with Ktown for All, an advocacy group that provides direct aid for people experiencing homelessness in Koreatown. He would ask her for tents, tarps, clothes and other supplies. More often than not, she said, they weren’t for him.

“He would always go above and beyond to take care of the people around him,” Varghese said at a vigil for Chowdhury on Saturday, Aug. 29.

Once, after Chowdhury lost his phone during a sanitation sweep, he searched for Varghese online and found her work number. He called to ask if she could bring tents and tarps for him and other people whose belongings were lost in the sweep.

“He was resourceful, he was reliable, and he was so thoughtful about the way that he talked about how all of this affected him and affected his friends,” Varghese said.

On June 25, Chowdhury was among 31 people moved into housing during an Inside Safe operation at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office.

A week later he was dead.

What happened after Inside Safe

According to Ktown for All, Chowdhury died at the Mayfair Hotel in Westlake, which is used for interim housing.

A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner said the case is still under investigation and Chowdhury died at a hotel in the 1200 block of West 7th Street on July 2. His cause of death is listed as deferred and the case is under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which oversees the Mayfair, would not say if Chowdhury was a resident when he died. An agency spokesperson said they cannot confirm an individual’s enrollment in a LAHSA-contracted program without a written release from next of kin.

LAHSA’s latest Inside Safe report shows that 6,406 people had entered interim housing through the program as of July 31. About 1,750 people remained in interim housing, including 289 at the Mayfair. Meanwhile, 1,802 people, or more than one in four who entered the program, had returned to homelessness. Another 126 people, or about 2%, were listed as deceased.

Bass’ office said it does not disclose the locations where an individual is placed following an Inside Safe operation.

Once someone is connected to interim housing, ongoing services and case management are handled by a LAHSA-contracted service provider, mayor spokesperson Jieun Kim said.

Remembering Chowdhury

The people who knew Chowdhury gathered last week to remember him at the site of the encampment where he had lived at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.

A little more than two dozen people attended the memorial, where they placed flowers at the base of a small tribute to him.

Planters now line the sidewalk where the tents once were. Several people cried as they shared memories of Chowdhury, who they said spent years looking out for others living on the streets of Koreatown.

Cynthia Zhang, who has volunteered with Ktown for All for about four to five years, remembers visiting an encampment where Chowdhury was staying after the Los Angeles fires. Newly displaced people there told her they felt safer with that community than they did at shelters.

“I think Raz was really instrumental in helping create that kind of space,” Zhang said at the vigil.

The last time Zhang saw Chowdhury, he had moved again and did not have a lot of his stuff. But he had a new puppy named T-Rex and seemed to be in good spirits.

“He had a really lovely smile,” Zhang said. “I just remember him skateboarding around … all these little things, maybe because I didn’t see him every day, it really does feel like I’ll be walking around and I’ll see him in one of our old spots.”

David Strugar, another longtime Ktown for All volunteer, said Chowdhury was often the person volunteers went to when they wanted to know how people in the area were doing.

“I would always point him out and say, ‘That’s the mayor of this area,’ because wherever he was, he was just the center of it, and he took care of people,” Strugar said.

Chowdhury would tell volunteers who needed what and help distribute supplies, Strugar said.

A few weeks before he died, Varghese said, she and Chowdhury were looking for places where he could stay outside a 41.18 zone, where the city restricts sitting, lying, sleeping and storing personal property in certain public rights-of-way under specified circumstances.

Then Inside Safe moved him indoors.

“I hoped that he’d be one of its success stories, but a week later, he was gone,” Varghese said. “The program is called Inside Safe, but for Raz and 125 others, it wasn’t that. And it was never going to be Inside Safe, and it was never going to be easy to be inside alone for someone who had so much to give and always surrounded himself with people to take care of.”

The last time Strugar saw Chowdhury, he had his dog T-Rex with him. Ktown for All volunteers don’t know where T-Rex is now.

Chowdhury believed he had the right to community and companionship, Strugar said.

“And there are so many people who have so much and won’t give anything,” Strugar said. “And Raz kept having everything taken away from him, and he still ended up being the person to give.”

He added, “I just keep expecting to walk around the corner and see him, and I’m angry that I won’t.”

Southern Californians who’ve long shopped at Daiso, Miniso, Uniqlo or 99 Ranch Market may not be surprised to see the Asian-rooted chains expand across the country.

But that growth is now showing up in the numbers.

The National Retail Federation’s Hot 25 Retailers list ranks retailers by U.S. sales growth from 2024 to 2025. Miniso tops the list, with sales up nearly 53%.

The Chinese chain of gift shops opened its first U.S. store in Pasadena’s Old Town more than nine years ago and is now aiming to grow its American footprint to nearly 500 stores this year.

“If you can make it in Southern California, that's great,” said David Marcotte, senior vice president of global retail and technology at Kantar and an author of the NRF list.

A 99 Ranch market opened in 2023 in Eastvale.

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Marcotte says succeeding in California’s highly competitive retail market can teach chains lessons that translate elsewhere.

“The stone-cold reason is quality. The second one is experience,” he said. “Those are the two things that when shoppers go into any retailer, they’re looking for.”

Daiso ranks third, with growth of nearly 26%, while another Japanese company, Fast Retailing — the parent company of Uniqlo — comes in sixth.

99 Ranch Market, an American supermarket chain founded in Orange County that specializes in Asian groceries, comes in 15th.

Marcotte says Southern California has been a logical landing spot for these companies because of its proximity to Asia. But Marcotte says it can also be an unforgiving place to launch because of the competition, and he often encourages the clients he advises to consider smaller markets.

“I said if you open in Southern California, open one store, get it right,” Marcotte said. “If you get it wrong, you're dead. You'll never recover. You'll have to leave the country and come back in.”

The supermarket industry is particularly tough to break into because customers here, he says, have plenty of alternatives if the quality, selection or experience falls short.

He also emphasizes a retailer in California focused on Asian goods will see more success serving Chinese, Filipino and other Asian customers rather than designing around a particular ethnic group.

“That type of diversity of Asian customers that you have to address in the same store is what really proves to be the difference for an Asian retailer in the California market,” Marcotte said.

That’s part of the business model for 99 Ranch, which was founded by a Taiwanese immigrant who opened the first location in Westminster's Little Saigon in 1984.

Got a taste for ducks cooked the Chinese way? Your quest may take you to a quiet suburban backyard in South Pasadena.

That's where That Peking Duck Guy cooks and sells his birds. His clients, he said, include Phil Rosenthal and Roy Choi.

The guy behind That Peking Duck Guy is Hong Pham, who started the social media account in late 2025 as a way to document his latest culinary obsession: making the perfect duck, be it Peking or Pipa (deboned and flattened into the shape of the namesake Chinese string instrument).

The intention was not to sell. "I have a day job," Pham said. A radiologist, to be precise.

"I was actually making so many that neighbors wanted to claim it and offered to buy it," he added. "So I'm like, 'OK, that makes it easier 'cause I don't have to eat it all.'"

Soon came DMs from strangers asking for the same thing.

These days, That Peking Duck Guy caters events and holds takeout pop-ups where people can purchase and pick up a duck (which comes with sides and duck soup) from his South Pasadena backyard — right where he cooks them.

Peking duck from That Peking Duck Guy served with Chinese sweet sauce, chopped spring onions and cucumber slices.

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Duck is the latest obsession

Duck is not his first rodeo. Pham said he and his wife are foodies who've always been curious about delving into Vietnamese and other Asian culinary traditions. For Pham, that also means replicating some of these dishes at home, from scratch.

He'd gone on a tofu bender — making gallons of the stuff, as blocks, drinks and pudding — and also a bánh cuốn spree, or Vietnamese steamed rice rolls. He landed on duck as his latest subject only because he had wanted to make better heo quay, or Vietnamese roasted pork belly.

It's the oven

Pham and one of his special outdoor ovens he uses to roast duck.

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He researched how to get that extra crisp online and landed on an oven people in Asia use to make roast and Peking ducks.

"It was called the Apollo oven 'cause it looks like an Apollo space capsule," he said.

He bought one and then another. In between, he experimented cooking different meats with the new oven to get a feel before turning to the waterfowl.

He even got advice from Top Chef winner Mei Lin, whom he messaged cold: "She's like, 'Keep it simple. Keep it basic. Keep it traditional.'"

Three Pipa ducks inside the oven.

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Hundreds of ducks later, Pham said he still learns something new. That's one reason why his side hustle has stuck around.

"I didn't create like, you know, That Bánh Cuốn Man," he said. "Yeah, duck's gonna last."

Two Pipa ducks fresh out of the oven.

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Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.

The clues, they say, lie in the murky space between genes and disease — where key proteins come together and interact.

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes. This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.

"It's an unprecedented resource for the field," says Dr. Daniel Geschwind, a professor of human genetics, neurology, and psychiatry at UCLA who was not involved with the study. "A lot of people interested in understanding autism and drug development are going to be using this."

For families affected by profound autism, it offers hope for eventual drug therapies. "This is the kind of scientific advance we have been waiting for and praying for," says Alison Singer, president of the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation, who has a daughter with severe cognitive impairment. "There's still a lot of work ahead, [but] this paper makes the path from genetic discovery to treatment much clearer."

The work builds on progress made in recent years to identify single genes that harbor mutations found in a subset of individuals with profound autism.

Getting past the "wall"

People with profound autism often live with severe intellectual disability and require around-the-clock care. They're nonverbal or minimally verbal, and often have serious medical conditions like epilepsy.

Pinning down the biology behind profound autism has always been a complicated endeavor — while both genes and environmental factors play a role, those factors can vary widely from person to person.

In the past decade or so, some genetics researchers have had remarkable success in identifying high-impact genetic differences in a subset of people with profound autism.

"They've discovered several hundred genes and corresponding mutations that are prevalent in [these] individuals," says Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UC San Francisco.

"But they kind of hit a wall," he added — because scientists haven't been able to turn those gene discoveries into many promising drugs and treatments.

"There was this huge missing piece," says Dr. Matthew State, a clinical psychiatrist and geneticist at UCSF: The genes serve as blueprints for making proteins that drive brain development, but researchers lacked visibility into how those proteins do the work.

State has been a pioneer in identifying high-risk genes, and the mutations in those genes, that are associated with profound autism. Krogan has been at the forefront of using new technology to look into protein interactions.

More than a decade ago, the two researchers were introduced by their mutual boss, the chancellor at UCSF, who encouraged them to collaborate. "[State] had the genes and the mutations. I had the technologies to look at the corresponding proteins," Krogan says.

They focused on filling a knowledge gap. "What we've been missing is the mechanistic understanding of how these mutations [on the genes] are seemingly resulting in autism," Krogan says. "In order to understand that, you need to go to the proteins."

Proteins are the complex molecules that come together to build the body, based on instructions encoded in the genes. "What makes an eye cell an eye cell, and a muscle a muscle, are the proteins and how they work together," State says. "They are the machinery of life."

In this case, the researchers wanted to find the molecular machinery of profound autism — to understand which proteins came from those high-risk autism genes, and how those proteins worked together.

The research was slow at first, but more recent advances in technology — including artificial intelligence — have sped things up.

To start, the researchers went on a "fishing expedition" for protein interactions. They chose 100 proteins from these high-risk autism genes, injected them into lab-grown cells, and then pulled them out, along with the additional proteins that attached to them.

Then, they used an AI system called AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, to help determine which proteins in the clumps were directly touching. "Where AI is playing an important role is being predictive about who's talking to who," says Krogan. "Sometimes they take years to figure out. Now, we can get these insights in an hour." While imperfect, the system has worked well enough to save significant time and money, Krogan says.

Then, they wanted to see what happened to the proteins when the genes got tweaked. They introduced mutations that appear in patients with profound autism, and assessed what changed. "We broke the proteins in the way that they're broken in autism," says State. "That allows us ultimately to answer the question of, when they're going wrong in autism, how are they going wrong?"

They conducted this research in frogs and in organoids, which are lab-grown tissues that model the human brain. In one example, the mutations weakened the connection between two proteins related to which genes turn on and off in a cell. Then, one went rogue, turning on other genes that led to neurodevelopmental defects in organoids.

Molecular convergence

There are hundreds of rare, high-risk autism genes, acting in more than a thousand different ways.

But in mapping more than 1,800 protein interactions, the researchers found that many of them moved along shared biological pathways — particularly those related to early brain development, such as how synapses get constructed, and which neurons develop and when.

The convergence found in this study aligns with other recent publications, adding to an emerging understanding in the field, says Dr. Geschwind of UCLA.

"If we look at multiple mutations and they converge on the same process, that's strong evidence that you're dealing with the things that you want to treat," State says.

Identifying this more limited set of protein complexes that likely contribute to the development of profound autism could change the approach to treatments, says Singer with the Autism Science Foundation. "We've been working gene-by-gene to correct mutations," she says.

And if future drugs could target these shared protein pathways, she adds, "we may not need that separate therapeutic strategy for every autism gene."

Setting sights on new drug-development targets

It takes years to go from a biological discovery like this to an approved drug that treats humans. The findings would need to be translated into drug candidates, then tested for safety and effectiveness.

"It takes time and a lot of persistence and focus," State says. "This [paper] is unlikely to lead to therapies tomorrow — but it lays an important foundation for them."

Most human drugs are made to target proteins, Geschwind at UCLA says, so the newly published map of protein interactions offers an accessible entry point for pharmaceutical development.

And researchers hope to combine recent technological advances in ways that accelerate that progress even more. "When you put together the ability to borrow from successes in other fields [such as cancer treatments], and the development of AI, we're at an inflection point that will hopefully shorten the time cycle," State says.

Last week, Krogan's Quantitative Biosciences Institute received a $46 million grant from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism initiative, funded by philanthropist and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The researchers are already working on next steps.

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