California has free preschool for 4-year-olds. Higher-income families are driving enrollment

In 2021, Governor Newsom and state leaders set in motion a plan to make a public preschool program — transitional kindergarten — available for all 4-year-olds by this fall. The plan was touted as an effort to improve learning outcomes for lower-income families and break “cycles of intergenerational poverty.”

According to a new report from UC Berkeley, however, more affluent neighborhoods in L.A. County are leading enrollment in transitional kindergarten.

The report found that enrollment growth in the richest quarter of ZIP codes in the county — places that include Palos Verdes and Brentwood — climbed at three times the rate of growth in the poorest parts of the county from 2021 to the spring of 2024.

“We were surprised by the magnitude of that gap, and that raises all sorts of questions,” said Bruce Fuller, professor emeritus of education and public policy at UC Berkeley and co-author of the report, which is based on state data. “Is TK expansion really going to narrow disparities in young children's early development, or will TK actually exacerbate or reinforce these inequalities?”

Keep up with LAist.

If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.

Subscribe

The report shows that middle- to upper-income families are gaining the most from transitional kindergarten.

“They were paying through the nose for expensive preschool, and now they have free pre-K for their 4-year-olds,” Fuller said.

A number of publicly funded preschool programs already are options for lower-income families, like Head Start and school district-based early learning centers.

Neighborhoods where TK is growing rapidly also are in school districts that have more resources to renovate their facilities and hire more teachers for TK, Fuller said.

Preschool closures an unintended consequence 

The report also found that the growth of enrollment of 4-year-olds in the public school system correlated to the shrinking number of preschools in the community — areas with the highest growth in TK also had a higher number of preschool closures.

“ We found that as TK was growing, it's actually eroding the vitality of nonprofit, community-based preschools,” Fuller said. “They're hemorrhaging the 4-year-olds.”

Preschools haven’t been able to make the quick pivot to serving younger kids, like infants, to compensate, as state leaders intended in a 2020 roadmap for early education.

Between 2020 and 2024, Berkeley researchers found 167 pre-K centers across L.A. county closed.

Susie Leonard’s preschool in Mar Vista was one of them. The school, A Kid’s Place, closed in August 2023 after 20 years of operating.

“ We were very proud of our school and the families that we were able to help and the kids that we were able to help, so the fact that it was kind of a forced closure, it makes us sad,” Leonard said.

She said the nonprofit school already had been reeling from COVID when TK started expanding. Without the 4-year-olds, she said enrollment dropped from as many as 90 students to around 30.

“It was a double hit,” she said. “We didn't have a huge financial cushion to allow us to ride out a couple of years and to really attempt to get to enroll on the younger side. We were kind of functioning on fumes.”

Can private preschools adjust?

Champa Perera’s preschool, Kidzhaven in Sun Valley, closed in 2021 due to COVID. Now, she’s a professor in early childhood education and consults preschools trying to switch to serve younger children.

“That is where the market is right now,” she said.

But it’s a significant change: Switching to serving children 2 and under requires a different license from the state and also requires a higher adult-to-child ratio. And it can be challenging to find enough teachers, Perera said, which the report echoed. Teachers also are better paid in transitional kindergarten than their peers in private or publicly subsidized preschools.

Fuller said the expansion of transitional kindergarten has created competition in the early childhood landscape as birth rates decline.

“When we have this fragmentation, it sets up this competition for a shrinking number of kids, and that doesn't really serve anybody,” he said.