According to a new report<\/a> from UC Berkeley, however, more affluent neighborhoods in L.A. County are leading enrollment in transitional kindergarten.<\/p>\n The report found that enrollment growth in the richest quarter of ZIP codes in the county \u2014 places that include Palos Verdes and Brentwood \u2014 climbed at three times the rate of growth in the poorest parts of the county from 2021 to the spring of 2024.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were surprised by the magnitude of that gap, and that raises all sorts of questions,\u201d 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. \u201cIs TK expansion really going to narrow disparities in young children’s early development, or will TK actually exacerbate or reinforce these inequalities?\u201d<\/p>\n The report shows that middle- to upper-income families are gaining the most from transitional kindergarten. <\/p>\n \u201cThey were paying through the nose for expensive preschool, and now they have free pre-K for their 4-year-olds,\u201d Fuller said. <\/p>\n A number of publicly funded preschool programs already are options for lower-income families, like Head Start and school district-based early learning centers<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Preschool closures an unintended consequence\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 areas with the highest growth in TK also had a higher number of preschool closures.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aWe found that as TK was growing, it’s actually eroding the vitality of nonprofit, community-based preschools,\u201d Fuller said. \u201cThey’re hemorrhaging the 4-year-olds.\u201d <\/p>\n Preschools haven\u2019t been able to make the quick pivot to serving younger kids, like infants, to compensate, as state leaders intended in a 2020 roadmap<\/a> for early education.<\/p>\n Between 2020 and 2024, Berkeley researchers found 167 pre-K centers across L.A. county closed.<\/p>\n Susie Leonard\u2019s preschool in Mar Vista was one of them. The school, A Kid\u2019s Place, closed in August 2023 after 20 years of operating. <\/p>\n \u201c\u200aWe 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,\u201d Leonard said.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was a double hit,\u201d she said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Can private preschools adjust?<\/p>\n Champa Perera\u2019s preschool, Kidzhaven in Sun Valley, closed in 2021 due to COVID. Now, she\u2019s a professor in early childhood education and consults preschools trying to switch to serve younger children.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is where the market is right now,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n A new report looks at the success and unintended consequences of California’s TK program<\/p>\n On AirTalk, senior reporter Elly Yu joins to discuss findings of a new UC Berkeley report on transitional kindergarten.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s a significant change<\/a>: 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<\/a> in transitional kindergarten than their peers in private or publicly subsidized preschools.<\/p>\n Fuller said the expansion of transitional kindergarten has created competition in the early childhood landscape as birth rates decline.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we have this fragmentation, it sets up this competition for a shrinking number of kids, and that doesn’t really serve anybody,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California has free preschool for 4-year-olds. Higher-income families are driving enrollment A new report finds enrollment in transitional…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,47014,31267],"class_list":{"0":"post-82682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-california-preschool","12":"tag-transitional-kindergarten"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"chart](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/thumbnail.jpeg\")
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