California is leading national preschool expansion, but quality lags, report says

California’s preschool expansion has lead to surging enrollment and ranks high nationally in the amount of money spent on its youngest students, but needs to focus on improving the quality of its early education programs, researchers said.

Across the country, the number of 4-year-olds attending state-funded preschools reached record highs last school year, driven by states embracing universal access and an unprecedented $14.4 billion in spending across 44 states and Washington, DC., according to a report published Wednesday by the National Institute for Early Education Research.

State-funded preschool enrollment in the U.S. rose to 1.8 million kids, reaching 37% of 4-year-olds and about 10% of 3-year-olds, the annual report said. More than half the nation’s public preschool enrollment gain — some 25,000 students — came from California, which this school year made every 4-year-old eligible for its transitional kindergarten program.

In total, states added 44,000 students to their preschool enrollment. But the report’s authors noted that the gains were smaller than the year prior and said preschool access remains wildly uneven from state to state. Some states — including Alaska and Arizona — even lost ground.

“If providing high-quality preschool education to all 3- and 4-year-olds were a race,” the authors wrote, “some states are nearing the finish line, others have stumbled and fallen behind, and a few have yet to leave the starting line.”

Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Rhode Island are the only six states to meet all of the benchmarks evaluated by the report.

The rapid rollout of California’s transitional kindergarten program has had its tradeoffs. The national institute outlines 10 quality benchmarks for preschools, related to teacher training, class size and curriculum.

Transitional kindergarten, which serves nearly half of the state’s 4-year-olds, met just three of them last school year, according to the report. It fell short several areas and improvements are needed to expand professional teacher development, further limit class sizes and require health screenings, the report said.

“We really want to make sure that quality piece and educational learning goals are centered in the program,” NIEER associate research professor Allison Friedman-Krauss said.

In California there have also been unintended impacts on other preschool providers. Private preschool owners say the rush of 4-year-olds joining public schools threatens to cripple their businesses.

“Universal TK … is a real win, but it’s also just the start of the work and not the end of it,” said Jessica Sawko of Children Now, which advocates on early childhood issues in California. She said the state is expected to reach two more quality benchmarks in next year’s report. The TK student-teacher ratio was lowered to 10-to-1 this school year and lead teachers are now required to have early education training.

California State Preschool Program, which serves 11% of 3-year-olds based largely on income eligibility, met six of the 10 benchmarks with room to grow on teacher degree requirements, professional development and class size limits.

The state ranks fourth on spending, averaging $14,907 per student across both programs.

Evidence is mounting that the impact of high-quality preschool can follow children into adulthood, making them better prepared for kindergarten, more likely to graduate high school and more likely to find work. And it is increasingly seen as essential for success in kindergarten and beyond. Educators now also expect youngsters to start their first year of school already equipped with the basics that help them navigate kindergarten.

“We have a lot of kids who still do not fulfill their potential,” said Steven Barnett, founder and director of the early education institute. “We have evidence — very strong evidence — that preschool programs substantially improved the foundation for later success.”

Preschool means confident kindergartners

Heather Sifuentes witnessed the impact of preschool when she was principal of Parkview Elementary in Chico, California, as it began its transitional kindergarten program. She said students who attended the program, which has a play-based curriculum and runs the length of a workday, arrived with more confidence and often volunteered to be class leaders.

“They’re well prepared to transition into that big elementary school setting,” said Sifuentes, now director of elementary education for Chico Unified School District. Chico has more than doubled the number of TK seats it offers since 2022.

Marisol Marquez, a secretary who works for the state, sends her daughter to TK at 1st Street Elementary in Los Angeles. She and her husband, a UPS driver, are grateful for the free public school option.

Educators there quickly discovered her daughter was bright and began sending her to kindergarten for math and reading lessons. “If it hadn’t been for this program, we would have never found that out,” Marquez said.

In some states, preschool is expensive. In others, it’s free

No state mandates that children attend preschool, and only some cities and states make it accessible to every 4-year-old.

Preschool offerings differ vastly. A family living in Wyoming, which has no state-funded preschool, could move across the border to Colorado, where every parent can send their 4-year-old to part-time preschool for free. In the District of Columbia all families have access to two full years of pre-kindergarten, while neighboring Virginia has a far less robust program.

The uneven access from state to state can exacerbate disparities. Wealthier families can often afford private preschool tuition, which can average more than $12,000 for 4-year-olds, according to Child Care Aware of America.

For families that can’t afford preschool tuition, the options in many states are limited. State-funded preschool programs often have waitlists.

If a family’s earnings are low enough, they can qualify for programs like Head Start, but the number of children in Head Start is falling, in part due to staff shortages. Lower-income families may also qualify for state or federal child care subsidies, but those have growing waitlists, too.

Trump says states should pay

Federal support for expanding early education funding is sparse and shrinking. Recently, President Trump said the federal government couldn’t afford to support child care while it was waging a war with Iran.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said. States, he added, “should pay for it. … They’ll have to raise their taxes.”

Republican-led states have pioneered universal prekindergarten, with Oklahoma introducing it in the late 1990s. Alabama and West Virginia also have preschool-for-all programs that receive top marks. Democratic-led states have lagged behind. New York state lost enrollment last school year, even as New York City, which already has universal prekindergarten, is charging ahead with a plan to make all child care free for younger children.

This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.

Balingit writes for the Associated Press.