State expands TK, but thousands unenrolled

It is unclear how many of the other 45% of 4-year-olds enrolled in private preschool or stayed home.

“It’s a problem if children don’t know about it, or their families are not choosing it because it’s perceived to be low quality, but if it’s in fact that families prefer something else and those children are equally prepared for kindergarten, then it’s OK. We don’t really have the answers to those questions,” Laura Hill, policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said.

She said preschool and child care providers surveyed by PPIC have said they are losing some children to TK.

Awareness of TK is a problem, according to a Stanford Center on Early Childhood survey. 

While 90% of families with small children said they’d like to enroll their little ones in a transitional kindergarten-style program, only 65% reported knowing TK was available, down from 83% the year before, according to the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. That means only 2 out of 3 California parents of children under age 6 had even heard about TK before taking the Stanford survey. Of these parents, lower-income families (64%) were less likely to know about TK compared to middle-class (74%) and higher-income families (81%).

“You can’t do one big splashy rollout and then expect everybody to keep up,” Abigail Stewart-Kahn, managing director at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, said. “The higher-income folks might hear about it from the news coverage, but lower-income folks, who frankly are just busier, might need to have trusted messengers, such as pediatricians, spread the word.” 

One of the tricky issues is that there is always a new crop of parents who have never heard of TK. Marketing and communication can’t be a one-and-done process. 

“Districts have work to do to market TK to families,” said Scott Moore, who runs Kidango, a nonprofit child care organization. “Just a few years ago, in 2022, only 25% of 4-year-olds were eligible for TK, so a 65% awareness rate is not surprising, even though it needs to be improved.

The incremental expansion of TK also created rolling admission dates pegged to birthdays that confused many families. Clarity has long been lacking in the preschool space, according to Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, who says the early education system in California is “overly complex and confusing for parents,” a maze of programs that parents must puzzle through.

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