Only half of California’s low-income preschoolers attend existing state preschool programs or Federal Head Start programs and only one-quarter of all children are provided with transitional kindergarten, a study found.

Following President Barack Obama’s signing of the Omnibus spending bill, deep sequestration cuts were restored to the Head Start program. In California, SB-837 and AB-47, passed between 2014 and 2015, provided funds to expand early childhood education, specifically in preschool programs and transitional kindergarten. Funding was allocated to special training for teachers, developing programs in existing locations and expanding eligibility criteria to higher domestic income. Yet, despite a $273 million investment into preschool programs, 46% of children aged 3 and 4 are not enrolled in free programs available to them, with only 23% given access to transitional kindergarten.

The report, published by the Center for American Progress, found that providing high-quality prekindergarten to all children nationally would dramatically reduce inequality in academic preparedness at kindergarten entry. Many ethnic/racial minority children and children from low-income families enter kindergarten without all the skills required to succeed in school. Compared to their white and higher-income peers, these children begin kindergarten months behind in precursors to reading and math (Fig.1). The larger problem is that these measures of children’s academic abilities at kindergarten entry are strong predictors of later school success — these “achievement” gaps begin early and are only modestly closed after kindergarten entry. They remain large as children progress through school, and are difficult to close.

NIEER researchers examined how working parents are not aware of the free preschool programs available to them, opting instead for paid childcare providers. When examined further, it transpired parents are simply unaware of their eligibility to free preschool, assuming that any form of domestic income renders them too ‘wealthy’ to be eligible. Another factor appears to be the difficulty navigating the often complicated process of identifying a program and undergoing the enrollment process, creating a further barrier for undocumented and low-income parents (Fig.2).

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