OAKLAND, Calif. — Teacher Yasmin Kudrolli sat on a low chair and lit a candle to start the morning meeting in her prekindergarten classroom in Oakland. Speaking quietly to her 4-year-old students, she picked one boy from the group to count his classmates: 22.
California mandates one adult for every 12 students in what it calls “transitional kindergarten,” so there’s an aide standing by the door, ready to take any child who needs to use the bathroom into the main building. Families from Oakland’s higher-income neighborhoods have been drawn to the transitional kindergarten program in her school, which had a waiting list at the beginning of the school year.
Across town, but in the same school district, teacher Alicia Simba leads 13 students, all 4-year-olds, in a breathing exercise in her classroom. Her 14th student is crying in the reading nook. She wants to go home.
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“You’re going to be okay, sweetheart,” Simba says soothingly. She brings out a basket of percussion instruments, and the crying child smiles broadly.
When a boy says he has to use the bathroom, Simba asks him to hold it until lunch, which is 30 minutes away. She should have an aide to take him, but she doesn’t. The school where she works can’t afford to hire extra staff members because of very low enrollment.
It’s the second year of California’s uneven four-year rollout of universal transitional kindergarten, an ambitious, multibillion-dollar initiative to make high-quality education available to each of the state’s 4-year-olds — an estimated 400,000 children.
The plan is that the $2.7 billion program will be fully implemented by the 2025-2026 school year across the nearly 900 districts in the state that include elementary grades. It will be the largest universal prekindergarten program in the country.
But like the children in these two classrooms — some of whom are ready for school and others who aren’t even potty-trained — some districts are on schedule and some are not.
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There are teachers who should have aides but don’t. There are districts, such as rural Mendocino, where some transitional kindergarten classrooms don’t have attached bathrooms and where school playgrounds aren’t designed for 4-year-olds. Many districts can’t hire enough staff members for after-school programs to accommodate the new transitional kindergarten students, forcing working families to scramble for care. The state has not provided learning expectations for this new grade. Handling toileting issues for young pupils is a headache.
Some, but not all, of these kinks might be worked out by the time the program is fully implemented. By the 2025-2026 school year, all children who are 4 years old by the beginning of the school year in September will be eligible. That year, classroom ratios will also go down, requiring one adult for every 10 students.
By offering free, high-quality transitional kindergarten in public schools, California will go a long way in helping to level the playing field for children entering kindergarten, officials say. Regardless of income, families will have access to top-notch early schooling. Additionally, officials say the state’s massive investment will shine a light on the earliest years of education and make it more likely that districts will align curriculums from preschool through third grade.
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That’s the hope. In the meantime, districts are figuring out how to serve this new, and quite different, age group without a unifying road map.
“There’s a new grade out there and no clear guidance yet from the state as to what should be covered in it,” said Alix Gallagher, director of strategic partnerships for Policy Analysis for California Education, based at Stanford University.
On the one hand, Gallagher said, the state could be criticized for not having clear guidance about what transitional kindergarten should look like when it started the expansion, especially because some districts had been offering transitional kindergarten for a decade before the statewide mandate.
“On the other hand,” Gallagher said, “making a new grade and requiring universal access is not something that is always politically available.”
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In this case, politics favor advocates of early-childhood learning. They have a powerful ally in California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who campaigned on his support for early learning and announced his intention to propose universal preschool, which includes transitional kindergarten, in a 2020 legislative master plan.
The bill Newsom signed in 2021 to expand transitional kindergarten to all districts calls specifically for high-quality programs. A 2017 study of California’s pre-expansion transitional kindergarten programs found that children who attended were better prepared for kindergarten than those who didn’t. But another more recent report found that early benefits did not lead to improved test scores in grades three and four.
That’s why it’s critical that districts ensure that their early-grade teachers collaborate to develop a vision for the grades from prekindergarten to third grade, so instruction and assessments are linked, said Steven Kellner, director of program sustainability and growth at California Education Partners. A 2021 report by the educational law firm Foresight Law and Policy notes that California schools are held accountable for student learning outcomes, in the form of standardized test scores, only from grades three and up.
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“The statewide incentive system doesn’t promote districts to focus on the early grades,” Kellner said. “They’re untested on the state dashboard, and under No Child Left Behind, but they’re the most essential.”
Share this articleShareIt’s significant, he said, that the state’s initiative requires that transitional kindergarten teachers be fully credentialed and have at least 24 units in early-childhood education, childhood development or both. Essentially, California has added a new grade: Teachers working with 4-year-olds are now part of an elementary school’s teaching staff. Keller said that the presence of these new teachers, and students, in schools may have the effect of linking high-quality early education to success at higher grades — a perspective that isn’t front-of-mind for many administrators.
“If you want kids to be reading at grade level in third grade, you can’t start that work in third grade,” Kellner said. “But if students reach third grade at grade level, they have an outstanding chance of maintaining that [rate of progress] all the way to graduation.”
The state has yet to release an update to its Preschool Learning Foundations, which will spell out what students are expected learn in transitional kindergarten classrooms. Experts say the best curriculum should be play-based. Districts are deciding for themselves which curriculum to use.
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“Can students in [transitional kindergarten] learn their letters? Absolutely,” said Noemi Valdez, director of early-childhood education in Oxnard School District. “But not necessarily by writing. They can tear tissue and use glue to paste the letters to paper.”
Oxnard, a district of about 14,000 students 60 miles from Los Angeles, began offering transitional kindergarten in 2017 when it became clear that most of the district’s kindergartners weren’t ready for school. When its first transitional kindergarten classrooms opened, some 60 percent of its kindergartners had not been to preschool. Today, the district has more than 700 transitional kindergarten students.
Many transitional kindergarten activities are designed to help children develop their fine motor skills so they will be able to hold a pencil steady for writing, Valdez said. Stations where children can play with dough and sort through buckets of rice to find scattered paper clips will help students attain these skills and meet the goals of cutting with scissors on their own and drawing a straight line, she said.
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“All of our centers are manipulated by the teacher for a certain goal or learning experience,” Valdez said. “Play-based is not a free-for-all. It is a context for learning.”
So what does high-quality transitional kindergarten look like? California requires a transitional kindergarten classroom to have no more than 12 students with one teacher, or up to 24 students with one teacher and an aide. It shouldn’t be a combo class with kindergarten.
The room should have space for children to rotate through learning centers that might include tables with puzzles and manipulative toys, drawing and painting, musical instruments and building blocks. Objects should be labeled with their names in every language spoken by children in the class. Bathrooms used by kids in preschool, transitional kindergarten and kindergarten, the state says, should be accessible only to those students.
But for 4-year-olds, using bathrooms independently is often a major milestone.
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Before Sara LaPietra’s son Theodore started transitional kindergarten in San Diego in 2022, LaPietra was worried he might not be completely ready to use the bathroom on his own. It turned out that he was ready, but the bathrooms themselves weren’t.
“It just seems like the state overlooked some details that seem obvious as a parent,” she said. “A 4-year-old needs to be able to reach the toilet and the paper towels.”
Access to care outside of school hours is another barrier to family participation in transitional kindergarten. In Fresno, for example, nearly 2,000 children attend transitional kindergarten and the district offers after-school care at all school sites. But the district can’t keep up with demand, even after more than doubling its staff.
“Addressing students on the waitlist [for after-school programs] is ongoing work,” said Jeremy Ward, assistant superintendent of college and career readiness for Fresno Unified Schools. “As soon as we’re able to provide more staffing for an elementary school to take students off the waitlist, more step forward wanting access.”
Although districts have money to pay for staff members — in 2021 California allocated $4.6 billion for expanded learning opportunities, including after-school and summer learning programs — in many communities there simply aren’t enough people applying for the jobs.
School districts are also struggling to predict where 4-year-olds will go. While officials in districts such as Oakland and Fresno study birthrates to anticipate which schools will have full transitional kindergarten classrooms, parents may be unaware that transitional kindergarten exists or are confused by the age requirement.
“It’s quite complicated for parents to know if their 4-year-olds are eligible,” Kellner said, “and for districts to know how many 4-year-olds will come. That’s why progress has been so uneven.”
But teachers of students who are enrolled in transitional kindergarten now say that it is making a positive difference, even amid the statewide challenges.
“You can tell the children who haven’t been to preschool. They aren’t used to the socializing and the routines,” said Kudrolli, one of the Oakland teachers. “Last year there was one boy who stood in the middle of the room for the first month and just soaked it all in, like, ‘What happened? Where am I?’ By the end of the year he was completely adjusted.”
This story about transitional kindergarten was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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