Michael Olenick has spent his life pondering the preschool years. His mother, a childhood development professor, was one of the first Head Start teachers back in the 1960s, so he started preschool at age 3.
credit: CCRC
In some ways, he has never left that space. Olenick, a lifelong advocate for children and families and president of the Child Care Resource Center, a California-based advocacy organization, has long been a champion of early childhood education, having seen its power to uplift lives firsthand. But he worries that the educational system often pits the needs of one age group of children against another.
For instance, he worries that the rollout of transitional kindergarten, or TK, not only has undermined the preschool sector by stealing away some of its 4-year-olds. He also notes that TK is poised to run into a number of speed bumps ahead, including a lack of facilities and the need for more child developmental training, as it reaches full implementation in the fall.
Olenick, who received his Ph.D. from UCLA in educational psychology and has shaped the field with influential research on the importance of quality child care, recently made time to chat about his passion for early education and what he sees as the key challenges facing TK.
What fascinates you most about early ed?
My mother said that I always liked kids because I always had to be there in her classrooms. To me, it’s the most hopeful period of time, the opportunity to change kids’ trajectories the most. It’s the most hopeful time in life.
What are the biggest challenges in the expansion of TK? Do you worry about too much academic rigor, potty training incidents, the need for nap time?
All of those issues. In the ’80s I evaluated hundreds of preschool programs and kept running into large numbers that were drilling children on colors, numbers and letters for inordinate amounts of time. Boys had a harder time with this than girls. In looking at teacher qualifications, I saw lots of certificated teachers who were doing the drilling. I realize that’s a long time ago, but I keep hearing from colleagues seeing the same thing now. That’s why we pushed for early childhood education units for TK teachers. The other issue that comes up is many schools are designed for children to go to the bathroom unescorted. Four-year-olds can get lost there.
What do you think is the root source of the problem? A lack of understanding of child development, like the realities of potty training?
I don’t think most current teachers understand early development. Over time, this may right itself if they get the education they need. But principals have to have the expectation that TK is not first grade. Also, teachers do not generally handle toileting issues, and schools are not designed for 4-year-olds.
Is the academic pressure too high today?
I recently got an email from my first adviser at UCLA saying she went to half a dozen TK classrooms, and it looked like first grade. I wrote her back and I said, I told you so. We don’t have enough people yet that understand that kids learn differently. People learn at different rates, and we try to put them all into the same box and have them all learn stuff at the same time. Some of them are just not ready yet. You have to individualize instruction.
Why do you think the TK take-up rate has been more sluggish than expected?
Some of the biggest challenges are in rural districts, where they can’t get a very large number to attend, and the lack of child-sized facilities, especially easily accessible bathrooms. Also, I don’t buy the part about this helping all lower-income children because their parents need a full-day, full-year solution, not just three hours. For families who have a predictable schedule, a 9-to-5 job, TK with aftercare probably works pretty well, but some families need more flexibility.
Why are small ratios so important?
There has always been the rationale for safety. But more recent literature focuses on individual interactions between adults and children, and the fewer children per adult increases interactions, learning and attachment.
Why is play so key in TK?
Play is so important. I’ve heard from several TK program directors who said it took their administrators five years to recognize that play was learning. It’s not just the teachers that need to be trained on what’s developmentally appropriate; it’s important for principals, too. You know, a principal comes into a classroom and expects to see that teacher up in front of that class teaching. So if you go in and you see all these kids are playing, you may not realize they are being taught. It’s all about how you structure things in the classroom because you can get the same results in a play environment. You don’t have to drill kids.
Do you think we focus on setting a solid preschool foundation too much when financial stability may be more important for families?
It’s at least as important. We do a lot of work with families that are below the federal poverty line, the poorest of the poor. There are classrooms where there are kids who seem to be defiant. There was one kid who, it turns out, was deaf, and it took a long time to get him checked. He wasn’t being defiant; he just couldn’t read our lips. We have to work to give families what they need.
Students listen to their teacher during a transitional kindergarten class in Long Beach.
Credit: Lillian Mongeau/EdSource Today
Top Takeaways
Transitional kindergarten, or TK, becomes available to all 4-year-olds in the fall.
Smaller child-to-staff ratios, 10-to-1, are slated to start in the 2025-2026 school year.
Early exposure to the basics of reading and math can kick-start academic achievement, experts say.
Paula Merrigan loves being a transitional kindergarten (TK) teacher so much she says she may never retire. She’d miss the wonder of a class filled with hugs, light bulb moments, and little ones who call her mom. She’d miss sitting cross-legged on the alphabet rug, hearing plans for a cat birthday party.
In teaching, a field often beset by burnout and high turnover, TK stands out as a joyous and messy world of puzzles, finger painting and puppet theater, a world unique from the rest of the K-12 system. This fall, California’s long-awaited vision of universal pre-kindergarten finally comes to fruition as transitional kindergarten, or TK, becomes accessible to all 4-year-olds across the state.
“I love working with this age,” said Merrigan, 57, a veteran teacher holding court in a classroom jam-packed with construction paper butterflies, hearts and Dr. Seuss characters. Merrigan has spent 17 years teaching kindergarten and transitional kindergarten in the Castro Valley Unified School District. “They’re so happy to come to school. They take genuine pleasure in learning. They enjoy it. They want to be here. They have a really good time, and so do I.”
Spearheaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom and Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, the roughly $3 billion program has been described by many experts as a game-changer for families in a state with about 2.6 million children under the age of 5. Many hope that increasing access to preschool may be one of the keys to closing the state’s ever-widening achievement gap. Given that about 90% of brain growth happens before kindergarten, perhaps it should come as little surprise that children who attend preschool are more likely to take honors classes and less likely to repeat a grade or drop out of school, research suggests.
“We know that early childhood experience strongly influences cognitive development and that many of the problems that become evident later in life, including high rates of failure, are set in motion before children enter kindergarten,” said W. Steven Barnett, the senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), which is based at Rutgers University. “We have strong causal evidence for links with educational attainment that has high payoffs over a lifetime.”
Four-year-old student, Alan, mimics the movements to a song about numbers during a kindergarten program at East Oakland Pride Elementary School.ASHLEY HOPKINSON/EDSOURCE TODAY
Once lagging behind the rest of the country in preschool access, some say California may now be poised to lead the way. The state now ranks 13th in the nation in preschool enrollment for 4-year-olds. That’s up from ranking 18th for 4-year-old access in 2023, according to a national NIEER report that ranks state-funded preschool programs.
“California’s TK is huge for the early childhood education field,” said Barnett. “The state is getting closer each year to achieving its goal of universal preschool for 4-year-olds.”
A stepping stone between preschool and kindergarten, TK began in 2012 as a program for “fall babies,” children who narrowly missed the cutoff date for kindergarten. Now it’s been expanded to function as a kind of universal pre-kindergarten initiative. Yet even as TK is set to become a real grade, just like any other K-12 grade, there are myriad challenges looming on the horizon, from finding qualified teachers amid a dire staffing shortage to how to ensure quality instruction and suitable facilities. Class size and specialized teacher training are among the major concerns.
California will need roughly 12,000 extra teachers and about 16,000 aides to keep the TK rollout on schedule, research suggests.
“More TK students means districts need more TK teachers,” said Gennie Gorback, an early childhood educator and president-elect of the California Kindergarten Association. “Because TK is a special grade that requires credentialed teachers to have additional early childhood education units, it’s more of a challenge to find qualified teachers.”
Candidates need a bachelor’s degree, must complete courses in child development or early childhood education, take the state’s teacher performance exam and log 600 hours in the classroom. Without pay. Those requirements may be holding back preschool teachers, who already teach 4-year-olds, from taking better-paying TK jobs, experts say.
“We feel from a position of equity and respect for the experience of preschool teachers that the current pathways are still inadequate,” said Anna Powell, senior research and policy associate at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE). “If 4-year-olds are moving into TK, some of their highly skilled teachers should have a streamlined pathway to go with them.”
Quality also remains a key issue. The NIEER report scored California’s TK program a mere 3 out of 10 criteria, largely for having a crowded class size of 24 children in a classroom and an average 12-to-1 student-to-staff ratio. Teacher training is also a factor.
“Building quality is job one for the future,” said Barnett. “Providing guidance and continuous improvement so that TK develops as a program appropriate for 4-year-olds.”
Newsom’s latest 2025-26 budget sets aside $1.2 billion to add new students and also help reduce TK staff ratios to 10-to-1, slated to start in the 2025-2026 school year.
“Low spending results in low quality,” according to the report. “While that may seem to save money, it is wasteful and costly in the long run to fund programs that do not adequately support long-term gains and may even harm long-term outcomes for some children.”
Paula Merrigan
Small class sizes are critical, experts say. For the record, the gold standard for the early education sphere is more like 8-to-1, like the state’s public preschool program, which met six out of 10 benchmarks.
“The real key is a small ratio,” said Gorback. “Having more adults in the room helps ensure that each child gets the attention and guidance they need.”
Play is the heart of learning at this age. Merrigan’s classroom encourages guided play that enhances learning, such as math games students beg to play and a kinetic sandbox that sparks creativity and motor skills.
“I love to watch the aha moments,” said Merrigan, who tested out many activities on her own son to see if they were fun as well as edifying. “I love seeing kids who come in knowing no letters and no numbers, and they leave knowing every letter and every sound. It’s amazing. And we do it all through play.”
Another roadblock is that some school districts don’t have enough space and facilities for TK classrooms or the resources to add everything from potties to playground equipment sized for 4-year-olds. Some Oakland schools, for instance, don’t have any TK classrooms, which is why some children end up on wait lists for their preferred school.
“Space is an incredible challenge for schools,” said Gorback. “Most elementary schools were not built with TK classrooms in mind, so administrators are having to get creative in making sure that all of their young learners have the space they need.”
After declining during the pandemic, TK growth has been accelerating. Enrollment jumped by more than 35,000 children from the previous school year, according to Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, now standing at roughly 151,000, but the rub is that the bump in TK enrollment may have come at the expense of other programs. Some families simply switched from one program to another.
“Enrollments in center-based programs have stalled overall,” Fuller said.
Certainly, ushering in a new grade at a time of profound upheaval, from learning loss to chronic absenteeism in the school system, may be an unwieldy challenge, experts say, but it also should be noted that early education can have the greatest impact now, even as the youngest learners struggle to recover from the damage caused by pandemic-era school closures.
“TK absolutely can help with pandemic recovery and with changes that we see in children’s development that persist,” added Barnett, “but this will require focused attention to ensure good practice, ensure children with the greatest needs enroll, and ensure high attendance rates when they do enroll.”
This is the fourth in a series of stories on the challenges impacting California’s efforts to offer high-quality instruction to all 4-year-olds by 2025.
Transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds has been touted as a way to boost declining enrollment and offer universal preschool. One major roadblock: Some districts just don’t have the space.
Some districts do not have room to accommodate additional transitional kindergarten, or TK, classes at all schools. Others, especially those in less affluent areas, lack the resources to add toilets and playground equipment made for 4-year-olds. A lack of state funding makes the problem worse.
“We’re going to see inequitable outcomes as a result of the inequitable access to appropriate facilities for transitional kindergarten,” said Jessica Sawko, education director at Children Now, an advocacy organization. “The state needs to continue to invest in the facilities that it has asked school districts to create.”
Some districts, such as Oakland Unified, are losing potential TK students because they don’t have space at all schools. Some elementary schools in Oakland don’t have any TK classrooms, and many have only one. As a result, some children end up on waitlists for their preferred school, and families are opting to wait until kindergarten to enroll their children.
Oakland district spokesperson John Sasaki acknowledged in an email that “there is a general capacity issue as we build out TK-appropriate classroom spaces,” noting that demand also varies between schools.
“School A may have 100 applications for 24 seats and school B may have 15 applications for 24 seats. Those families for school A may not go to school B because it’s far away, etc. and so it’s less that we weren’t able to accommodate, and more about family choice and preference,” Sasaki wrote.
Emily Privot McNamara applied for her 4-year-old son to attend transitional kindergarten in Oakland as soon as the district opened enrollment in 2023.
She was hoping for her son to attend his neighborhood school, Montclair Elementary, less than a two-minute drive from their house. Her neighbors told her getting into Montclair for kindergarten was easy for their children, since the district gives priority to students who live in the neighborhood.
But getting into TK there was different. Montclair has far fewer TK classrooms than kindergarten classrooms; in 2023-24 the school enrolled 28 students in TK, compared to 90 in kindergarten. McNamara’s son didn’t get into Montclair or Thornhill Elementary, another nearby school. Instead, the district offered him a seat at Emerson Elementary, more than 3 miles from their house and a 10-minute drive each way.
The McNamaras considered sending their son to Emerson for TK and then moving him to Montclair for kindergarten, but felt that would be too many transitions.
“We’d had several years of shifts and changes. We wanted to start consistency. The idea was once we got into TK, we could stay there a number of years,” McNamara said.
So the McNamaras declined the spot at Emerson and kept their son in private preschool, paying $1,900 a month for tuition. They stayed on the waitlist for Montclair but were never admitted.
McNamara’s son is one of 143 children who applied to transitional kindergarten in Oakland Unified in 2023-24 but ultimately chose not to enroll, according to Sasaki. That number is equivalent to about 12% of the district’s total transitional kindergarten enrollment that year.
TK enrollment has been lower than expected statewide. According to the California Department of Education, 151,491 students were enrolled in TK in the 2023-24 school year, far below projections. The Learning Policy Institute had estimated that between 159,500 and 199,400 would enroll.
A lot of districts, on paper, they’re under-enrolled. However, the devil’s in the details. … Is there potential extra space where it’s actually needed? And what’s the condition and quality of those spaces?”
Jeff Vincent, Center for Cities+Schools
Oakland Unified and Alum Rock Unified in San Jose are both trying to use empty space creatively, revamping previously closed elementary school campuses and converting them into early childhood centers to serve both TK and younger students in preschool. Oakland gives priority at this center and another early childhood center to students who come from neighborhoods with schools that don’t have a single transitional kindergarten classroom. Yet the situation in Oakland, where some schools are under-enrolled, while others have waitlists, shows that expanding TK is more complicated than simply filling empty classrooms with 4-year-olds, said Jeff Vincent, who co-directs the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley and has done extensive research on school facilities.
“A lot of districts, on paper, they’re under-enrolled,” said Vincent. “However, the devil’s in the details on that, right? Is there potential extra space where it’s actually needed? And what’s the condition and quality of those spaces, and what would it take to turn them into TK-appropriate classrooms?”
A problem statewide
According to a February 2023 Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) budget brief, 25% of districts said they did not have adequate classroom space to meet projected transitional kindergarten enrollment. Similarly, a survey conducted by the California Department of Education and analyzed by the Learning Policy Institute found that 18% of school districts did not have enough classroom space for transitional kindergarten expansion, and more than a third cited facilities as the biggest challenge.
That report found that school districts will need 946 additional classrooms to enroll all projected transitional kindergarten students in 2025-26. TK has been gradually expanding since 2022 to reach all the state’s 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year.
One of the challenges for districts is the requirement for transitional kindergarten classrooms.
State guidelines for TK and kindergarten classrooms are more stringent than for classrooms for older children. New classrooms must include bathrooms with toilets sized for young children, and be at least 1,350 square feet. Renovated classrooms must be at least 1,250 square feet. In contrast, classrooms for grades 1-12 must be at least 960 square feet.
Victoria Wang, one of the authors of the report, said some districts told the Learning Policy Institute that the lack of classrooms has made it difficult to offer full-day TK and that they are instead offering half-day morning and afternoon TK sessions in the same classrooms, in order to accommodate more students. Parents who need a longer program to meet their child care needs are unlikely to enroll in half-day TK.
Many districts cited not being able to provide bathrooms connected to classrooms as a challenge.
“If they don’t have a bathroom that’s in the actual classroom space, a staff member will need to walk with the child to go to the bathroom,” Wang said. “That’s just an additional layer of challenge staffing-wise.”
In San Juan Unified, near Sacramento, lack of classrooms “has been a concern,” said spokesperson Raj Rai. In 2023-24, 16 of the district’s 28 transitional kindergarten classrooms had waitlists, and about 249 students who applied eventually declined to enroll in TK at the schools where they were assigned, she said. The district has been offering spots in state-subsidized preschool to some families on the waitlist.
San Diego Unified and San Francisco Unified also had waitlists at some schools, but they would not share how many of the children who applied did not enroll.
Some districts that wanted to expand to more 4-year-olds faster than the state’s phased timeline for TK expansion could not because of facilities constraints, Wang said. The state required schools to offer TK to all 4-year-olds who would turn 5 before April 2 in 2023-24, and to all 4-year-olds who would turn 5 before June 2 in 2024-25, but districts could enroll younger children if they had room and met stricter rules: a 1:10 adult-child ratio and a maximum class size of 20.
A spokesperson for Garden Grove Unified in Orange County said the district had to place 84 children who were younger than the TK birthday cutoff on a waitlist this year; 25 had been pulled from the list as of mid-September.
Inequitable access to funding
Districts are often forced to choose between renovating current classrooms, demolishing, then reconstructing new transitional kindergarten classrooms, or purchasing portables, said John Rodriguez, facilities planning director for Central Unified, a 16,000-student district in Fresno County.
“What do you do when there’s growth?” he said. “And where’s the money going to come from?”
This year, overall facilities funding was cut by $500 million to address the budget shortfall, and funding set aside for transitional kindergarten facilities has run out. The state had provided $490 million in grants to construct or retrofit early education facilities, including for TK, in 2021-22 and $100 million in 2022-23, but that funding was “oversubscribed,” the LAO budget brief found. Additional promised funding of $550 million for TK facilities was first delayed to 2024-25, then to 2025-26, and ultimately was eliminated from the budget altogether.
“It puts at risk the ability for school districts who do not currently have the right facilities to provide those proper learning environments,” Sawko, from Children Now, said.
The ability to build new classrooms or renovate old ones is often tied to a district’s property wealth, said Sara Hinkley, California program manager for the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley.
“The only way for districts to do real facility upgrades, like adding bathrooms and reconfiguring a number of classrooms, is by getting capital funding, which means going to their voters or tapping into an existing bond measure, and districts have really different capacities to do that,” said Hinkley. “If they have less property wealth, they just have less ability to tap their voters to pay for those kinds of things.”
Julie Boesch, the administrator for small school district support in Kern County, said some of the county’s small districts don’t have the classrooms to serve transitional kindergartners at all sites, so they bus them all to one school, sometimes far from home. Other superintendents have said they may not offer transitional kindergarten at all, she said.
She said one small school district north of Bakersfield is constructing a new building for transitional kindergarten but could not afford a new playground. Another district was approved for some state funding for a new TK building but had to put it off because it could not afford its portion. The district did not qualify for the state to pay the full share because its total assessed property value was just over the current $5 million limit. That limit for a district to qualify for full financial help would be increased to $15 million in assessed property value if voters pass Proposition 2, the state construction bond.
“People are really struggling with figuring out what to do and having enough money when they do get funding,” Boesch said. “The frustrations are real.”
Winters Joint Unified School District, a small district serving about 1,500 students in Yolo County in the Central Valley, had to divert funds planned for other facilities to meet the urgent demand for TK classroom space. According to Superintendent Rody Boonchouy, voters passed a bond measure in 2020 to address major maintenance issues, including adding a multipurpose room to an elementary school. But then, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to expand TK to all 4-year-olds.
“It was a big, ‘Uh oh, what do we do?’ Everything came to a halt and everything shifted toward, ‘How do we ensure we have capacity for TK as it expands?’” Boonchouy said.
After a long process that included a demographic study and analysis of all facilities needs, the district is using some of the bond money to build four transitional kindergarten classrooms in a dedicated wing of the elementary school, with its own playground. The district was also able to do some maintenance at other schools, but it no longer has funds for the planned multipurpose room.
Without that bond money, the district wouldn’t be able to build new TK classrooms at all, a situation Boonchouy knows many other districts face.
“Ideally, in a perfect world,” Boonchouy said, “that legislation (expanding transitional kindergarten) would have come with money to build facilities for it.”
credit: CCRC
