Maybe they’ll do it by the time I have grandchildren.

It’s already too late for my own kids. The youngest of my three sons graduated from preschool last week. I celebrated by writing my final preschool check—for monthly tuition of $1,165. With that check, my spending on preschool tuition for all three boys, over the last seven years, totaled more than $120,000.

All that tuition, alongside a 21st-century Southern California mortgage, has wiped away most of my family’s savings. And yet, my kids are extremely lucky because they got to go to preschool at all.

Today, only half of California’s 4-year-olds and 21 percent of our 3-year-olds are enrolled in either a public preschool or Head Start, according to figures from the National Institute for Early Education Research. By comparison, 90 percent of 5-year-old Californians attend a public kindergarten.

That leaves most families to search for their own preschool solution, if they can. Many middle-class families struggle to find anything affordable (preschools often charge tuitions higher than the $14,000 of the University of California) and full-day (to accommodate work schedules). The state’s tax credit for preschool—$516—would cover two weeks at such facilities.

Subsidized preschool programs mostly target low-income kids, but an estimated 170,000 California children who are eligible for publicly funded preschools can’t go because there aren’t enough spots. And only 13 percent of low-income kids are in high-quality preschools, advocates say. In a state with high childhood poverty and inequality, such statistics are unconscionable.

Preschool makes liars of California adults, demonstrating the vast canyon between our progressive rhetoric (“children are the future”) and reactionary reality (“kids don’t vote so why should we care about them?”). Investments in early childhood education are of enormous social value: Kids who get high-quality preschool are less likely to fall behind in school, be victims of crime, or drop out of high school. The RAND Corporation even found that spending on early childhood had a higher rate of economic return than dollars devoted to infrastructure or workforce training.

So it would make a great deal of sense for California to invest in our kids. But the state can’t even match Oklahoma, which established universal preschool in the 1990s. Voters turned down a ballot initiative to establish universal preschool in 2006. Even part-way measures get blocked. In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill guaranteeing one year of part-day preschool to every low-income 4-year-old.

This year, California has the billions necessary to make preschool universal, but instead the new state budget throws $16 billion into rainy day reserves. This failure to do the best by young children is barely an issue in an election year in which Californians are debating a tiny gas tax increase that doesn’t do much for infrastructure.

Since the Great Recession, which saw $1 billion in cuts to early childhood programs, preschool has made progress: increases in the number of subsidized preschool slots, improved ratings and quality systems for preschools, and the establishment of transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds. Some local school districts have added programs, passing local taxes. But all this falls short of a universal system in which preschool is guaranteed, like a grade in school; instead early childhood education is provided through a complicated patchwork of nine programs with different settings, standards, hours, and fees. The closest thing to universal preschool—transitional kindergarten—is limited to students born between September 2 and December 2. State spending per child on early childhood education actually declined last year.

This lack of commitment to preschool undermines quality and staffing. It’s hard to get talented people to devote their careers to early childhood, given the uncertainty. And California relies far more than most states on unlicensed providers.

Despite all these challenges, I have hope. And that hope is grounded in four Northern California children—the four kids, all under the age of nine, of our likely next governor, Gavin Newsom.

Newsom talks obsessively about early childhood, which is a good sign. Yes, he’s rich and lives in Marin, but the difficulty of readying small children for the world is one thing that even the glitterati have in common with the rest of us. A few years ago, while I toured a ridiculously expensive and irresponsibly progressive L.A. preschool, one prospective parent, the actor-musician Jack Black, became so frustrated at the school’s absurd child-centeredness (“we never correct the children even when they’re wrong”) that he asked the principal, with full School of Rock exasperation, “Don’t you think kids need a little more structure?”

Newsom proposes, in great detail, to create a robust system of public early childhood services that starts in the womb (with greater prenatal care), emphasizes coaching for parents of very young kids, and includes universal preschool. He calls for integrating the early childhood system with K-12 education and even universities.

This could be just the most elaborate of a generation’s worth of unfulfilled promises, but there are reasons to take him seriously: As mayor of San Francisco, he implemented a “Preschool for All” program, funded by a voter-approved tax. And in putting together a statewide ballot initiative that legalized cannabis in 2016, Newsom directed some marijuana money to early childhood.

Of course, Newsom will have to negotiate with child care providers wary of change, as well as education and health interests who see universal preschool as unwelcome competition for public funds. He should build a broader constituency for preschool by making sure his expansion reaches middle-class families. Middle-class support is why Social Security and Medicare are more popular than targeted programs for the poor.

And he shouldn’t wait. Those early years fly by. In the fall, my youngest will start kindergarten at our local public school. And while I no longer will be paying preschool tuition, I still will be writing checks.

California guarantees only half-day kindergarten, which means that he’ll be in the classroom for just three hours and 25 minutes a day, 8:10 to 11:35 a.m. Since my wife and I work, we’re very relieved that we can keep him at school by enrolling him in a “kindercare” program for the 11:35 a.m. to 3 p.m. stretch, and then an after-school program to cover 3 to 6 p.m.

Those two extra programs will allow us to keep our jobs. They also will cost us $750 a month.

The post California Promised ‘Preschool For All.’ What I Got Was $120,000 in Tuition Fees. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

State leaders were congratulating themselves on passing a budget and new legislation that promised more than 40,000 new full-day pre-K spots for low-income 4-year-olds. California was celebrated as a leader of a nationwide movement that would guarantee pre-school for every child someday.

Of course, a decade later, as I sit here composing this column on my brain’s iChip in 2024, we know that the day of universal pre-K never arrived.

For all their big ambitious promises in 2014, California’s leaders were so cautious in how they launched their new investment that they sabotaged a great opportunity for real social progress. When you’re trying to build something for the future, it can be reckless to be too careful in your construction, lest your creation is too small and weak to withstand the winds of time.

To be fair, universal pre-K—despite its popularity in polls and its economic potential (freeing parents to work and better preparing children for school and productive lives)—was never an easy thing to expand, or explain. Pre-K remains a somewhat amorphous concept, organized in many different ways and subject to many differing standards, funding sources, and even names (sometimes called “preschool,” “junior kindergarten,” or “transitional kindergarten”). Basic questions: How many kids already attend pre-K? What level of government should fund pre-K? Who should be accountable for the quality of pre-K?—have always been hard to answer.

Still, in 2014, when more than 35 states supported some form of pre-K, it seemed like we had a moment of real opportunity. That year, California decided to step up its existing programs by budgeting nearly $273 million for early learning and child development. This batch of money was to fund 11,500 new full-day preschool spaces for low-income 4-years-olds at first, and another 31,500 in future years. The legislation’s stated intent was to eventually cover pre-K for 234,000 children, or about half of all 4-year-olds in the state.

At the time, this first step—and a big promise about the future—seemed to make sense. The state was coming out of a decade-long budget crisis that had seen cuts to early childhood programs. So start slow and build support, the thinking went, and universal pre-K would follow.

But that was the wrong approach for California.

The new investment simply didn’t reach enough people to build a strong constituency for pre-K. In fact, the highly touted 2014 legislation covered fewer kids over multiple years (43,000) than New York City—with less than one-quarter of California’s population—managed to add in the fall of 2014 alone (more than 51,000). And by targeting low-income kids, the legislation made it hard for middle-class voters to see the new pre-K investment in their daily lives—and thus made it easy for critics to stigmatize pre-K as another need-based handout. There’s a reason why Social Security, Medicare, and housing support via the mortgage-interest deduction (as well as public education itself, for that matter) are far more popular than less costly programs targeting the poor.

The state of Georgia understood this basic political reality. Georgia today, as it did in 2014, boasts the country’s oldest and most durable public pre-K program, one that has survived tough budgetary times because of its universality. Conservative Republicans in that state’s legislature didn’t want to scale it back—their own kids and grandkids were in it.

It could have been so here as well. California in 2014 had a rare budget surplus, and enough money to cover every 4-year-old. In fact, that very same summer the legislature put just $273 million into pre-K, it threw even more money—$330 million a year—at incentives for motion picture production, even though TV and movies were already by then a mature, stagnant business. Heck, the state even offered $500 million to the electric car manufacturer Tesla to build a battery plant. (Fortunately for California, Nevada gave Tesla even more.)

Predictably, when the state budget surplus disappeared a few years later, the new pre-K investment was immediately vulnerable since it didn’t have any of the special protections—approval by ballot initiative or as a constitutional measure—of other California programs. And demographics worked against pre-K. With the birth rate falling, immigration flat, and young families leaving the state because of its exorbitant cost of living, the percentage of Californians with small children—and who would fight for pre-K—was shrinking.

At first, the state merely delayed some of the expansion promised in the 2014 legislation. But when a recession hit at the end of the decade, the axe came out. The legislature did the same things—reducing reimbursement rates to providers, adding fees that discouraged enrollment—it had done to early childhood education programs after the Great Recession hit in 2008. In the end, pre-K ended up worse off; today, in 2024, total spending on early childhood programs is actually lower than it was in 2008.

The derailment of universal pre-K affected more than enrollment figures. It stymied efforts to improve the quality of programs. The unstable funding dissuaded many people from devoting their career to pre-K and undertaking the education and training necessary to improve the teaching kids get. There also was less money to devote to research on the crucial questions of what makes some pre-K programs more effective than others.

Looking back at 2014, it’s frustrating to see how so many people knew the approach was flawed but were unable to do more. Indeed, the original legislation was much more ambitious, establishing a truly universal pre-K for all 4-year-olds. But powerful lawmakers and Governor Jerry Brown were obsessed with spending and preferred a program tailored to low-income kids. There was little discussion in Sacramento of the potential benefits of preschool programs that brought low-income kids together with middle-class and affluent kids.

Now, only a decade later, I find myself wishing the Mark Zuckerberg Institute—with its $1 trillion endowment and ownership of all the world’s accumulated personal data—were making more progress on its planned time travel machine. Because it sure would be nice to go back to 2014, and do pre-K differently.

The post California Pre-K Is Doomed appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was an innocuous question, asked by my statistics professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. It might have been a rhetorical question, too, as the professor didn’t seem to expect anyone to speak up.

But I did, providing an empirical data point in a graduate seminar that was looking at the correlation between Head Start participation and success later in life. This was an academic discussion for everyone else in the room but a personal one for me.

In 1990 and 1991, I attended a Head Start program in Lincoln, Nebraska that offered classroom learning as well as home visits. As a little girl of 4, I thought that “Head Start” was the name of my preschool. It was only later that I learned Head Start was a federal program that specifically prepares children from low-income families for school.

My family’s early years in America were not easy. My father’s graduate school stipend—around $500 per month—made up the bulk of our income. To help support us, my mother, who had been a teacher in China but did not speak English, bused tables at a local Chinese restaurant. Yet she never complained. To this day, she remembers how proud she felt when she made her first American dollar.

Our meals often consisted of ramen noodles purchased with food stamps and made more substantive by adding egg and lettuce. My parents denied themselves so that what we did have could go toward me: my education, my healthcare, my well-being.

We were all supposed to return to China once my father completed his graduate studies, but the events of 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square changed everything. As they watched the chaos in their homeland on TV in their American apartment, my parents came to believe I would have a better life here.

Head Start’s principal mission is not to help immigrants integrate into American society. But as with other forms of public assistance and infrastructure designed to level the playing field for all Americans, immigrant integration is one of the program’s bonus benefits.

In addition to teaching me in the classroom, my first Head Start teacher, Ms. Cathy, also often made home visits to my family’s apartment. Neither of my parents spoke English as a first language, and we spoke Mandarin at home, so these visits were meant to help me catch up. I remember how, on the mornings of Ms. Cathy’s visits, my mother would always make me take a bath and put on my nicest clothes so that I would look my best for my teacher.

Seated at our kitchen table from the Salvation Army on mismatched chairs donated by a local church, Ms. Cathy worked with me on the differences between “the” and “that” and “this.” We counted numbers, practiced writing the alphabet, and talked about different shapes and colors. I say “we” because with each new word and phrase I recited, my parents were learning English as well.

At 27, I am now the same age that my parents were when they left China and came to the United States in pursuit of a better education for my father. As I begin making my own way in the world, I find myself reflecting on what it must have been like for my parents to “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne described in simple but elegant terms in “The Custom-House,” his introduction to The Scarlet Letter.

The many evenings that my father spent listening to BBC World and Voice of America on the radio as a college student in China paid off when he earned the highest score on the provincial English-language exams and a scholarship to attend graduate school in the United States.

My parents believed, as so many do, that giving their child a quality education was key to achieving the American Dream. They also understood that early education would provide me with a critical foundation for future success. We like to tell ourselves that, in this land of equal opportunity, a baby’s zip code should not determine her life trajectory. But all too often, it does. Studies consistently show that children from low-income families are less likely to succeed than their wealthier peers.

When the budget cuts from the sequester took effect earlier this year, almost 57,000 children lost access to Head Start services. With this week’s government shutdown, those preschoolers who still had spots were sent home. Without giving them a quality head start in life, low-income children have nowhere to begin but behind.

In my case, without Ms. Cathy’s patient one-on-one instruction and out-of-class tutoring, I surely would have started kindergarten behind my peers from higher-income homes where English was spoken as a first language. My parents would not have received the additional benefit of sitting in on basic English classes.

To my parents’ and my teacher’s delight, I thrived in the classroom setting. Confident in my new vocabulary, I began to come out of my shell and started speaking up and asking questions. By the end of my year in Head Start, I had served as a line leader at lunch and delivered the morning weather report to my fellow classmates.

I can’t speak for how things turned out for the other eight kids who were in my Head Start class in 1990, but I was fortunate to have received the extra attention. It placed me on a road that eventually led to a college scholarship and a rewarding graduate school experience. I am proud to be a Head Start alum who became a Harvard graduate.

My father finished his doctoral program in 1995. With the job offer and salary that followed, our growing family was able to live more comfortably. We moved into our first house—a modest one, located in a safe neighborhood with good public schools.

I have had many wonderful, talented teachers throughout my various educational experiences, but it is Ms. Cathy my parents remember and talk about as the one whose dedication and patience first proved that this country believed in their child as much as they did.

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