California launches taxpayer-funded transitional kindergarten

Since 2019, California has spent over $12 billion to expand transitional kindergarten, according to the Newsom administration. The administration says the program will save families an average of nearly $14,000 per child.

The Democratic governor's announcement on transitional kindergarten came on Tuesday as a different topic was on a large crowd's mind outside the Governor's Mansion in Sacramento. The Center Square reported that Altadena residents gathered there to get the state's top politician to give them money to rebuild homes destroyed by the Eaton Fire.

Newsom and his wife were not there. The couple, who reside at their Marin County home instead of the Sacramento mansion, hosted a press conference of their own in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time to announce investments in universal transitional kindergarten. 

“Washington, D.C. is dismantling public education. We’re building it in historic ways,” Newsom said during the press conference. 

Alex Traveros, a spokesperson for the governor's administration, told The Center Square that the funding has already been allocated in the state budget. Traveros said the nearly $14,000 savings figure is an “avoided-cost estimate” based on the average annual price of full-time, center-based care for a 4-year-old in California.

This is the second full year of the program's implementation, and over 200,000 children were enrolled in transitional kindergarten during the 2024-25 school year.

The program is part of a broader set of education initiatives promoted by Newsom, including free school meals, expanded before- and after-school programs, school-based mental health services, literacy programs and additional support for students with disabilities.

Lance Izumi of the Pasadena, Calif.-based Pacific Research Institute told The Center Square that the universal TK has “no long-term evaluation research” even though it is attached to billions of dollars spent. 

“I think that for the governor to say that all this money will surely improve the performance of kids - well, there's no research to back that up,” Izumi told The Center Square. 

Izumi noted that the program is not free and comes at a cost to taxpayers. 

“It's free in the sense that the people who partake of it don't pay tuition, but it's not free because taxpayers end up paying for this,” said Izumi, senior director of the PRI's Center for Education. “I mean, somebody's going to have to pay for this program, and it's an ongoing cost over the coming years, and that's going to be the taxpayer.” 

Izumi told The Center Square that this push for universal kindergarten is no coincidence, since California has seen a significant decline in K-12 enrollment over the past decade.

Just in this past year alone, public school enrollment has dropped by over 74,000 students, according to the California Department of Education.  

Izumi said the strategy for the state government to combat this issue is to “add on TK so that we are able to balance out the decline in K-12 enrollment with adding more kids at the very front end with TK, and that keeps our membership up, and that keeps the dues money flowing to the unions, who can then use that to continue their ability to wield power in Sacramento.”