Since the publication of Getting Down to Facts II in 2019, there have been significant changes to the early care and education (ECE) landscape in California. California continues to offer the same array of ECE programs and services to young children from birth to kindergarten entry, but access to these programs has substantially increased for preschool-age children. In 2019 federal- and state-funded ECE programs in California focused primarily on providing free or subsidized care and education programs to low-income children and their families. Parents of children who did not meet eligibility requirements, or who were unable to access subsidized programs, even when eligible, paid for ECE services out of pocket.
When Governor Gavin Newsom took office in 2019, he committed to a “California for All”—a California that provides all children with a great start. The Newsom Administration, led by the Health and Human Services Agency, in collaboration with the State Board of Education (SBE) and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction developed a Master Plan for Early Learning and Care, with a core objective to promote school readiness by making preschool available to every four-year-old child and all low-income three-year-old children across the state.
During his administration, Governor Newsom and the state legislature took many steps to achieve this goal. Most notably, California implemented a major expansion of early care and education for four-year-old children by expanding Transitional Kindergarten to create Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) across the state. As a result, this paper, and this section focus primarily on programs that serve preschool age children (3-6 years). However, we briefly explore how progress towards serving preschool age children has created opportunities for additional investments in infants and toddlers. In this section we explore a few key questions that are central to understanding how recent investments in preschool have altered the landscape of ECE in California. Specifically, we discuss:
- What is Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) and why is it important?
- How has UPK implementation changed California’s ECE landscape?
- Is UPK meeting the needs of California’s children and families?
- How can California build upon its UPK investment to improve the ECE system as a whole?
We utilize the most up-to-date information, data, and research available to answer each of these questions below. Data quality and availability, however, create challenges for the ECE field (see Section 6), which limits our analysis.
