California finally rolled out free preschool for all 4-year-olds in the 2025-26 school year, after more than a decade of expanding what the state calls transitional kindergarten. Many advocates hoped the move would ease child care shortages and close learning gaps between rich and poor. But a new University of California, Berkeley, study of Los Angeles shows the opposite happened: More than 150 child care centers closed, and the biggest beneficiaries were families in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
Why does free preschool sometimes backfire? The Berkeley report can’t definitively answer that, but the study’s lead author, Bruce Fuller, a retired Berkeley sociologist who has studied early childhood education for decades, says the new public school seats siphoned 4-year-olds away from community child care centers and private preschools. Many centers lost revenue when children left, and it wasn’t easy to pivot to serving younger toddlers or infants.
“We found this worrisome finding that the death rate, so to speak, of pre-K centers has accelerated since the governor moved toward universal access” to transitional kindergarten, Fuller said. “Private pay centers can’t survive.”…