For many years, California has referred to itself as a national model for early childhood education, and in a limited sense, that assertion is true. The state promised hundreds of thousands of new subsidized child care spots, invested billions to build out transitional kindergarten, and changed the way it pays providers. When combined, the scope of California’s efforts is unmatched in the entire nation. On paper, it appears to be a true turning point, the kind of policy change that could be examined in graduate programs twenty years from now as the turning point in American early education.
As usual, the lived reality is far more complex. Today, a picture of persistent financial precarity appears when you walk into practically any licensed child care facility in a low-income California neighborhood. Even with recent increases, providers claim that their reimbursement rates still don’t cover their true operating costs. Employee turnover is constant. The majority of the women who run these centers are women of color, and they are carrying a system that has historically been based on the idea that their labor doesn’t need to be fairly compensated. Whatever Sacramento has passed, that presumption hasn’t entirely vanished.
A portion of the story is revealed by the numbers. Depending on the county, full-time preschool care in California can cost anywhere from $9,000 to $24,000 annually; infant care is even more expensive. Over the past ten years, state and federal funding for early childhood programs has almost tripled, which is truly noteworthy.
However, the growth of transitional kindergarten has caused its own disruptions, removing four-year-olds from community-based programs and placing them in classrooms at schools, frequently without prior notice to providers who relied on that enrollment to survive. Although the total number of early care seats has increased by about 6% since before the pandemic, the supply is still most limited in low-income areas where there is a shortage of licensed care compared to the number of children in need.
Speaking with people in this area gives the impression that California lawmakers comprehend the issue conceptually but not completely on the ground. The 2020 Master Plan for Early Learning and Care was comprehensive and ambitious. Passed in late 2025, AB 1123 and AB 753 made a significant impact by increasing access and bolstering workforce support. These are not merely aesthetic accomplishments. However, implementation has been uneven and slow, a pattern the state has previously struggled with. For example, it has spent enormous sums of money to establish transitional kindergartens, while reports of poor oversight and wildly disparate quality across districts have surfaced.
Everything is made more difficult by the federal context. In 2025 alone, UC Berkeley researchers identified over fifty different ways that the current administration’s actions harmed the early childhood education workforce, including cuts to Head Start pipelines, rolled-back protections, and frozen funds. California has made an effort to use state funds to close some of those gaps, and to its credit, it has mostly been successful in backfilling the most important programs. However, in a system this size, no state can fully absorb the effects of federal disinvestment. With K–12 education already accounting for about 40% of state spending, California’s budget is under serious strain.
Advocates will tell you that ambition is not what’s lacking. California is overly ambitious. Honesty regarding the workforce crisis at the core of the entire business is lacking. Early educators are routinely underpaid, frequently earning less than retail employees, often lacking benefits, and possessing credentials that the system demanded of them without compensating them appropriately. Increasing access is meaningless if those providing care are unable to continue their careers. That issue is still unresolved. Perhaps it hasn’t even been taken seriously yet.
It’s difficult to look at everything California has accomplished without feeling something akin to cautious respect—for the scope of the commitment, for the real advancements in access, and for the policy recognition that early childhood is not a luxury but rather an economic and developmental necessity. It is another matter entirely whether the apparatus of a state this complicated can genuinely fulfill that promise in a consistent and fair manner. It’s a historic ambition. The execution is still being drafted.
