Early Childhood Education Programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District: (LAUSD): Prekindergarten in highlight

• In Event: Poster session 2

Proposal

This research analyses how the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) provides access to education for four-year-old children. We focus on two programs: the California State Preschool Program (CSPP) and the Transitional Kindergarten (TK). We conduct a thorough analysis of primary sources such as government documents, databases available on official state government websites, and publications issued by recognized non-governmental research institutes and multilateral organizations. Our project focuses primarily on three variables: 1.Type of supply and nature of providers; 2. Financing mechanisms: public per capita or other forms of subsidy; private or mixed; 3. Demography of the participants.
Regulation of childhood education in the US can be best described as decentralized and diverse. Each state offers its own range of programs and each school district has the autonomy to expand these possibilities. Each program varies when it comes to costs, funding, forms of licensing, target audiences, and curricula which, therefore, makes the analysis of public policies and social control mechanisms a challenging task.
Pre-Kindergarten programs are funded through a combination of federal, state, and local funds that may overlap as they serve similar goals and audiences (Hustled & Barnett, 2011). At the LAUSD, it is possible to see competing programs supervised by different departments. When it comes to programs tailored for four-year-old children, there are four programs that are being offered: "Head-Start", "California State Preschool", "Transitional kindergarten" and "Early Education Centers". We find that the “Transitional Kindergarten" program serves the widest public because of its unique characteristics: this program is offered at public elementary school and it does not have any eligibility criteria. This shows that although the state of California targets children from low-income families, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, there is a tendency to universalize early childhood education for four-year-old children in part-time terms, for 6 hours a day.
Both the California State Preschool Program (CSPP) and the Transitional Kindergarten (TK) are offered at public elementary schools and their funding follows the standards of other elementary school grades, in which state funds are distributed proportionately to the number of the attendees. While the CSPP is limited to 93 schools, TK would be offered in all elementary public schools according to the official district website. Of the 508 elementary public schools in the district, 92 (18%) are charters and 53 of them include the TK program. Charters have been increasing steadily in the LAUSD, and today it is the district with the largest number of such schools in the country. Most of them (80%) are independent and are able to follow self-created curriculum; however, management teams can be responsible when the intended performance and/or goals determined by the district are no longer met. Although charter schools are non-profit, they operate a growing private consulting and advisory market (Wells, Stuart, et al., 1998, 32). The inclusion of children in early childhood education in these schools tends to increase public financial resources for them.

Authors

• Janaina Vargas de Moraes Maudonnet, Universidade de Sao Paulo - USP

• Theresa Adrião, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)