Even casual observers of the early childhood space likely noticed the massive push for expanding access to care and education programs over the last year, most notably with universal preschool options.
But a less splashy effort has been quietly underway for years: making kindergarten mandatory, enrolling the small percent of children holding out from the entry-level grade in order to boost their academic and emotional success.
Enrolling children in kindergarten is only legally required for families in 20 states, though every state makes it mandatory for public schools to offer the entry-level grade to students. Students in those states can also complete kindergarten in private school or through homeschool, instead.
The mandate has gained momentum slowly over several decades, most recently in California, Michigan, New Jersey and Louisiana, though only the latter two ultimately passed new laws.
But as state leaders grapple with dwindling funds for early childhood education, and with the spotlight shining on the more popular push for universal preschool, the future of mandatory kindergarten remains murky.
“I bet there are lawmakers who don’t even know it’s not mandatory,” says Hanna Melnick, director of early learning policy at the Learning Policy Institute.
The Push for Kindergarten
The purpose of kindergarten has shifted over the years. Once a haven for educational play, kindergarten classrooms now tend to emphasize academic work. Regardless, educators and experts use it as a way to identify whether students have the social-emotional, language and motor skills they need for elementary school. Plenty of studies prove that enrolling in kindergarten reaps long-term rewards, both academically and socially, particularly for lower-income and minority students.
Those benefits are often mentioned by lawmakers looking to make kindergarten mandatory.
For example, Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in 2024 that mandatory kindergarten could decrease student absenteeism in addition to increasing student achievement. That measure failed to pass, though the state instead launched its expansive PreK for All initiative that same year.
“Any time a group of kids are being underserved, it’s not good for the kid or family,” Christina Weiland, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan, says.
“But for the teacher, if students are placed in first grade and they are behind, it places more demand on teachers on how to get every kid to the same place.”
Even states without technically mandated kindergarten have workarounds. Florida, for example, does not mandate kindergarten for all students, but for a student to enroll in a public school first-grade classroom, having completed kindergarten is a prerequisite. New Jersey leaves it up to individual school districts, and some require completing the grade while others do not.
Alabama in 2024 passed legislation requiring children who did not attend kindergarten to pass the “First Grade Readiness Assessment” in order to enroll directly into first grade. The test is being administered for the first time this school year. Those who do not pass will be required to attend kindergarten.
“This new law will ensure students are truly prepared to enter the first grade,” Alabama state representative Pebblin Warren, who has pushed for this legislation since 2019, said in a statement. She added that she hoped it would help even the playing field for students and their teachers, and help with future school retention.
Comparing Costs
California’s policy history offers a case study about the push and pull between investing in mandatory kindergarten versus other public early learning programs.
In California, 5 percent of families do not enroll their children into kindergarten. That adds up to about 200,000 kids sitting out.
In 2024, a bill was put forth to legally mandate students attend kindergarten before entering first grade. As of now, 6-year-olds must attend school, and it is up to parents whether to enroll them in kindergarten or first grade.
California’s proposal made it through the state House and Senate before Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, pointing toward the $268 million it would cost annually as too high a price tag.
However, starting in the 2022-2023 school year, similarly to in Michigan, Newsom approved California’s transitional kindergarten program, which sought to increase access to public education programs for 4-year-olds. In the most recent budget, Newsom proposed $1.8 billion in additional funding for expanding the state’s transitional kindergarten program, which effectively serves as universal pre-K.
Financial cost is one big factor as officials weigh which kinds of early learning programs to support. Sometimes the pain of big upfront bills seem to outweigh the potential longer-term payoff for society, says Emma Garcia, a principal researcher at the Learning Policy Institute.
“I feel like sometimes the argument used against it is, ‘Oh, it costs a lot and the effects fade,” she says. “But it’s what society gains from the early investment.”
There’s also the political “costs” of passing new regulations mandating participation in school.
“Offering a service tends to be fairly popular; requiring it tends to be less so,” Sarah Novicoff, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, says. “It’s all about questions of priorities, about what the state particularly thinks will make change in the most impactful way and there’s trade-offs to all these things.”
Today’s political climate favors “parental choice,” both in the ideological sense of parents knowing what is best for their children, and in the literal sense via school vouchers.
“Family choice has always been embedded in any child care policy,” Jade Jenkins, an associate professor of education at the University of California Irvine who has studied the effects of mandatory kindergarten since 2015. “And with the conservative sentiment dominating the landscape these days, which is parental choice and the push toward educational choice for school-aged children, nationalizing or any kind of early childhood educational mandates are further off.”
It’s not obvious that even families who do participate in kindergarten always value it fully, at least according to attendance records. According to the American Enterprise Institute, 1 in 3 California kindergarten students were chronically absent, or missed 10 percent or more of a school year.
If families put less stock in kindergarten, it might be because of the reality that, in many places, only half-day programs are available. According to the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit tracking education policy, only 16 states and Washington D.C. require schools to offer all-day kindergarten options, with the remainder mandating half-day offerings.
Without that all-day offering, many parents are left in the lurch for half of the work day.
“It’s not just about parent choice: They offer half day, and you often have to pay for full day [care], which is a real access problem where policies could make a difference,” Weiland says. “A push toward offering full day is probably more meaningful, at least on the equity side.”
Potential Wins and Roadblocks
It turns out that the two policy ideas — offering universal pre-K and mandating kindergarten — may lead to the same place. Some experts posit that expanded pre-K could help place students on the elementary public school track earlier.
After all, Weiland says, “I’ve never heard of doing universal pre-K and then not kindergarten; that’s not too much of a common path, at least.”
That seems especially likely in areas like Washington, D.C., and Boston, where universal preschool programs are embedded in public school settings (as opposed to offered at standalone centers or in-home programs).
“In a mixed-delivery system, we have no reason to believe this would make me stay in public school, but in places like Boston where it’s highly regarded in the public schools, we have found they are somewhat more likely to stay in public schools,” Jenkins says.
And that could help in a small way with the enrollment issues schools have encountered since the pandemic. While school enrollment rates for 5-year-olds are high — 84 percent across the country, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — they began dipping postpandemic, down 6 percent for 5-year-olds from 2019 to 2021.
These days, education leaders are also worried about longer-term demographic and birth rate changes primed to hurt schools, such as “the fertility cliff and the enrollment cliff,” Jenkins says. For institutions that are funded based on a per-pupil method of calculation, that means fewer dollars.
Weiland pointed toward states like Vermont, Maine and West Virginia that have all been hit particularly hard with enrollment dips and had to close down schools.
“We have these school enrollment crises, where the birth cohorts are getting smaller, and it doesn’t make great financial sense for kindergarten classrooms to go under-enrolled,” she says. “That could have some political momentum to increase enrollment numbers.”
For schools trying to stay open, every additional kindergartener helps.
