As a longtime advocate and TK-12 Policy Director at EdTrust-West, I looked forward to the Advancing Equity in Transitional Kindergarten for Black Families session at the 2024 Ed Equity Forum. I knew it would be a good session and hoped it would provide important insights for the field as California continues implementing transitional kindergarten (TK). What came as a welcome surprise, however, was how the session ended up providing a rare space for the frank conversations that I know we need as both a policy advocate and Black parent myself. In the months since the Ed Equity Forum, my reflections have led me to a few important takeaways:
Black families’ negative experiences with school systems are contributing to them feeling wary of enrolling in transitional kindergarten.
Despite the benefits of early education, the state’s new transitional kindergarten roll out is struggling, particularly for Black families. In the Ed Equity Forum session, Yolanda Beckles, President and CEO of The Knowledge Shop and Cedric Nelms, Community Organizer for the Black Parents Network at Innovate Public Schools shared their experiences, both as Black parents and as parent leaders in California’s school system and providing support to their children and other parents of Black children. Speaking to the hostilities they have witnessed Black children experience in schools and the significant effort Black parents must put in to building relationships with educators to both defend their children and to ensure their children are receiving a fair and high-quality education, the session highlighted a disheartening truth. Black families are avoiding transitional kindergarten altogether due to the observations they’ve made about the over disciplining, developmentally inappropriate treatment, and lack of culturally and linguistically affirming approaches to supporting our youngest learners.
Spaces where Black parents can share their truths and be affirmed are increasingly necessary and disappointingly rare.
By speaking to their experiences authentically and vulnerably, the presenters at the Ed Equity Forum created a sense of trust that set the stage for all participants in the session to engage in authentic truth telling. Parents in attendance were able to not only share their own experiences as Black parents, but to be in a space that affirmed those experiences through mutual support. I’ve been in this field for over a decade, attended countless conference sessions and meetings, and this was one of the very few spaces that provided the necessary conditions for a frank, authentic conversation. Often when we talk about data in education equity, we’re reminded that we “can’t fix what we can’t see”. The same applies to the data that comes from the lived experiences of Black parents and families. School districts can learn from these experiences and more intentionally engage Black TK parents by bringing in facilitators from trusted, Black-serving community-based organizations to hold conversations, conduct focus groups, and consult on effective outreach strategies to inform their efforts to tailor TK programs to the specific needs of Black families. If school districts do not listen – and respond – to the ways Black families are experiencing schools, efforts like transitional kindergarten will fail.
Transitional Kindergarten won’t be a success in California unless school districts address the anti-Blackness that families grapple with.
Participants in the Ed Equity Forum session shared so many common experiences, from having to constantly expose the types of biases and lack of cultural awareness they experience with teachers, to the strategies they use to mitigate the negative impacts on Black children that come from the lack of instructional training and support from the very schools those children attend. To address these experiences, both the state and school districts must focus their efforts on bringing more early childhood education (ECE) professionals as TK lead teachers. Current ECE professionals are predominantly women of color and are more likely to have the cultural competency necessary to creating affirming and nurturing environments for Black four-year-olds. Principals must also build their capacity to be able to provide instructional guidance and support to TK teachers in providing developmentally and culturally responsive instruction.
As a Black parent of young children, I experienced the same level of affirmation and mutual support as other participants in the session. Hearing others’ experiences that so closely mirrored my own was validating, supportive, and galvanizing. And it has reaffirmed my own commitment to both ensuring our EdTrust-West team creates more spaces like these, and that as advocates, we push for such spaces as integral parts of policy development and implementation. We need truly transformative education systems, where schools show they care about Black children as much as their parents do. Conversations like the one at the Ed Equity Forum’s Advancing Equity in Transitional Kindergarten for Black Families session are crucial for making those systems come to fruition.
There are many things school, district, higher education, and state education leaders can do to create more affirming environments for Black families, where Black children can thrive in transitional kindergarten.
School and District Leaders:
- Gain a foundational understanding in serving Black young children and families by viewing and sharing the California Department of Education’s community-of-practice webinar series, Centering and Cultivating Black Voices to Strengthen P-3 Alignment, to LEA administrators and TK educators .
- Engage Black families and community members when selecting and implementing TK curriculum, in alignment with the Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations (PTKLF) to ensure developmentally appropriate classrooms, culturally and linguistically affirming teaching practices, and preschool through third grade alignment.
- Provide professional development opportunities for local education agency (LEA) administrators and educators to foster partnerships between LEAs and ECE providers who are trusted in the Black community to learn from their wealth of knowledge in teaching young Black children. Districts should also build school administrator capacity to provide instructional guidance and support to TK teachers.
- Address financial barriers for current ECE professionals and new Black teacher candidates who want to be in TK classrooms by providing stipends for clinical practice hours and covering teacher preparation program tuition so that we can recruit and retain the teachers we need.
State and Higher Education Leaders:
- Eliminate barriers for current ECE professionals, who are predominantly women of color, to earn the PK-3 ECE Specialist credential that will allow them to teach TK.
