There definitely does seem to be a learning curve involved here. They try to teach DK to K standards because there are no other standards. Which is just unrealistic, especially as you start accepting nearly newly 4 year olds.
Doesn't matter, it's just good writing to spell out acronyms initially. At the very least, it also helps everyone else reading this to not waste their collective minutes googling uncommon acronyms when the commenter could simply spend an extra few seconds spelling them out initially.
Transitional kindergarten. Basically staying a year early around 4.
If on the other hand people are finding that childcare costs exceed their wages, then what reason is there to believe that the government will be able to buy childcare so cheaply?
There's an argument to be made that childcare should be provided for free even at a loss. But of all the public good the government could provision, "keep your shitty job even when it doesn't make economic sense to do so" is a weird one. It's LARPing productivity at that point.
We could always consider it a public good. $35 billion a year is the rough estimated cost I've found to provide universal pre-k (ages 3-5), with people leaving the workforce costing $155billion elsewhere in the thread. We spend at minimum $880 billion on the military. Seems like a no brainer to me.