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July/August 2006
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Prekindergarten—not just preschool—may
be the key to narrowing disparities in achievement by race, ethnicity,
and income
by Michael Sadowski
For decades now, educators, researchers, and policymakers
have puzzled over so-called achievement gaps—the disparities
in academic performance by race and ethnicity that consistently
show up on standardized tests, grade-point averages, and a host
of other measures. The No
Child Left Behind Act seeks to narrow these gaps by mandating
standards-based tests in elementary, middle, and high school, and
holding schools accountable for raising scores not just overall,
but among racial and ethnic subgroups. A growing body of research,
however, suggests that any serious effort to eliminate disparities
at the primary and secondary school levels must also address what
some researchers call the school readiness gap—the varia-tions
in academic performance and certain social skills among children
entering kindergarten and first grade.
Recent studies document specific dimensions of
this gap:
- On average, black, Hispanic, and American Indian
students demonstrate significantly lower reading, math, and vocabu-lary
skills at school entry than white and Asian American children.
- According to a seminal 1995 study by Betty
Hart and Todd Risley, 3-year-olds whose parents are professionals
have vocabularies that are 50 percent larger than those of children
from working-class families, and twice as large as chil-dren whose
families receive welfare.
- Using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s
Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study (ECLS), University of Cali-fornia researchers have shown
that fewer than 20 percent of California kindergartners from non-English
speaking backgrounds score above the 50th percentile on reading
and mathematics tests, a finding echoed in other states.
Many researchers today still cite an analysis
in the 1998 Brookings Institution book The
Black-White Test Score Gap, in which researchers
Meredith Phillips, James Crouse, and John Ralph estimate that about
half of the black-white test score gap at twelfth grade is attributable
to gaps that exist at first grade. Researchers have since made similar
claims about gaps existing among other ethnic groups. Analyzing
eight national studies of racial differences in school performance,
Phillips, Crouse, and Ralph pose a bold challenge: “We could
eliminate at least half, and probably more, of the black-white test
score gap at the end of twelfth grade by eliminating the differences
that exist before children enter first grade.”
Most researchers agree that socioeconomic status—closely
associated with race and ethnicity—is one of the strongest
predictors of low skills at school entry. In a 2002 study,
Valerie E. Lee and David T. Burkam of the University of Michigan
found that at kindergarten entry, cognitive scores of children in
the highest socioeconomic group were 60 percent higher than those
of the lowest group.
“Most if not all early gaps are due to economic
disadvantage,” says Katherine Magnuson, an assistant professor
of social work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who
has extensively studied the issue.
Magnuson and others have argued for broad-based
policies addressing parental poverty and education levels. But she
and her colleagues also believe that improving all children’s
access to high-quality prekindergarten programs could do a great
deal to narrow early learning disparities.
Preschool vs. Prekindergarten
Predictably, the likelihood that a child will
attend some kind of preschool is largely tied to socioeconomic status,
according to data from the National
Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University.
A 2004 NIEER analysis found that while 78 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds
from families with incomes over $100,000 attend preschool, less
than half of children from families with incomes below $50,000 do.
When looking at preschool attendance differences
by race and ethnicity, the picture is more complicated. Among Hispanics,
only 23 percent of 3-year-olds and 50 percent of 4-year-olds attend
preschool, according to national enrollment data. But thanks in
large part to Head Start and similar state-funded programs, African
American children now attend preschool in roughly the same percentages
as their white peers (about 45 percent of 3-year-olds and 70 percent
of 4-year-olds).
Still, attending preschool is no guarantee that
a child will receive adequate preparation for kindergarten and the
elementary grades, notes Jane Waldfogel, an economist at Columbia
University’s School of Social Work and author of the 2006
book What
Children Need. Waldfogel draws a clear distinction
between preschool—a term she uses to include everything from
private day care centers to Head Start—and prekindergarten
(preK) programs, which are usually connected with school districts
and are specifically intended to provide a bridge to school for
young children.
Based on studies she conducted using the Department
of Education’s ECLS data and other sources, Waldfogel theorizes
that one of the reasons why white and black children have different
levels of school readiness despite similar preschool attendance
rates is that they do not attend the same kinds of programs. While
she acknowledges the benefits of Head Start, she says there is evidence
that it does not foster the same level of school readiness as school-based
preK or the best-quality private programs, which serve predominantly
white children.
Patrick Galatowitsch, principal of Rolling Hills
Elementary School in Orlando, Fla., which serves predominantly African
American students, says he sees a real difference between students
entering kindergarten from preK programs, in which goals and expectations
are closely aligned with the district’s elementary schools,
and those who come from less structured settings.
“We see lots of incoming students with very
poor social, academic, and listening skills,” Galatowitsch
says. “Many of these children spend their prekindergarten
years … in settings which lack structure and tend to be more
play than learning environments. Thus the children learn that school
is play. This makes a difficult adjustment to the more structured
and academically focused kindergarten experience.” (See “Are
Schools Ready for Children?”)
Galatowitsch adds that children who enter kindergarten
directly from at-home care often need extensive remediation. “We
really see the benefit of a high quality preK experience,”
he says.
PreK and the Gap: Long-Lasting Effects
A 2004 study conducted by Magnuson, Waldfogel,
and Christopher Ruhm of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro,
paints a complex picture of the overall effects of prekindergarten
on school readiness. Like a host of researchers before them, Magnuson,
Ruhm, and Waldfogel found preK participation to be associated with
significantly higher reading and math skills at school entry, narrowing
gaps if not fully closing them. They also found, however, that these
advantages were long-lasting for children from low-income homes,
many of whom were African American, Latino, or from immigrant families.
“All children certainly seem to benefit
from attending prekindergarten, but these are the kids who seem
to benefit even more,” Waldfogel says. “Expanding access
to preK looks like a really promising way to go [to narrow school
readiness gaps].”
Waldfogel’s assessment was backed up this
spring by a NIEER study of children who attended full-day preK programs
in New Jersey. The study, which included 339 children randomly assigned
to either full-day or half-day preK programs, found that the children
who had attended full-day preK outperformed the others on literacy
and math assessments, and that these gains held through at least
the end of first grade. Moreover, the full-day preK programs were
found to narrow skill gaps between children from upper- and lower-income
homes.
Prekindergarten has enjoyed slow but steady growth
in recent years as more states and municipalities recognize the
benefits of free and equal access to early schooling. According
to the latest NIEER data, the number of U.S. children currently
served in state-funded prekindergarten now tops 800,000, about 17
percent of the nation’s 4-year-olds and significantly more
than the number of 4-year-olds attending Head Start. All but a dozen
states now offer some form of state-funded prekindergarten, and
eight states—Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts,
New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, and Tennessee—fund preK on a par
with K–12 schooling (based on spending per child enrolled),
according to NIEER statistics. Still, only one state, Oklahoma,
offers universal preK for all 4-year-olds, and quality varies widely
from state to state and from program to program, NIEER researchers
say.
A few school districts have begun to examine specifically
how prekindergarten can be integrated with children’s other
early learning experiences (see “School
District Meets the Gap Head On”). Orlando’s Rolling
Hills Elementary, for example, is one of a growing number of schools
to incorporate preK education with the early elementary grades as
part of a preK–3 continuum model, which aligns both academic
and social development goals under a common structure for children
in preschool through grade 3. Such alignment, some research has
shown, is associated with less “fade out” of children’s
skills from year to year and fewer behavior problems as children
move between systems with different goals and structures.
Magnuson, Ruhm, and Waldfogel, for example, found
that children who attended preschool (broadly defined) had more
behavior problems on average than those who didn’t, but this
pattern did not hold true among the children who attended preK programs
in the same schools where they attended kindergarten.
“We thought that was an important finding
in terms of alignment and continuity,” Waldfogel says. “[School-based]
prekindergarten gets them ready not just in reading and math, but
in the important component of behavior.”
The Individual Child
Considering issues of both access and continuity
seems essential if districts are going to undertake any serious
effort to close later achievement gaps. But it is also important
to remember that subgroup differences are merely averages, and that
there are high- and low-scoring students within all racial, ethnic,
and socioeconomic groups, cautions the University of Wisconsin’s
Magnuson.
False assumptions about minority children based
on skin color “or their last name,” Magnuson adds, can
lead to low expectations, which in turn can lead to tracking, only
serving to widen the very gaps educators are working to narrow.
“There’s so much variation within
all of these groups,” she says. “It’s critical
that we treat each child as an individual.”
Michael Sadowski is
an assistant professor of education in the Master of Arts in Teaching
Program at Bard College.
For Further Information
W.S. Barnett, J.T. Hustedt, K.B. Robin, and K.L.
Schulman. The State of Preschool: 2005 State Preschool Yearbook.
New Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research,
2005. Available online at nieer.org/yearbook
G.J. Duncan and K.A. Magnuson. “Can Family
Socioeconomic Resources Account for Racial and Ethnic Test Score
Gaps?” and Princeton University and The Brookings Institution.
“School Readiness: Closing Racial and Ethnic Gaps.”
The Future of Children, 15, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 35-54.
Available online at www.futureofchildren.org/pubs-info2825/pubs-info_show.htm?doc_id=255946
V.E. Lee and D.T. Burkam. Inequality
at the Starting Gate: Social Background Differences
in Achievement as Children Begin School. Washington, DC: Economic
Policy Institute, 2002.
K.A. Magnuson, C. Ruhm, and J. Waldfogel. “Does
Prekindergarten Improve School Preparation and Performance?”
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper #10452.
Cambridge, MA: NBER, April 2004. Available online at www.nber.org/papers/w10452
J. Waldfogel. What
Children Need. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006.
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