Executive Summary: "Early Childhood Care and Education and Ethnic and Racial Gaps in Readiness at School Entry" by Katherine Magnuson and Jane Waldfogel

For children growing up in the U.S., early childhood care and education have become an increasingly common experience. The typical child entering kindergarten today has been in care of some form, and a growing share of new kindergartners has attended preschool or received center care. On average, preschool and center care develop young children's early academic skills through enriching activities and, sometimes, direct instruction. Yet the type and quality of the care children receive varies widely. Hispanic children, for example, are less likely, and black children are more likely, than white children to be enrolled in preschool or center care.

Do children's differing experiences in early childhood care and education affect racial and ethnic gaps in readiness at school entry? If so, how? Do they widen the gaps or narrow them? In this paper, we review research on the effects of childcare and education on young children's school readiness and look at racial and ethnic differences both in who receives early childhood care and education and in the amount and quality of care. All three types of evidence are important:  for early childhood care and education to influence racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness, the enrollment, intensity, or effects of these programs must differ by race or ethnicity.

In this chapter, we review the major types of early childhood care and education and their effects on school readiness. We then summarize trends in enrollment and in the quality of care for Hispanic, white, and black children. We conclude by considering how early childhood care and education might help to narrow racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness and discuss the implications for public policy.

We draw two conclusions about the role of early childhood care and education in closing racial and ethnic gaps in readiness at school entry. First, public funding of early education programs is probably already reducing ethnic and racial gaps. Large shares of Hispanic and black children are attending Head Start, and their participation in these programs may be reducing racial and ethnic gaps. As an upper bound, we estimate that the black-white test score gap at school entry might be as much as 26 percent larger in the absence of Head Start. Yet remaining questions about the extent to which Head Start provides lasting academic benefits for children, particularly children of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds, make conclusions about Head Start's role in reducing test score gaps speculative.

Second, the effects of incremental enrollment increases or quality improvements will depend on the specific changes adopted. For example, boosting the enrollment of Hispanic children in center care to meet or exceed the enrollment of white children would raise their test scores at school entry and narrow the gap between their scores and those of non-Hispanic white children. The overall effect could be quite large - because the gap in enrollment between Hispanic and white children is fairly large - but would depend on the quality of the preschools in which children were enrolled. Thus, our analysis affirms the wisdom of policies that specifically boost the enrollment of Hispanic children starting at age three, for example, by funding early education programs in Hispanic neighborhoods.

Likewise, improving the quality of center care would modestly boost children's test scores. Such improvements in quality would do more to close black-white school readiness gaps than Hispanic-white gaps, because more black children are now enrolled than Hispanic children. Yet these effects would be fairly small for both groups, because quality improvements would also benefit white children attending preschool.

What about simultaneous increases in children's preschool enrollment and quality? Universal enrollment in higher quality center care or preschools for low-income children could close a substantial portion of the racial and ethnic school readiness gaps, narrowing the black-white reading gap at school entry as much as 24 percent and the Hispanic-white reading gap as much as 36 percent. Such findings point to the potential role of policies that raise enrollment in Head Start, prekindergarten, and other preschool programs for children in and near poverty while substantially improving the quality of these programs.