Early Education and Care as a Mechanism to Ameliorate Socioeconomic Disparities in School Readiness Skills

Some scholars and policy-makers have recently emphasized the potential of early education and care (EEC) programs as a strategy for improving the life opportunities of disadvantaged children. Although some high-profile programs, such as the Perry Preschool Project, have been shown to have substantial positive impacts on long-term outcomes, there are still many unanswered questions about the nature and value of EEC programs in general. Are there barriers to participation that disproportionately affect more socioeconomically disadvantaged children? Does participation in EEC programs reduce socioeconomic disparities in cognitive or behavioral outcomes? Or does participation in some programs, but not others, exacerbate these socioeconomic differences?

Professors Rebekah Levine Coley at Boston College and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal at the University of Pittsburgh are poised to address these questions using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Coley and Votruba-Drzal are interested in addressing two main issues within the scope of this project. The first is to explore SES differences in children’s access to EEC programs, identify the factors that help explain those differences, and to see whether differences in access contribute to differences in school readiness skills. The second focus of the project is to better understand how the actual EEC experiences contribute to socioeconomic differences in children’s school readiness skills.

They will begin by examining whether economic, social, and policy barriers differentially limit access to EEC experiences, and explore the implications of differential access for socioeconomic disparities in cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes. These analyses start with questions such as whether lower-SES children have a different likelihood of EEC use, especially EEC programs shown to increase children’s school readiness. They ask, for example, whether public programs such as Head Start, subsidies, and public pre-K increase disadvantaged families’ access to developmentally supportive EEC. In the final step of these analyses, they intend to assess how differential use of promotive EEC helps to explain SES differences in school readiness. They then build on these initial models of differential use to better understand the role that EEC experiences play in exacerbating or moderating the association between socioeconomic status and school readiness skills.