Access To Preschool Research Articles

ACCESS TO PRESCHOOL EDUCATION

ACCESS TO PRESCHOOL EDUCATION

Preventing criminal minds: Early education access and adult offending behavior

In this paper we estimate the impact of higher early preschool access on offending behavior later in time, exploiting a nationwide public preschool expansion that took place in Spain over the 1990s. This is the first study providing evidence on the relationship between preschool and crime using a large-scale, universal-access program rather than targeted initiatives reserved for disadvantaged children. Our identification strategy relies on the staggered implementation of the Spanish preschool expansion across regions and birth cohorts. We link the education data to a unique administrative crime dataset recording the offenses committed in the region of Catalonia over the period 2009–2014. On average, a 1 percentage point increase in preschool access among the age 0–3 population yields 1.6% fewer crime actions during youth and young adulthood. Larger effects on impulsive-crime categories provide suggestive evidence for non-cognitive-skills improvements being important drivers of our results.

Why is it so Hard to Send My Kid to a Good Preschool? The Shocking Truth about Early Education in America

In comparison with other industrialized nations, the United States is behind in early education. In addition, students from low-income families are less likely to enroll in preschool than their more privileged counterparts and more likely to attend low-quality programs. This situation harms American students and society. This essay documents the results of various studies showing that high-quality preschool benefits children. It also offers reasons for improving preschool access and quality in the United States and includes examples of strategies for achieving this goal.

The Effects of Universal Preschool on Grade Retention

Nationwide, the percentage of four-year-olds enrolled in state-supported preschool programs has more than doubled since the early 2000s as states dramatically increased their investments in early childhood education. Florida's Voluntary Pre-kindergarten Program (VPK), which began in 2005, has been a national leader with respect to preschool access. This paper provides the first evidence of the program's impacts. We measure the effect of VPK participation on the likelihood that children are retained at any point between kindergarten and third grade. Using an instrumental variables approach, we leverage local program expansion and detailed student-level data on eight cohorts of children, four of which were of preschool age in the years before VPK was implemented and four of which had access to VPK programs. The results indicate that VPK did not lead to changes in the likelihood that children complete the third grade without ever being retained. We do find, however, that VPK led to a change in the timing of retention. Specifically, the program led to a drop in the likelihood that children were retained during the kindergarten year, but this drop was counteracted by increases in retention in subsequent school years. Implications for policy are discussed.

How Variations in State Policies and Practices Impact Student Outcomes: What Principals and Professors Need to Know

American high school graduates’ readiness for higher education or employment in the global economy may depend on the state where they live. Since the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution makes education a state function, the 50 states and the District of Columbia vary significantly in their policies and practices for (a) preschool access and enrollment, (b) compulsory attendance, (c) instructional standards, (d) school funding, and (e) student outcomes. The variance in state requirements and student outcomes is a high-stakes equity issue. If every child is to be well educated and prepared to live productively in the 21st century, principals, professional associations, and allies can assess their own states’ policies and outcomes on these five criteria and determine where their advocacy may be needed to strengthen them.

Measurement Invariance of a School Readiness Screener for Use in Preschool and Kindergarten

ABSTRACTResearch Findings: Public policy has increasingly focused on expansion of preschool access for underserved students and systematic evaluation of preschool quality and students’ readiness for school. However, such evaluation is limited by a lack of thoroughly validated assessments for use with preschool populations. The present study examined the measurement and structural invariance of the Kindergarten Student Entrance Profile (KSEP) across kindergarten and prekindergarten groups to evaluate its potential use across developmental groups. Participants included 522 kindergarten and 548 prekindergarten students in central California. Invariance was tested by fitting a series of multiple-groups confirmatory factor analysis models with parameter constraints across groups. Results indicated that measurement and structural parameters of the KSEP were invariant across kindergarten and prekindergarten groups. Prekindergarten means on both Social–Emotional Readiness and Cognitive Readiness were significantly lower than kindergarten means. Practice or Policy: These results suggest that the KSEP may potentially be used with prekindergarten students to assess school readiness and inform intervention before kindergarten entry.

Inequality, preschool education and cognitive development in Ethiopia

This study used longitudinal data from the Young Lives Project in Ethiopia to examine the main factors relating to preschool access and their potential effects on cognitive performance of children aged five and eight years. The results show that only one quarter of the preschool-aged children have the opportunity to attend this vital stage of education, with significant disparities by family wealth, education and regional location. Regardless of its limited coverage, preschool attendance is shown to have statistically significant positive effects on cognitive performance, measured by receptive vocabulary and mathematics tests. The effects do not also seem to fade away at a later age, as the inequality in cognitive abilities at age five continues to exist at the age of eight. Furthermore, using mediation analyses, causal chains between family backgrounds and cognitive performance were thoroughly analyzed. Bootstrap results show that preschool attendance mediates about one third of the direct effects of family wealth, education and regional location on child cognitive performance. Nevertheless, despite the importance of preschool education, public investment in this area is currently very limited, with the private sector taking the key role and exacerbating the inequality that exists between children of the rich and poor. These findings thus emphasize the need for government involvement in the form of public investment to this subsector to increase access for all children and reduce future educational inequalities.

The effects of universal state pre-kindergarten on the child care sector: The case of Florida's voluntary pre-kindergarten program

Over the past two decades states have drastically increased their investments in pre-kindergarten programs. One major question about state investments in early childhood education programs is to what extent these initiatives create new child care options rather than crowd-out existing private child care options. We investigate this issue using Florida's universal pre-kindergarten program (VPK), a national leader with respect to preschool access, as a case study. Leveraging a 9-year panel of data we find that the introduction of Florida's VPK program expanded the size of the state's licensed child care market by 13% relative to the predicted market size. Using a synthetic control difference-in-difference approach we also show that VPK led to an increase in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in formal care but a drop in the percentage of 3-year-olds enrolled in these settings. Implications are discussed.

Experimental Impacts of a Preschool Intervention in Chile on Children's Language Outcomes: Moderation by Student Absenteeism

ABSTRACTDespite consensus that school absenteeism has negative consequences for children's life outcomes, until recently, little was known about the prevalence of absenteeism or its potential to moderate the impacts of school-based interventions. This study provides evidence from a randomized experiment of a preschool intervention involving 1,876 children in 64 schools in Chile that chronic absenteeism develops in preschool and is predicted by multiple risk factors for poor academic achievement. We find moreover that individual children's likelihood of absenteeism moderated the intervention's impact on children's language and literacy outcomes such that there were positive impacts of the intervention only for children with the lowest likelihood of absenteeism. Experimental evaluations of school-based interventions that do not take absenteeism into account may thus mask heterogeneous effects. In the context of policy pushes to expand early education and preschool access in the United States and globally, these moderation analyses may prove essential for appropriately interpreting the results of experimental studies of school-based interventions.

The inclusion of disadvantaged children in preschool programs: The children’s rights and social responsibility

Participation of at least 95% of children between the ages of 4 and the mandatory school age in high-quality preschool programs represents an important contribution to the achievement of the Europe 2020 strategy. Slovenia is not far from achieving this objective; however, if we consider participation in preschool programs from the perspective of the entire population of preschool children and the realisation of children?s rights, we note that nearly a quarter of children - among them (at least in the wider European area) the most disadvantaged - have not realised the right to education. We studied the awareness of the importance of ensuring access to preschool programs for all children on a representative sample of 106 Slovenian preschool principals by means of quantitative pedagogical research. The results show a high percentage of disadvantaged children in the preschool areas and in the preschools themselves; on the other hand, only a low percentage (only one-third) of preschools collect data about disadvantaged children and implement preschool programs for them; only one-fifth of preschools implement preschool programs for disadvantaged children. In order to act responsibly and enable all children the right to education, we must start devoting greater attention to identifying and including disadvantaged children in preschool programs.

Preschool attendance trends in Australia: Evidence from two sequential population cohorts

Participation in a preschool program in the year before starting school can promote children’s healthy development, and has the potential to reduce inequities in developmental outcomes for at-risk subpopulations. In Australia, boosting preschool attendance has emerged as a national policy priority. In this paper, we draw on data from the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) to describe preschool attendance in two sequential population cohorts, with preschool experiences in 2008 and 2011 reported retrospectively by teachers of children in their first year of school. Overall, findings show that the proportion of children attending preschool remained relatively stable between the two AEDC cohorts (in 2008, preschool attendance ranged from 57.0% to 85.8% across the states and territories, while in 2011, attendance ranged from 49.2% to 93.7%). At a subpopulation level, children from non-English speaking and Indigenous backgrounds and children living in disadvantaged communities all had substantially higher odds of not attending preschool in both 2008 and 2011. These findings highlight the need to maintain policy attention on efforts to further reduce barriers to preschool access for at-risk subpopulations, and the value of monitoring population trends in preschool attendance to better inform policy and service provision.

Inequality in Preschool Quality? Community-Level Disparities in Access to High-Quality Learning Environments

ABSTRACTIn recent years, unequal access to high-quality preschool has emerged as a growing public policy concern. Because of data limitations, it is notoriously difficult to measure disparities in access to early learning opportunities across communities and particularly challenging to quantify gaps in access to high-quality programs. Research Findings: Using unique data from Georgia’s universal prekindergarten program, this study provides empirical evidence of the relationship between community characteristics and the availability of high-quality preschool opportunities. We show that in Georgia, a national leader with respect to preschool access as well as quality, there are still meaningful differences in quality across communities. Low-income and high-minority communities offer state preschool classrooms that are rated significantly lower on a widely used and validated measure of classroom process quality. Practice or Policy: This process quality gap is troubling given the positive relationship between our process quality measure and children’s learning. Note that we do not see similar gaps in structural measures of quality, which are the aspects of quality more often regulated but are also weaker, inconsistent predictors of children’s learning. Implications for policy are discussed.

Countering the Politics of Class, Race, Gender, and Geography in Early Childhood Education

Mirroring many of the same social and geographic inequities present in the K-12 educational system, the promise of early childhood education has been unfulfilled for many young children and their families. Social norms and funding structures, including the lack of universal, publicly funded high-quality preschool offerings, have served to perpetuate gender, class, economic, and racial inequity. The outcomes of these inequities are clearly manifested in the politics of universal preschool access and quality. In this policy analysis, the author discusses disparities in preschool access and quality, critiques social and political barriers to equitable distribution of preschool resources, and suggests several strategies for countering the current politics of class, race, gender, and geography in early childhood education. Findings from this analysis suggest that in order to provide high-quality early childhood education for all children, policy makers and advocates must address structural and attitudinal inequities.

Did the No Child Left Behind Act Miss the Mark? Assessing the Potential Benefits From an Accountability System for Early Childhood Education

With growing evidence that human capital investment is more efficiently spent on younger children coupled with wide variation in preschool access across states, this article uses a neoliberal approach to examine the potential social costs and benefits that could accrue should the United States decide to implement a centralized preschool accountability system. Conceptual agency-based arguments that support implementing a preschool accountability system are compared and contrasted with conceptual arguments that oppose centralized accountability. In spite of credible conceptual arguments that local control over preschool access maximizes efficiency, we find the most support for an accountability system that enhances equity through universal access to preschool.