By Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
The kindergarten-readiness gap between low-income and high-income students has not closed in a generation, even though parents are more involved than ever in their children’s education and state-funded pre-K, nutrition programs, and prenatal care are more accessible now than in the late 1990s.
That is the major finding of a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, in which researchers Emma Garcia and Elaine Weiss analyzed kindergarten readiness data for socioeconomic groups in 1998 and 2010 to see if gaps in academic readiness have shrunk over time. The researchers found that large gaps for both reading and math performance between kindergarteners of high and low socioeconomic status were nearly the same in 1998 and 2010 even though there are more anti-poverty programs than ever before.
Posted on November 1, 2017