W. Steven Barnett on a targeted and universal early childhood policy

As Michael Sadowski makes clear in "The School Readiness Gap", disparities in knowledge and skills among ethnic groups and between rich and poor are substantial even before children enter kindergarten. In a soon-to-be-published paper, Clive Belfield and I assess the potential for preschool interventions to reduce these disparities. Although the disparities are often portrayed as sharp divisions, they are more accurately depicted as continuous and remarkably linear relationships with income. Poor children are 18 months behind the median-income child on a variety of skills at kindergarten entry, but the median-income child is equally far behind children in the top income quintile at school entry. For those who care about the optimal development of all children, this is a much broader problem than just one of children in poverty, though the lower the child’s income, the more serious the deficits. Thus, early childhood policies that address this problem most fully will seek to assist all children and will assist those children with the greatest needs the most.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with current early childhood policies. Although current policies increase access to preschool education programs to some extent, they miss far too many children in poverty. Participation rates remain extremely low for Latino children, in particular, even though experience in New Jersey shows that when they are offered access to high quality public programs they participate at high rates. Federal child care policy emphasizes numbers served, but pays little regard to educational quality and child development. Head Start and state prekindergarten programs explicitly focus on child development, though state prekindergarten programs vary greatly in their standards and quality. Despite the research cited by Sadowski, based on the larger body of research I would caution against concluding that Head Start is less effective than state prekindergarten programs on average. I suspect they differ little on average in their effects on children’s cognitive abilities, and some state prekindergarten programs clearly are less well designed to support child development than is Head Start. (As an aside, I would also caution against accepting the false dichotomy between play and learning.)

If early childhood policies are to have maximum impact on disparities, more intensive and extensive services are required. Some believe that these should be tightly targeted to children in poverty. My own view is that this approach has been tried for 40 years, and it doesn’t work very well. There are practical problems (poor children benefit from education with more advantaged peers, targeting is imperfect, etc.) and political problems (programs for the poor are viewed as charity, limiting quality and coverage). If programs are open to all children, more children in poverty will get better services. However, it will be necessary to deliver the most intensive services to children with the greatest needs, if there is to be substantial impact on achievement disparities. This requires a hybrid policy that is targeted and universal. New Jersey’s intensive Abbott preschools in the context of a larger Early Childhood Program Aid program are one example. The French approach to providing more resources to preschool programs in Educational Priority Zones is another.

W. Steven Barnett is director of the National Institute of Early Education Research.