Influence of Early Childhood Services and Neighborhood Disadvantage on Kindergartners' School Readiness: Integrated Data System (IDS) Approach

Background/Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify the influence of early childhood services and neighborhood disadvantage on kindergartners’ school readiness. Early exposure to stressful life circumstances and less than optimal early learning environments adversely influence cognitive and social-emotional development. While early experiences in childhood are vitally important to predict kindergarten readiness, research has been limited by the absence of integrated, longitudinal data covering life history from birth. This study uses an Integrated Data System (IDS) to explore the potentially protective effect of early childhood service receipt on school readiness after controlling for adverse early childhood experiences. This study addresses pressing developmental, environmental, and educational research questions concerning school readiness and later academic success.

Method:

Sample and Integrated Data System (IDS). 

Children entering kindergarten in the Cleveland, Ohio Metropolitan School District (CMSD) between 2007 and 2010 with a valid Kindergarten Readiness Assessment-Literacy (KRA-L) score were selected for this analysis (N=9,769). Using an IDS, multiple data sources containing individual-level records for each child were linked. These included administrative records following children from birth to kindergarten (e.g., birth certificates, public services, child maltreatment, child care subsidy, pre-school attendance, and public school). Additionally, neighborhood-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS, 2009) were matched to each child’s census tract to determine the degree of neighborhood disadvantage in which they lived. 

Measures and Analysis. 

Due to the clustered nature of the data, where children were nested within census tracts, multi-level modeling, correcting for spatial autocorrelation, was used to estimate children’s KRA-L scores (M=16.0, SD=6.9) using early childhood service experiences and neighborhood disadvantage after controlling for individual and family level covariates. At a neighborhood-level, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) summarized six social-economic items and produced one standardized score for each census tract to measure the level of neighborhood disadvantage.

Results: Approximately 11% of children received early intervention home visiting, 22.5% participated in on-going home vising, and 31.3% received a welcome newborn home visit. Head Start and public pre-school enrollment were 9.4% and 18.7%, respectively. At the individual-level, the length of time spent living in poverty (in months between birth and kindergarten entry), child maltreatment, and being born to a mother without a high school diploma were associated with decreased KRA-L scores (p<.05). Compared to children who did not participate in Head Start or public pre-school, enrollment in these early education programs was related to higher kindergarten preparedness (p<.05). Finally, at a neighborhood-level, children’s KRA-L score were negatively associated with neighborhood disadvantage (p<.05).

Conclusions and Implications:  This study lends support for publicly-funded early childhood programs designed to improve school readiness among all children particularly those who would otherwise be underprepared for kindergarten. The positive association between pre-school enrollment and school readiness reported here contributes to a sizable body of literature citing the benefits of high-quality early learning experiences for child mortality, adolescent and adult physical and mental health, future educational attainment, economic self-sufficiency, and crime prevention. Additionally, the IDS approach is powerful tool for social work researchers answering longitudinal research questions with applicability to community practice.