Background: Socioeconomic gaps in children's academic and social skills are large upon Kindergarten entry (von Hippel, Workman, and Downey 2018; Reardon 2011; Reardon and Portilla 2016). Preschool programs may yield particularly large benefits to low-income students and racially minoritized groups and may be promising for reducing inequalities…

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites. To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million…

Research Findings: The amount of time and type of program that children experience in early childhood settings may be associated with children's kindergarten-entry skills, or kindergarten readiness. Taking a person-centered perspective, in the present study, we examined the extent to which reliable and unique profiles of early childhood…

The majority of students in Maryland spent at least a portion of the last school year learning virtually, from public prekindergarten through college. Throughout the year, jurisdictions made individual decisions to allow for a gradual return to in-person school in a variety of ways. Lessons learned from the earliest stages of the pandemic made it…

This study documents gaps in kindergarten and first-grade science achievement by family income and explores the degree to which such gaps can be accounted for by student race/ethnicity, out-of-school activities, parental education, and school fixed effects. In doing so, it expands on prior research that documents disparate rates of science…

Theory and limited research indicate that race and socioeconomic status (SES) interact dynamically to shape children's developmental contexts and academic achievement, but little scholarship examines how race and SES intersect to shape Black-White achievement gaps across development. We used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study,…

COVID-19 has brought chaotic change to early education. Most of the nation's 5 million 3- to 5-year-olds attending preschool classrooms had their attendance cut short in March 2020. Preschool-age children in family day care or at home with parents and other family members had their daily routines disrupted. Parents now often work from home and…

In Maryland, one way children's wellbeing is measured is by looking at the data from the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA). While the data can illustrate how children perform on various indicators across literacy, math, social-emotional development and physical well-being, it's really a reflection of the "readiness" of Maryland…

This appendix provides additional details on the underlying data, statistical models, and results presented in the main report. We first describe how we created each control and outcome variable and its source (e.g., parent report), followed by an overview of the logistic regression models employed, and then provide the full set of results from…

Minnesota has a persistent and substantial student achievement gap based on race and family income. There are also substantial achievement gaps between native English speakers and English learners (Minnesota Compass, n.d.). In 2019, Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood (SPPN) worked with Hmong American Partnership (HAP) and Saint Paul Public Schools…

The Big Lift™ (Big Lift) is a preschool-third-grade collective impact initiative in San Mateo County, California. The initiative is a partnership of the County of San Mateo, San Mateo County Office of Education, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Launched in 2012, the initiative aims to boost children's reading proficiency by third grade…

There is a virtual consensus regarding the types of language processes, interactions, and material supports that are central for young children to become proficient readers and writers (Shanahan et al., 2008). In this study, we examine these supports in both home and school contexts during children's critical transitional kindergarten year.…

For more than 25 years, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has used the data-based advocacy of KIDS COUNT to raise the visibility of children's issues and to inform decision making at the state and local levels. Building on this work and the efforts of other groups nationwide that are using indicator analysis to contribute to positive change for…

The 2020 Census risks undercounting thousands of young Colorado children, depriving communities of federal funding and political representation for the next decade. Children under age 5 are more likely to be missed by the census than any other age group, with children of color, non-English speakers, and kids living in high poverty communities at…

A substantial body of research establishes that high quality preschool education can enhance cognitive and social development with long-term benefits for later success in school, the economy, and society more broadly. Such programs have been found to have particularly large benefits for children who are economically disadvantaged. Such children…