In his fascinating book, Our Kids, that tracks the impact of growing income inequality on children, Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam poses this question: “Do schools in America today tend to widen the growing gaps between have and have-not kids, do they reduce those gaps, or do they have little effect either way?” (p. 160)

Putnam answers his own question by reporting ground breaking research studies released five years ago by Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon: “In a landmark study, the Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon demonstrated a widening class gap in both math and reading test scores among American kids in recent decades… He summarizes his key finding succinctly: ‘The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30-40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five year earlier.’ … Strikingly, Reardon’s analysis also suggests that schools themselves aren’t creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and, he reports, does not grow appreciably as children progress through school.” (pp. 160-162)  (This blog has reported Reardon’s research on the income inequality achievement gap here.)

At the end of August, Sean Reardon released new, very preliminary research that is encouraging: the early-childhood (pre-school) achievement gap has begun to narrow. In a NY Times column, Reardon explains: “(H)ere is some good news about educational inequality…. Children entering kindergarten today are more equally prepared than they were in the late 1990s. We know this from information collected over the last two decades by the National Center for Education Statistics. In the fall of 1998 and again in 2010, the N.C.E.S. sent early childhood assessors to roughly 1000 public and private kindergartens across the United States. They sat down one-on-one with 15-25 children in each school to measure their reading and math skills. They asked children to identify shapes and colors, to count, to identify letters and to sound out words. They also surveyed parents to learn about the children’s experiences before entering kindergarten… It’s worth noting that the gap in school readiness narrowed because of relatively rapid improvements in the skills of low-income children, not because the skills of children from high-income families declined.”

Reardon and colleagues used the N.C.E.S. data to study what he calls the ‘school readiness gap.’  Reardon concludes: “From 1998 to 2010, the school readiness gap narrowed by 10 percent in math and 16 percent in reading. The gaps that remain are still vast.” In an interview with Eric Westervelt for National Public Radio, Reardon clarifies that there is still much work to do.  The gaps in school readiness remain large: “The low-income kids are coming in about six to nine months in readiness behind the high-income kids still… It’s narrowing at a measurable rate.  But it’s not narrowing fast enough…”

What is causing the school-readiness gap to narrow? In his NY Times column, Reardon speculates that increased enrollment in high quality preschools is surely part of the answer: “One possibility is that school readiness gaps have narrowed because it is easier now for poor families to find high-quality, publicly funded preschool programs for their children. Today 29 percent of 4-year-olds are enrolled in state-funded preschools, up from 14 percent in 2002.”

Reardon believes growing enrollment in pre-kindergarten programs is not the only explanation, however: “Tracking the experiences of young children over time, we found that both rich and poor children today have more books and read with their parents more often than they did in the ’90s. They are far more likely to have computers, internet access and computer games focused on reading and math skills. Their parents are more likely to spend time with them, taking them to the library or doing activities at home.”

He adds that our growing understanding of the importance for child development of the very early years is reflected in the data: “We suspect that in part this happened because of the widespread diffusion of a single powerful idea: that the first few years of a child’s life are the most consequential for cognitive development. This idea is commonplace today….”

In his interview with NPR, Reardon explains that the new findings are very preliminary: “I think you could think of this study as a starting point. I mean, it certainly shows that it’s possible for us to make progress on these achievement gaps even in a time of rising income inequality, but it raises as many questions as it answers in this regard. That is, what is it about some places that showed more narrowing than other places? What can we provide in communities? What can we do to support families? What kind of preschool environments are going to be most successful for kids? We have a lot to learn yet about how to… optimize opportunity for low-income students.”