Helping All Children Become Kindergarten-Ready

Children growing up in poverty have the most to gain from Early Childhood Education Centers (ECECs), but they have the lowest enrollment rates. In the U.S., only 48% of children from low-income households are considered kindergarten-ready at entry compared to 75% of their higher-income counterparts.

Unfortunately, gaps in kindergarten readiness can translate into academic achievement gaps throughout a child’s life. Research shows that enrollment in an ECEC can improve kindergarten readiness, but early childhood education in the U.S. is expensive. Many families, especially low-income ones, are unable to afford it.

Further, when low-income children attend early childhood education centers, the centers are typically of lower quality than the ones attended by higher-income children. Even when low-income children can attend a high-quality ECEC, these centers may not be prepared to fulfill their more complex needs.

This report describes how ECECs can effectively improve kindergarten readiness for all children, especially low-income ones. Read the key takeaways below or download the full report.

View children within the context of their environment

To have the greatest impact, ECECs need to view the children they serve within the context of their environment. Kindergarten readiness is often defined by the developmental abilities of individual children (e.g., cognitive skills, social-emotional skills). However, these skills do not develop in isolation. Receiving nurturing and stimulating care either at home and/or at an ECEC is crucial to the development of these skills. Simultaneously experiencing chronic stressors (e.g., severe poverty, abuse, parental mental health issues) can impede brain development and put children at risk of lifelong issues with learning, behavior, and health.

Kindergarten readiness is mainly determined by environmental factors. As is described in this report, to have the greatest impact on kindergarten readiness, early childhood education centers should focus on the child’s individual skills, their school environment, their family, and their wider community.

Traditional screening methods are lacking

Identifying children at risk of not being kindergarten-ready is crucial, but traditional screening methods are lacking. As discussed above, intense stressors in early childhood, also called adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) put children at risk of not being kindergarten-ready. ECECs can help mitigate risk factors, but they first need to identify which children are at the highest risk.

ACEs screeners are often used in educational settings to identify how many ACEs a child has experienced, but these screeners carry some risks. Giving school staff knowledge of a child’s ACE score can cause stigma and a sense that children with high ACE scores are “doomed.” Further, the heavy content of these assessments can cause distress for children, families, and staff.

Finally, ACE scores either stay the same or increase throughout a child’s life, so they are not useful measures of fluctuations in overall mental well-being. An alternative option is to use screeners that focus on overall well-being and/or the presence of resilience factors which provide a more positive perspective and room for improvement.

Focus on social-emotional and cognitive skill-building

To reliably improve kindergarten readiness, focus on social-emotional and cognitive skill-building. Pre-academic skills such as counting and knowing the alphabet can give children a temporary boost in academic achievement at kindergarten entry, but once their peers learn these basic skills, these children no longer show academic advantages. Instead of teaching academic skills directly, ECECs should focus on building a strong foundation of skills that children will need to learn successfully in school.

Children need social-emotional skills to behave well in class and form relationships with teachers and peers. Children also need cognitive skills to maintain their attention for extended periods and to incorporate new information. Research shows that ECECs can successfully build these skills through direct skills-based instruction.

Not all factors have equal impact

Research shows structural factors are crucial to quality ECECs, but not all factors have equal impact. Experts believe that structural factors, including child-to-staff ratio, group size, and staff qualifications influence the quality of children’s experiences in the ECEC environment. For the most part, research supports this claim. Smaller child-to-staff ratios and smaller overall group sizes do have a significant impact on how much attention children receive in a group setting.

However, the evidence on staff qualifications is more mixed, as evidence shows that increased educational attainment does not lead to overall improvements in ECEC quality. The reasons for this are unclear, but it may be related to evidence that early childhood education teachers with bachelor’s degrees are more dissatisfied with their jobs. This can lead to high rates of turnover and burnout which may cancel out improvements in teaching quality. This contradictory evidence illustrates how, while important, the impact of structural factors on overall quality can be difficult to predict.

Support children and their families outside of school

Children’s family and home environment are the most important factors in kindergarten readiness—successful programs support children and their families outside of school. As we have discussed, poverty is a major risk factor for kindergarten readiness. Programs that alleviate the effects of poverty by providing free food, medical and dental services, and case management services can directly improve children’s outcomes. Parental behavior also plays a major role in children’s cognitive and social development.

Parenting and discipline styles influence social-emotional development and home learning behaviors such as parent-child reading impact cognitive development. Some programs have been successful in improving parental behavior through education and home-visiting programs. However, these programs often struggle to gain and maintain high participation rates and are not always effective. Potential solutions include designing less intensive programs and increasing efforts dedicated to parent outreach.

Focus on quality testing and community outreach when expanding sites

It is difficult for high-quality ECECs to maintain that quality when expanding across sites, but rigorous quality testing and ongoing community outreach efforts can help. All organizations face threats to quality when expanding because they inevitably lose some oversight when delegating responsibilities to new people at new sites. Low quality at one site can be a serious problem because it can damage the reputation of the larger organization. ECECs have even more complex barriers to expansion than other organizations.

One reason for this is that educating is a nuanced and complex task that is difficult to standardize and replicate. Rigorous quality control systems such as data collection and intensive observation can help with quality control. A further barrier is that ECECs with a family and/or community involvement program will need to adapt their programs to each new community they expand into for these programs to be successful. This requires continuous community outreach and being willing to adapt programs in response to community feedback.