About the author
Sharon Ward is child care policy director and coordinator of advocacy for Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth and co-chair of Philadelphia Alliance for Better Child Care.
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Preschool works as ‘protective factor’
Local study finds link between formal child care experience and school success
by Sharon Ward
Do children entering Philadelphia public schools attend early childhood education programs? Does attendance at these programs make children more “school-ready” than their peers? Do the benefits last?
These are among the questions being asked in a long-term research study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, in partnership with the School District of Philadelphia. The answers so far are powerful new evidence of the importance of formal center-based preschool experiences to school success.
Researchers under the direction of John Fantuzzo, a professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, have been collecting and analyzing data about children entering the Philadelphia public schools to understand how early childhood experience affects children’s school performance, and whether attendance in these programs can help children who enter kindergarten at risk of school failure.
Each kindergarten family interviewed
A key tool in the study is a survey called the “Early Childhood Experiences Interview.” This is a questionnaire administered each fall by Philadelphia kindergarten teachers to a parent or guardian of each of the roughly 13,000 incoming students at the start of kindergarten. A key goal is to determine if children attended a child care or Head Start program, stayed in a more informal care setting, such as family day care or with a relative, or remained entirely with parents during their early years.
For a cohort of Philadelphia kindergartners, the data on preschool experiences and other information on the students’ background have been correlated with these young students’ subsequent school performance in kindergarten and beyond. Student attendance and school performance have now been monitored through third grade for this cohort of children.
“We treat kids when they enter kindergarten like they have no past, and they’ve been on the earth for five years. That’s a long time and they’ve had all kinds of experiences,” explained Donna Piekarski, Director of Early Childhood for the School District of Philadelphia, whose office oversees the kindergarten survey and has collaborated on the study.
The other key variables monitored by the Penn researchers are a list of family or environmental risks some children in the cohort have experienced, such as poverty, inadequate prenatal care, exposure to lead, homelessness, and maltreatment. Each of these is a factor that appears to have a negative impact on kindergarten readiness and academic outcomes.
These risk factors facing individual children in the study can be tracked thanks to a powerful local database known as KIDS – the Kids Integrated Data System. This system combines child health and welfare records from a number of city agencies such as the Health Department and Department of Human Services (DHS), while preserving the confidentiality of the children.
Many children in the Fantuzzo study entered school with multiple risks. Fully 30 percent of entering kindergarteners had three or more of these risk factors.
Formal programs show a benefit
Overall, 69 percent of children entering kindergarten in 2000 had attended a formal early childhood education program. More than 70 percent of African American and White children had attended these programs.
In comparison, Asian and Latino children were more likely to have spent the early years with parents or family members, with only 57 percent of Latino kindergartners and 46 percent of Asians having been part of a formal early childhood program.
Early findings from the study demonstrated that experience with early childhood education improved children’s school performance and attendance in kindergarten.
Children who entered kindergarten with formal early childhood experience started ahead of their peers and stayed there. These children scored better on academic measures, in social skills and in attendance.
As researchers followed the children and charted their progress through third grade, the results on the significance of preschool continued to be encouraging. Children with a formal preschool education continued to perform well, and preschool participation emerged as a protective factor, boosting children’s performance, in spite of the risk factors many students had faced.
Noting the prevalence of significant risk factors among Philadelphia kindergartners, Piekarski commented, “The first look at the data is disheartening, but then you see in third grade, for those who were in preschool, that the protective factor is still holding up for them. So it really points to getting children early and doing parent education.”
Study contributors say the findings have important implications for efforts to help poor children and children with risk factors improve their chances of succeeding in kindergarten and beyond.
Partnerships to support students
“It really has sparked lots of conversations,” said Piekarski. “Now we have partnerships with five DHS agencies that do parent training, and they’re exclusively working with our pregnant and parenting teens. They’re focusing their training on those issues.”
The School District and other community agencies have used the findings to direct additional early childhood education opportunities to Latino children and to work together to improve services to all Philadelphia children.
Other key policy implications cited by the researchers are the need to increase participation in formal preschool programs and to increase the quality of those programs.
“Dr. Fantuzzo’s research further confirms the vital importance of providing quality early childhood programs to children, starting at infancy, to prepare them for success in school and beyond” commented Alba Martinez, president of the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
“Using Dr. Fantuzzo’s findings, the School District and United Way have been working with early childhood and elementary school professionals to create a seamless transition for the thousands of Philadelphia children entering kindergarten each year, especially those most at risk,” Martinez added.