Compensatory Effects of Early Childhood Education and Care on Preschool Mathematical Skills for Children From Disadvantaged Backgrounds?

• In Event: Explaining Family Effects on Early Child Development: Results Based on European Birth Cohort Studies

Abstract

Since 2013, the German government has massively expanded the provision of public childcare for children between the ages two and three (statutory right for institutional care). One aim of this policy measure is to compensate (or even balance out) skill inequalities by social background through institutional care by the time children enter school. The measure is encouraged by a growing body of literature –mainly based on Scandinavian or US intervention programs such as the ‘Perry Preschool Project’ (Heckman et al., 2010) – that stresses the potential of participation in early institutional education to stimulate children’s skill development for children from disadvantaged families (Magnuson, Meyers, Ruhm and Waldfogel, 2016). Shortcomings of these intervention programs are that only children from disadvantaged backgrounds participate in these studies and that these programs are based on high quality interventions. Thus, it is impossible to generalize these results for less targeted institutional care settings and to assess whether the positive long-term impacts are compensatory in a sense that the gap between disadvantaged and privileged children closes (or even disappears) or if children from privileged backgrounds would show developments in the same direction.
Focusing on Germany, this paper compares the distribution of mathematical skills at the age of five by social background and by duration of ECEC participation to assess the new policy measure. Germany is especially interesting as the decision for (e.g. financial reasons) and the quality of ECEC (usually intermediate quality) is not socially selective. In other words, no disparities in the quality of early institutional care can be found by social background (an exception are families with migration background; Lehrl, Kuger & Anders, 2014).
Using data of the infant cohort of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), a descriptive approach followed by regression analysis is applied to analyze the mathematical skills at the age of five. We utilize information on the duration of educational participation (entry into ECEC before vs. after the age of three) and on parental highest education (low education (n=31), medium education (n=796), and high education (n=1075)) by applying the dominance approach (Erikson, 1984). Children with migration background or those who entered institutional care before the age of one or who did not enter center-based care by age five are excluded from the analysis.
The empirical results show a hierarchical distribution of the mean math competencies by social background within both subsamples (children entering institutional care before vs. after the age of three). The differences between the social groups within each subsample are statistically significant, but the competence distributions do have big overlaps. Within subsamples by educational background, we do not find statistically significant differences between the children that entered ECEC early or late.
In sum, we do not find any effect of longer ECEC participation on mathematical skills for children aged five years for any of the social background groups. This indicates that it is not only the expansion of institutional care but rather the targeted high-quality care for children from disadvantaged backgrounds that might stimulate their skill development.

Author

• Gwendolin J. Blossfeld, University of Bamberg