Ready or Not? State Policy Choices, Family Resources, and Children’s School Readiness.

• In Event: Supporting Children, Youth, and Families: The Social Safety Net and Student Experiences

Abstract

Background: Young children’s ability to fully benefit from formal schooling is contingent on the skills with which they enter school. Unfortunately, gaps in school readiness along lines of race and socioeconomic status are common. The policy response to these gaps in the United States has prioritized increasing access to high-quality early care and education through programs such as Head Start and publicly funded prekindergarten. Other developed countries instead often prioritize broader economic supports for lower-income families with young children, which may better support a more holistic view of school readiness than the education programs in the US. To some extent, this policy variation is replicated within the US due to differences in state economic policy for low-income individuals and families; however, little research has explored whether variation in such economic policies at the state level is related to school readiness skills.

Purpose: The goal of this research is to examine the extent to which state economic policy for families with young children, which encompasses a broad range of policies such as the minimum wage, paid family leave, child care subsidy access, and access to federal programs such as SNAP and WIC, is associated with children’s school readiness skills across multiple domains.

Data & Methods: The data for this project come from two key sources. To measure state economic policy generosity, I rely on the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center’s Policy Impact Calculator (PIC), which estimates the resources available to a model family across all fifty states while accounting for the policy variation described above. I then link these data to the National Survey of Children’s Health’s (NSCH) Healthy and Ready to Learn index which uses parent report to assess children’s school readiness across five domains. My main analysis consists of a set of logistic regressions that estimate the relationship between state policy generosity, i.e. the resources available to a family, and the probability of a child being “on track” across readiness domains.

Results: Analyzing data from the three most recent years of the NSCH, I find that increased state policy generosity is positively associated with children’s school readiness skills across all five domains as well as the overall readiness index. For children in families that best match the PIC model (single parents with incomes below 130% of the federal poverty line) a $1,000 increase in family resources is associated with roughly a 4% increase in the odds of being “on track.”

Conclusion: Children in states with more generous economic policies have higher school readiness skills across multiple domains. These skills enable children to make the most of future education offerings and likely represent a large return on investment for states. These findings highlight the importance of providing economic supports to families with young children in addition to quality early care and education programming.

Author

• Easton Stone Dawson, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author