Recent Trends and Geographic Variation in Skills at School Entry

• In Event: Policies on Early Childhood Access, Skills, and Opportunity

Abstract

The environments in which young children live, grow, and learn have meaningfully changed over the past decade. Despite growing policy attention to early childhood education and increased investment in public preschool, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about widespread disruptions to early care and education systems and the social structures that support young children’s development (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2024; Lee et al., 2021; Thomeer et al., 2023; Weiland et al., 2021). Yet recent, geographically granular data on early skills is limited, constraining both public understanding and informed policy action to support young learners. In this study, we leverage a first-of-its-kind, population-level dataset on kindergarten readiness to study recent trends and variation in early childhood opportunity. We ask:
1. How have skills at school entry changed over the last decade, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic?
2. How do community characteristics relate to trends in skills over time? 

We build a novel, district-level dataset using statewide kindergarten readiness assessment (KRA) data spanning multiple years (2017-2024) and skill domains (including literacy, math, and social-emotional). Our analytic sample for this study includes 7 states (AK, CT, FL, KY, SC, UT, and WA) that did not change their assessment during the pandemic. We combine the KRA data with community-level covariates, including demographic characteristics and a set of pandemic-related covariates that have been used to understand pandemic effects in prior work (Fahle et al., 2025). We apply a three-level hierarchical linear model to estimate trends over time and associations with community covariates.

Our analyses reveal that post-pandemic cohorts entered kindergarten with lower skills than pre-pandemic cohorts across all domains, though impacts varied by child age and community context. Cohorts aged 2.5 – 4.5 at pandemic onset (who had disrupted preschool years) experienced larger skill declines, while cohorts aged 0 – 2 (who had disrupted infant/toddler years) scored similarly to pre-pandemic cohorts. Skill declines were larger in lower-resourced communities and those with higher COVID-related mortality rates. Changes in skills at kindergarten entry were not associated, however, with the degree to which community life was disrupted during the pandemic. Pre-pandemic disparities between low and high SES communities widened during the pandemic but have since returned to prior levels.

These findings clarify when, where, and for whom pandemic disruptions most affected early development, underscoring how large-scale societal shocks disproportionately burden communities with fewer resources. By situating these disruptions within broader trends, we illustrate how patterns of early educational opportunity have evolved over the past decade. Because these early opportunities have well-documented consequences for children’s short- and long-term outcomes, timely and geographically granular evidence about early development is essential for informing effective policy. State- and district-level variation in post-pandemic recovery offers actionable information to help policymakers meet the needs of the young children in the present moment.

Author

• Sadie Richardson, Stanford University
  Presenting Author