Connections between Parents’ School Readiness Beliefs and Academic Redshirting

• In Event: Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

Children whose entry into Kindergarten is delayed, an action referred to as academic redshirting, tend to be white, higher socioeconomic status males, with summer birthdays (Bassok & Reardon, 2013; Graue & DiPerna, 2000). While this population seems fairly homogeneous, qualitative literature on parents who delay school entry for their children indicates that the groups may be less homogeneous than previously indicated (Noel & Newman, 2003, 2008; Albanesi, 2019), and parents’ ratings of school readiness items may be one way of meaningfully grouping parents. Further, these distinctions may predict choices parents make regarding when to enter their children into formal schooling.
This project investigated whether subgroups of parents could be identified using parents’ ratings of the importance of school readiness items, what those groups looked like with regard to race and ethnicity, and whether the groupings were related to parents’ decisions regarding when to enroll their children in Kindergarten.
Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Kindergarten (2011) cohort data was used to investigate these research questions (n = 13,149). Using Latent Class Analysis, parents’ ratings of school readiness items were grouped to reflect common response patterns. LCA findings indicate a three-class solution best fits the data, with one class of parents rating all items as essential, one class rating all items as very important, and one class rating academic items as only somewhat important and behavior items as very important (making distinctions). This distinction between academic and behavorial items was not found by Diamond, Reagan, & Bandyk (2000).
Descriptive statistics for the race and ethnicity variable showed distinct patterns in each of the three classes, as shown in Figure 1. The breakdown in race and ethnicity suggest that White parents are more likely than Black/African American or Hispanic parents to make distinctions between behavioral and academic items. In contrast, Black/African American and Hispanic parents are more likely to rate all items the same way. Further, Black/African American parents choose essential and very important ratings in similar proportions, while Hispanic parents were more likely to choose a rating of very important. These findings are in line with Puccioni (2015) who found that Black parents were more likely to rate school readiness items as more important.
The BCH method in Mplus was used to test for differences in the prevalence of parents choosing to delay school entry across the three classes. Parents decided to delay school entry at the highest rate in the making distinctions group, a rate that was significantly higher than that seen in the very important group (χ2 = 7.9, df = 1, p = .01), but not the essential group (χ2 = 2.53, df = 1, p = .11). See Figure 2.
Latent Class Analysis has not been used on parents’ ratings of school readiness items and provides an interesting contrast to previous research utilizing variable-centered approaches. Most interestingly, the LCA was able to develop groupings of parents that show different demographic patterns and prevalences of delaying school entry. Future work will examine how the classes related to child outcomes.

Author

• Alexandra M. Daro, Buffett Early Childhood Institute
  Presenting Author