Can Preschool Instructional Practices Promote Racial Equity in Academic Skills? Evidence from the Boston Schools

• In Event: How Can Pre-K Contribute to Reducing the Black-White Achievement Gap?

Abstract

Due to historic and structural inequities, Black children begin formal schooling with significantly lower language/literacy and math skills than their white peers (Reardon & Portilla, 2016). These gaps have proven difficult to close as children move into middle childhood and adolescence (von Hippel et al., 2018). Supported by evidence that high-quality preschool programs may promote more equitable outcomes for non-white students (Yoshikawa et al., 2016) -- a number of states and cities have made major investments to expand access to early childhood education. Yet, little is known about the preschool instructional practices that do stand to close racial disparities in children’s academic skills. To this end, the current study examines whether preschool learning formats, instructional domains, and exposure to constrained vs. unconstrained instruction promote more equitable language/literacy and math skills for Black students in preschool through 1st grade.
The sample includes 240 students (N = 112 Black and N = 138 white) who were recruited in the fall of the preschool year from 30 public schools and community-based programs implementing the Boston prekindergarten model. The research team assessed students’ language (PPVT), literacy (WJ Letter Word ID), and math skills (WJ Applied Problems (WJAP); Research-based Math Assessment (REMA)) in the fall and spring of preschool, the fall and spring of kindergarten, and the spring of 1st grade and accessed demographic information from administrative records and parent reports. The team used videos of preschool teachers’ typical practices to code individual students’ exposure to different learning formats/experiences and content areas on the Individualizing Student Instruction (ISI) coding scheme (Connor et al., 2009), and to capture global classroom quality on the CLASS (Pianta et al., 2008).
We used descriptive statistics and individual growth models to achieve the research aims, with multiple imputation to address a small level of missingness on covariates. Results revealed substantial differences in language (.87 SDs), literacy (.76 SDs), and math skills (.92 WJAP; 1.11 SD REMA) at the start of the preschool year between Black students and their white peers. Gaps closed slightly during preschool, widened during the summer after preschool, and then stayed consistent through the end of 1st grade across outcomes. Results of individual growth models with interactions between an indicator variable for whether the student was Black or white and instructional factors of interest (adjusting for a robust set of covariates) demonstrated that exposure to more time spent in math in preschool predicted reductions in gaps in math skills between Black and white students through 1st grade (See Figure 1). Exposure to more time spent in small groups in preschool also predicted reductions in gaps in language/literacy skills between Black and white students through 1st grade (see Figure 2).
Findings suggest that there are opportunities for preschool teachers to engage in some instructional practices in preschool – spending more time on math and small group instruction -- that may be beneficial to promoting more equitable racial outcomes in math and language/literacy skills for Black students through first grade.

Authors

• Meghan Patricia McCormick, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City
  Presenting Author

• Joann Hsueh, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christina J Weiland, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mirjana Pralica, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City
  Non-Presenting Author

• Catherine Snow, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Annie Taylor, Boston Public Schools
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jason Sachs, Boston Public Schools
  Non-Presenting Author