Literacy in the early grades has become an increasingly prominent concern in the U.S. education system. States and local school districts are racing to pass much-discussed interventions like requiring “science of reading” curricula and making students who are reading below grade level repeat the third grade. Universal preschool gets less attention as a literacy intervention, but cross-national research by Héctor Cebolla-Boado, Jonas Radl, and Leire Salazar finds that it can serve as such, and help close achievement gaps—another major concern in U.S. education policy.
Cebolla-Boado, Radl, and Salazar’s study incorporates two lines of inquiry that are each the subject of significant existing research: the effects of preschool on school performance—mostly, though not unanimously, positive—and the effects of parental education levels and socioeconomic status on children’s educational outcomes, showing that children from more advantaged families have better outcomes, on average.
Drawing on data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study for 28 developed nations, Cebolla-Boado, Radl, and Salazar compare fourth grade reading skills based on whether and for how long children attended preschool, along with family socioeconomic background and parental involvement levels. The latter variable measured how much parents engaged in educational activities with their preschool-aged children before they attended preschool.
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They find that longer time in preschool is linked to higher fourth grade reading scores, with an increase of around five points for each year of preschool. But the advantages of preschool attendance are greater for children whose parents are less involved or have lower levels of education. “The more advantaged their socio-economic origins are,” the authors write, “the smaller the returns children obtain from preschool education.”
The authors suggest that “because children from less stimulating families have greater untapped potential to improve their knowledge and abilities when they first enrol in formal non-compulsory education, they learn, on average, more quickly than their counterparts from more stimulating homes who start from a higher baseline.”
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While disadvantaged children gain more from preschool than those from more stimulating or more highly educated family backgrounds, “the kind of extra stimuli that preschool provides to disadvantaged children appears to be more similar to the benefits obtained from active parental involvement before primary school than to the benefits derived from a privileged social origin.” In other words, privilege embedded in family background—rather than produced by intentional parenting—creates a gap that is harder to close.
The differential between gains by children from more and less advantaged backgrounds are not enough to erase inequality—children from more advantaged backgrounds still have higher fourth grade reading scores. That’s not surprising: Policymakers and educators have been trying to reduce achievement gaps in education for decades, yet those gaps persist. But the findings suggest that universal preschool can meaningfully narrow those gaps. With fourth grade reading scores receiving heightened public attention in the U.S. in recent years, a policy that “significantly reduces” achievement gaps, even if it does not eliminate them, may be worth increased attention.
