Means-Tested State Prekindergarten Programs Are More Segregated than Universal Prekindergarten Programs. An Essay for the Learning Curve

Urban Institute. 2100 M Street NW, Washington, DC 20037. Tel: 202-261-5687; Fax: 202-467-5775; Web site: http://www.urban.org

N

19

Walton Family Foundation
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Preschool Education; Public Education; Equal Education; State Programs; School Segregation; Racial Segregation; Racial Factors; Ethnicity; Blacks; Hispanic American Students; African American Students; White Students; Financial Needs; Open Enrollment; Program Effectiveness; Family Income

Texas; North Carolina; Georgia; Oklahoma

Absent a nationwide plan for universal public prekindergarten, states and districts have taken various approaches to increasing access to school-based educational opportunities for their youngest learners. Though some of these programs have focused on making public prekindergarten available to all families, others have targeted families most in need by introducing means-tested programs. Early efforts to expand access to public schooling for preschool-age children, such as the War on Poverty-era federal Head Start program, focused on reaching low-income children. More recently, states and cities have made significant investments in their own public preschool programs, often citing their utility in combatting racial, ethnic, and income-based test score differences that are apparent at school entry. A long-standing debate has weighed the relative merits of targeting limited resources to equalize early educational opportunities versus providing universal programs. But an underexplored distinction between the two approaches is how they might contribute to racial and ethnic school segregation among this country's youngest students. Key findings in this essay include: (1) Black and Hispanic prekindergarten students in means-tested programs experience consistently higher rates of racial isolation and lower rates of exposure to white students relative to their K-12 counterparts than those in open programs; (2) In states with open-enrollment prekindergarten, the proportion of Black prekindergarten students enrolled in racially isolated schools is nearly identical to that of Black first-graders (roughly 46 percent), but in states where prekindergarten is means tested, the proportion of Black preschoolers in racially isolated schools is 6 percentage points higher than that of Black first-graders; (3) Hispanic preschool students are 5 percentage points more likely than their first-grade counterparts to attend racially isolated schools in states with means-tested prekindergarten and are 3 percentage points less likely than first-grade students to do so in states where prekindergarten is open; and (4) In comparing states with diverse and robust prekindergarten programs, the data show that Black and Hispanic prekindergarten students in Texas and North Carolina, which have means-tested programs, have less exposure to white students than their counterparts in Georgia and Oklahoma, which have universal enrollment.

ERIC

2023

ED629109