![]() One of the most powerful child-focused policy trends in recent history has been the expansion of preschool opportunities for low-income children, a trend supported by converging theoretical and empirical activity across disciplines. Preschool Education and Children from Low-Income Families Thus, this large-scale picture of preschool selection among low-income families provides a foundation that can be built on by more intensive multi-method community-based approaches in the future. One weakness of these data is that they include quality assessments for only a subset of preschools, but this weakness is mitigated by recent studies (including in this journal see Gordon et al., 2013) calling into serious question the validity of many extant strategies for measuring preschool quality. Our use of ECLS-B is well-suited to this goal because it provides the opportunity and power to make numerous comparisons within a large low-income sample that is internally diverse. In the process, it can identify segments of the low-income population most in need of attention and/or best positioned to inform efforts to reduce socioeconomic disparities in early education. Such research can expand theoretical knowledge about differential preschool exposure as a mechanism of socioeconomic stratification in the U.S. At the same time, the lens for examining selection processes is widened to better recognize how children help to create their own ecologies through the responses they evoke from adults ( Sameroff, 2009). This developmentally-oriented approach reverses the conventional direction of research rather than preschool effects on children, selection of children into preschool is considered. Drawing on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), we examine five potential mechanisms of selection cutting across the supply side (e.g., neighborhood settings), the demand side (e.g., parental needs, preferences, and circumstances), and the potential role of children themselves. This study tackles this “why?” question by exploring the processes by which children from low-income families are selected into preschool programs, adapting a theoretical framework from the general case of parents’ selection of child care arrangements (accommodations) to the specific case of low-income parents’ selection of preschool ( Coley, Votruba-Drzal, Collins, & Miller, 2014 Meyers & Jordan, 2006). The associated policy support for universal preschool has heightened the need to understand why some low-income parents enroll their children in preschool and others do not ( Haskins & Barnett, 2010 Waldfogel, 2006). An emerging consensus across the broad developmental sciences is that boosting the preschool enrollment of children from low-income families is a cost-effective and a developmentally appropriate way to reduce the socioeconomic gap in educational attainment that is so crucial to the stratification of society ( Heckman, 2013 NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005). Preschool is a powerful tool for reducing the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality ( Currie, Garces, & Thomas, 2002 Duncan & Magnuson, 2013 Ludwig & Phillips, 2007). Systemic connections and child elicitation did not consistently predict preschool enrollment in this population. Supply side factors (e.g., local child care options) and more necessity and human capital factors (e.g., having fewer children, desiring preparation for school) selected such children into preschool over parental care or other care arrangements, and several necessity factors (e.g., being less concerned about costs) selected them into non-Head Start preschools over Head Start programs. In general, parental necessity (e.g., maternal employment) and human capital considerations (e.g., maternal education) most consistently predicted preschool enrollment among children from low-income families. In this study, we tested an accommodations model with data on 6,250 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort. Because children from low-income families benefit from preschool but are less likely than other children to enroll, identifying factors that promote their enrollment can support research and policy aiming to reduce socioeconomic disparities in education.
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