Meeting Puts Focus on Early Education of English-Learners

Sacramento, Calif.

Children who speak a language other than English at home are less likely than other children to attend preschool before entering kindergarten, a study has found.

When they do enroll in preschool, they are more likely to attend the federal Head Start program for disadvantaged children than any other type of center-based program. Overall, preschool attendance was found to improve the literacy skills of language-minority children and to reduce the chances that they would be forced to repeat a grade or be identified with a disability, according to the report.

But Russell W. Rumberger, the education researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who conducted the study, also found a strong relationship between attending preschool and behavior problems. Language-minority children who were enrolled in a non-Head Start center before kindergarten were 70 percent more likely than native English-speakers in the same programs to exhibit problems such as fighting, arguing, and bullying in 1st and 3rd grades, especially if they spent more time, rather...