The policy brief, “Preschool for California’s Children: Promising Benefits, Unequal Access ,” is available online from PACE. (Requires Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.)
Also released last week was a policy brief from the Berkeley, Calif.-based Policy Analysis for California Education, or pace, called “Preschool for California’s Children: Promising Benefits, Unequal Access.” It says the attendance gap in early education leads to large achievement gaps later.
The study, which used California data from the 1998-99 school year from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, found that in the year before kindergarten, only 38 percent of Hispanic children attended some type of preschool program, compared with 58 percent of non-Hispanic white children.