Early education: Progress and promise for children from low-income families

Katherine Magnuson and Hilary Shager

Children and Youth Services Review, 2010, vol. 32, issue 9, 1186-1198

Abstract: It has become normative for children to attend some type of early education before entering kindergarten; yet, gaps in enrollment suggest that children from low-income families, who might benefit the most from such services, remain the least likely to receive them. The public sector engages in two main policy strategies to address this gap, providing compensatory preschool programs such as Head Start or state pre-kindergarten (pre-k), and means-tested child care assistance. Federal and state investments in both types of programs have increased dramatically over the past two decades; however, still only a portion of eligible poor children are served. Evidence from the evaluation literature suggests that high quality early education improves low-income children's school readiness and other long-term developmental outcomes. States face considerable challenges in ensuring that children have access to quality early care and education experiences.

Keywords: Early; childhood; education; Low-income; families (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190-7409(10)00070-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:32:y:2010:i:9:p:1186-1198

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().