Latino Children Who Attend Preschool Fare Better

“Giv­en these demo­graph­ic trends, and what we know about their eco­nom­ic char­ac­ter­ist­ics, how His­pan­ic chil­dren fare is go­ing to have a lot to say about the fu­ture of our coun­try,” says Lina Guz­man, who leads re­search for the cen­ter.

Us­ing data from the Miami School Read­i­ness Pro­ject, Guz­man and her col­leagues fol­lowed nearly 12,000 low-in­come Latino preschool­ers who at­ten­ded either a pub­lic pre-k or a sub­sid­ized cen­ter-based pro­gram, the two most pop­u­lar preschool op­tions among Latino fam­il­ies in Miami.

By and large, those stu­dents were more pre­pared for kinder­garten com­pared to na­tion­al av­er­ages. The chil­dren later also scored well on third-grade state read­ing as­sess­ments, with more than 90 per­cent earn­ing a passing score. On av­er­age, third-graders who had at­ten­ded a pub­lic pre-K pro­gram earned an av­er­age GPA of 3.23; stu­dents at­tend­ing a cen­ter-based preschool earned about a 3.0.

The be­ne­fits were also pro­nounced for bi­lin­gual stu­dents (or dual-lan­guage learners). Al­most three-quar­ters of low-in­come bi­lin­gual stu­dents entered kinder­garten with either an ad­vanced or pro­fi­cient com­mand of Eng­lish.

“These [res­ults] are con­sist­ent with the grow­ing body of re­search that shows the be­ne­fits of early-care and edu­ca­tion pro­grams,” Guz­man said. “I would ex­pect that, as we see more ex­pan­sion na­tion­ally at the preschool level, that we’ll have grow­ing evid­ence that will con­tin­ue to show that.”

Na­tion­wide, Latino preschool­ers lag be­hind their white, black, and Asi­an peers on every meas­ure of edu­ca­tion­al read­i­ness, as the fol­low­ing chart shows. Ex­pand­ing ac­cess to pre-K edu­ca­tion seems to be the solu­tion to clos­ing those gaps, es­pe­cially for the low-in­come Latino stu­dents the re­port stud­ied.

“The fact that these kids are scor­ing above na­tion­al av­er­ages is really prom­ising,” says Arya An­sari, coau­thor of the re­port. “It’s really about get­ting these chil­dren ready to learn so we set the found­a­tion so they can suc­ceed when they enter kinder­garten. That’s what we’re see­ing here in Miami.”

Al­though the study is spe­cif­ic to Miami-Dade County, the re­search does sug­gest that early in­ter­ven­tion could im­prove long-term edu­ca­tion out­comes for low-in­come Latino stu­dents na­tion­ally. From here, the find­ings may pave the way for fol­low-up re­search in oth­er metro areas with grow­ing Latino pop­u­la­tions.