Closing the School Readiness Gap

When they enter kindergarten, children from lower- and middle-income families are, on average, far behind their wealthier peers in reading, mathematics, and general knowledge. Research has found that high-quality preschool such as AppleTree can close this gap in school readiness.

This morning Dr. Steven Barnett of the National Institute for Early Education Research visited AppleTree to announce the release of the 2009 State of Preschool Annual Report. Dr. Barnett called AppleTree a “wonderful” place, and lamented that more children across the nation do not have the opportunity to attend such a high-quality program providing positive early-educational experiences.

The chart above, which comes from Dr. Barnett’s research, demonstrates the “knowledge gap” that low- and middle-income children face upon entry to kindergarten in comparison to their more advantaged peers. What this graph fails to capture is the gap in social- and emotional- skills that are key to future school success: that children can attend or listen to what someone else is saying; that they can develop positive relationships with other children of the same age; that they can identify different emotions and strategies for self-regulating these emotions; that they can key in on and listen to a central person in a classroom setting; that they can follow directions from respected adults; and so on and so forth.

AppleTree believes strongly that by providing explicit instruction in a fun and engaging way, we can eradicate the school-readiness gap, and in turn, the achievement gap that persists in later years between at-risk and advantaged children.