In US households that earn $100,000 or more per year, 64% of children age three or four attend preschool. In US households making less than $50,000, only 40% of kids are getting education before kindergarten. That’s a 24 percentage-point difference.
A few caveats to the data, which come from the Quality Counts report (pdf) out today from the Education Week Research Center: the figures are based on an analysis of American Community Survey data from 2008 to 2012, which was self-reported. So the data were collected from families, not school districts. Also, the data were collected in a period that included a severe recession, which may have influenced outcomes—for instance, higher unemployment may have kept some parents home or altered some households’ financial circumstances in ways that affected their decisions about preschool enrollment or childcare in general.
[For more of this story, written by Sonali Kohli, go to http://www.citylab.com/work/20...-the-poorest/384348/]
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