The past two decades have been characterized by a dramatic increase in early childhood investment. Between 2000 and 2012 alone the percentage of students enrolled in state-funded pre-kindergarten has nearly doubled mirroring a rising state investment in preschool from 2.4 to 5.1 billion dollars. Forty states currently offer state-funded preschool programs, and eight serve over 50 percent of their four-year-old children.  Over the same period, the majority of states have introduced heightened quality standards governing aspects of early childhood settings such as class size, student teacher ratio, teacher qualifications, and curriculum.  Given this heightened investment in early childhood education, and the hypothesized link between access to high-quality early childhood opportunities and child outcomes, some might hypothesize that children entering school today are coming to school more “school-ready” than children in the late nineties.  However, until recently data were not available to assess this claim empirically.

The proposed paper fills this gap. Using two large, nationally representative datasets (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, 1998 and 2010), we document the extent to which students entering kindergarten in 2010 differ from those who entered in 1998, in terms of both their proficiency in math and reading skills as well as their social skills. We rely, primarily, on teacher ratings of student proficiency across a broad array of reading, math and social skills. In addition to documenting overall changes, we explore whether changes in school readiness over time have differed across race and socioeconomic status. Finally, we explore the extent to which changes in school readiness over time are explained by increased access to preschool programs.

Our preliminary results show that compared to children entering kindergarten in 1998, incoming kindergarteners in 2010 are rated by their teachers as substantially more proficient across all measures of reading and math. The overall pattern does not differ by socio-economic status, suggesting across the board increases in school readiness.  That said, our results do show that changes are far more pronounced among Black students.

In our preliminary analyses, we have been unable to link these patterns to observable changes in policy or practices.  Notably, the changes are not explained by several crude measures of preschool access, nor are they explained by changes in several measures of early childhood parenting practices. The patterns are also not driven by demographic shifts across the two waves or changes in the age at which children enter school.  Follow up analyses will examine if changes are more pronounced in communities that invested substantially in efforts to enhance the quality or scope of their early childhood education programs.  In addition, in the next few months, the National Center for Education Statistics is set to release a crosswalk that will allow us to make comparisons across the 1998 and 2010 kindergarten entrants with respect to direct assessments of cognitive skill.  We will incorporate these analyses into our study to assess whether the substantial changes we observe in the teacher-reported measures of school-readiness are mirrored in direct assessments.  Implications for early education policy will be discussed.