The achievement gap became a nationally-recognized hot topic in education with the 1966 publication of the Coleman Report, a wide-reaching report on educational equity commissioned by what was then known as the U.S. Office of Education. The study found, among other things, a significant gap in achievement between white and black students that only widened with each passing grade. After the Coleman Report sounded the alarm, many other studies followed, finding that all across the United States low-income and minority students enter school behind.
New Mexico mirrors the nation in that low-income and minority students enter kindergarten less prepared than their peers.
Universal prekindergarten is more effective at boosting achievement than voluntary or targeted prekindergarten, particularly for students from low-income households. Research indicates that racially and socioeconomically diverse classrooms benefit all students. While this intrinsically makes sense (we learn most from people who are different from us!) this is useful information for New Mexico, as the state currently uses a targeted model that can lead to segregation of students by income. Braiding funding sources, for example between federally-funded Head Start and state-funded prekindergarten, would lead to more diverse prekindergarten classrooms and benefit both students and the state.
Prekindergarten programming quality matters. For example, research shows that teachers matter more to student success than any other aspect of schooling. Some research also suggests that a prekindergarten teacher’s level of education impacts student success. This is important as New Mexico state-funded prekindergarten is split between the Public Education Department and the Children Youth, and Families Department – which have different prekindergarten teacher licensure requirements. Lead prekindergarten teachers funded through the Public Education Department need a bachelor’s degree, while prekindergarten teachers funded through the Children, Youth, and Families Department do not. Clearly, equality in licensing requirements is needed to ensure equality in prekindergarten programs. Equal quality is important as research shows low-income and minority students receive substandard programming, even in state-funded prekindergarten.
In addition to prekindergarten, extending the school year is a promising strategy to eliminate the achievement gap. New Mexico’s K-3 Plus program, which extends the school year for 25 days for students in kindergarten through third grade, is shown to improve student performance when executed correctly. Students who participated in K-3 Plus were more likely to be on grade level according to standardized tests than students who did not participate.
So, what do we do to ensure school does not reproduce the social and structural inequalities that arguably created the achievement gap in the first place? Combining universal prekindergarten and K-3 Plus programming would help narrow our persistent achievement gap.
Research shows that universal prekindergarten is more effective than voluntary prekindergarten at improving outcomes for low-income and minority students. While this would be a costly policy to implement, early education is cheaper than later education. The average per pupil spending on prekindergarten in 2017 was $5,008, which is cheap compared to New Mexico’s total per pupil spending of $9,693. However, implementing universal prekindergarten would not be easy, as it would require infrastructure investments to build new prekindergarten classrooms as well as hiring new and assistant teachers when New Mexico is experiencing a teacher shortage. That said, prekindergarten is a sound financial investment for the state, especially as recent research from the Legislative Finance Committee finds state-funded prekindergarten improves student outcomes through the eleventh grade.
K-3 Plus has been shown to improve student performance, but currently only one in three students have access to K-3 Plus in New Mexico. However, for K-3 Plus to be effective, it must be implemented correctly. For this reason, schools should be required to keep K-3 Plus students with the same teacher they had during the regular school year, and programs should end no more than two weeks before the start of the regular school year. While implementing K-3 Plus will incur additional costs such as staffing and maintenance due to the nature of extending the school year, it will help mitigate summer learning loss for students.
Stacking these early childhood education intervention strategies will allow for a greater impact than if they are implemented on their own. Prekindergarten has the potential to boost achievement for low-income and minority students, and K-3 Plus has the potential to build on the gains made in prekindergarten. Implementing both these programs will likely lead to a narrowing of achievement gaps in New Mexico. The cost of making both of these programs universal will be substantial. However, the U.S. Department of Education asserts that high-quality prekindergarten not only narrows achievement gaps, but increases earnings for students when they become adults, and provides a return on investment of $8.60 for every $1 spent. For these reasons, it’s time to implement universal prekindergarten and K-3 Plus in New Mexico.
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