November 13th, 2010

Why Early Absences Hit Low-Income Kids Harder

Researchers have long recognized  the connection between children’s socio-economic status and their cognitive abilities. A new study looks at the extent to which school absences in the early grades exacerbate these class differences and fuel the nagging achievement gap.

The findings, put simply, are that low-income children are more likely to be adversely affected by absences because they miss out on time in a language-rich environment, i.e. school.

Researcher Douglas D. Ready of the Teachers College at Columbia University explains why: Lower-income children typically start kindergarten with fewer literacy skills than their more affluent peers. But kindergarten and 1st gradecan be greatequalizers, allowing these children to close some of the gap. If they come to school, that is. Children who miss too much school are missing out on that chance to catch up.

This is particularly true in reading, since much of the focus in the early grades is on literacy skills. Ready’s research found that those with poor attendance rates, missing 10 days or more, gained roughly 14 percent fewer literacy skills in kindergarten than those with average attendance rates. And the negative impact of the missed days was 75 percent greater for a low-income child than for one from an average-income family.

In other words, school matters more for poor children. Ready draws the natural corollary to the summer learning loss, another phenomenon that affects poor kids more significantly and exacerbates the achievement gap. The prescription for both problems is the same: spend more time on task.

Attendance Counts is trying to achieve that, by pushing for better practice and policy to reduce chronic absence, while the National Summer Learning Association works to combat the “summer slide.”

Ready’s work, using an analysis of the U.S. Education Department’s ECLS-K longitudinal student data base, also found that low-children were more likely to rack up absences than their peers. Consider:

• More than one out of three children with poor attendance in kindergarten and first-grade lived in a single-parent home, compared to less than a quarter of those with average or good attendance.
• Students with poor attendance were more likely to speak a language other than English at home

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