Increasing Low-income Mothers’ Educational Attainment: Implications for Anti-poverty Programs and Policy

Context: Emerging research indicates parental educational attainment is not always stable over time, particularly among young adults with lower levels of income and educational attainment. Though increases in postsecondary education are often highlighted as a route to greater earnings among higher-income students, it is unclear whether increases in parental educational attainment can improve the socioeconomic circumstances of low-income families. Objective: The first goal of the current study was to determine whether low-income mothers increased their educational attainment over a 6-year period as their children transitioned from early childhood through elementary school. Second, the current study examined a range of individual characteristics that may help or hinder a mother’s re-entrance into education. Last, associations between increased maternal education and indicators of family socioeconomic resources were examined to determine ways that increased education among low-income mothers of young children may serve as a mechanism to reduce poverty or other poverty-related risks. Design and Sample: Data for this study come from the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), a cluster randomized control trial of Head Start centers and a longitudinal follow-up of children and their families. The current study included 432 participants. Of those participants, 97% were the child’s mother or female caregiver, 70% lived below the Federal Poverty Line at baseline, and 93% identified as a racial/ethnic minority (i.e., African American, black, or Hispanic). Main Outcome Measures: Maternal educational attainment was collected at 4 time-points across a 6-year period. From these data, a binary variable was created to indicate whether (1) or not (0) mothers increased their educational attainment. Maternal report of household income, unemployment status, and poverty-related risk were examined as indicators of family socioeconomic resources. Results: Thirty-nine percent of mothers increased their educational attainment over the 6-year period of study, and the majority of those mothers attained additional degrees rather than years of schooling alone. Mothers whose children attended treatment-assigned preschool classrooms at baseline were subsequently more likely to increase their educational attainment over time than were mothers of children who initially attended control-assigned classrooms in preschool. Analyses of the roles of parental characteristics in predicting gains in maternal education suggest that mothers who reported greater depressive symptomatology were less likely to increase their educational attainment. Increases in educational attainment, in turn, were positively associated with income earned in subsequent years of our longitudinal follow-up study and negatively associated with maternal unemployment and poverty-related risk when children were in 5th grade. Conclusions: Increases in parent educational attainment were impressive for our sample of low-income mothers, given their exposure to a range of poverty-related risks. Furthermore, our analyses support prior research suggesting that increases in maternal educational attainment may serve as an important mechanism to reduce families’ experience of income poverty

Symposium Title: The children of the CSRP go to school: Their social-emotional and academic well-being in Kindergarten

Abstract 1 Title Page Title: Predicting children's transitions from Head Start to low-performing schools in Chicago: The roles of exposure to poverty-related risk and to early childhood intervention Exposed to a wide range of economic and psychosocial stressors, children in low-income families face greater chances of developing emotional and behavioral problems. For instance, it has been reported that the prevalence of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is higher among young children from low-income families than their more advantaged peers Moreover, early school years, especially from kindergarten to third grade, are a critical transitional period not only for promoting children's scholastic and psychosocial development but also for helping prevent the dissipating effects of earlier interventions (Reynolds, Magnuson, & Ou, 2006). Research has consistently shown that the benefits gained by participants, especially those in low-income families, from high-quality early interventions, including Head Start, can be sustained to later school years and even adulthood for those who attend continuing enrichment programs in early school years; but tend to fade out by the second or third year of formal schooling for those who attend inferior schools subsequently Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This paper investigates the socioeconomic contexts navigated by low-income children enrolled in the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), as they made the transition from preschool to elementary school. We focus on the following two questions. First, do families' exposure to poverty-related risks (i.e., low income, maternal education, and employment engagement) change for the better or for the worse, from the fall of preschool to the fall of kindergarten? Second, we examine the share of CSRP-enrolled preschoolers who subsequently attended kindergarten in low-performing elementary schools. We ask whether children's chances of entry into a lower-performing school differ as a function of (a) their current or past exposure to poverty-related risks, (b) having attended a program randomly assigned to treatment versus control group during the intervention year of CSRP, and (c) having attended a Head Start program that was assessed to be lower-quality at pre-treatment baseline. Settings: A Overall 602 children and 94 teachers participated in CSRP. Children on average were 4 years old and about half were boys. About 66% of participating children were non-Hispanic Black, 26% were Hispanic, and 8% were members of other racial/ethnic groups. Teachers on average were 40 years old and almost all (97%) were female. About 70% of teachers were non-Hispanic Black, 20% were Hispanic, and 10% were non-Hispanic White. Intervention/Program/Practice: The CSRP intervention included three components of services. The first was a 30-hour teacher training focusing on behavior management strategies, which were adapted from the Incredible Years teacher training module Research Design: CSRP randomly assigned a multifaceted classroom-based intervention to two cohorts of Head Start children and teachers in seven of the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago, with Cohort One participating from fall to spring in 2004-05 and Cohort Two from fall to spring in 2005-06. Using a clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) design and a pairwise matching procedure (Bloom, 2005), we first identified nine pairs of matched sites based on a range of site-level demographic characteristics that were collected by each site and reported annually to the federal government. One site in each matched pair then was randomly assigned to the treatment group and the other to the control group. Two classrooms from each site were initially included. One classroom left after randomization due to Head Start funding cuts. As a result, 35 classrooms (i.e., 18 in the treatment and 17 in the control groups) participated in the CSRP. Data Collection and Analysis: CSRP-enrolled children were followed from Head Start programs into kindergarten, with follow-up parent and teacher interviews completed in the fall of the follow-up year (92% had follow-up data from one or more reporters). Preliminary analyses of school-based follow-up data suggest that children made the transition from 35 Head Start preschool classrooms to over 170 kindergarten classrooms. Those schools whose percentage of children meeting ISAT testing criteria (as reported by Chicago Public Schools elementary scorecard) fell lower than one standard deviation below the mean of all elementary schools are coded as "low-performing." Poverty-related risk is measured by three indicators: family income-to-needs ratios (i.e., less than half the federal threshold in the previous year), maternal educational attainment (i.e., less than a high school degree), and mothers' employment (i.e., 10 hours or less of work per week). Data of poverty-related risk were collected in the fall of both years. Other child-level covariates include the child's gender, race/ethnicity, whether Spanish was spoken at home, whether he/she was in a 2010 SREE Conference Abstract Template 5 single-parent family, and his/her behavioral problems in the fall of Head Start. The quality of Head Start programs in which children were initially enrolled at pretreatment baseline was also measured, as indexed by the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-R (ECERS-R; . Other classroom-level covariates collected in the fall of Head Start include teacher behavior management skills, classroom emotional climate, class size, and the number of adults in the classroom. To answer our first question, descriptive analyses of CSRP-enrolled children's exposure to poverty-related stressors are presented. To address the second question, we estimate children's propensity to be enrolled in a low-performing elementary school using a three-level hierarchical logistic regression model with child covariates at Level 1, Head Start classroom covariates at Level 2, and paired Head Start site dummy variables at Level 3. Following the notations in Raudenbush and Bryk (2002), Level 1 is specified in Equations Sample model: Link function: Structural model: where is whether child i in class j at Head Start site k attended low-performing schools (1 = yes and 0 = no); is the expected probability of attending low-performing schools, which is normally distributed; is the log of the odds of attending low-performing schools; and is the vector of the sum of m child-level covariates. Equation where represents the sum of n Head Start classroom-level covariates; and is the random effect with mean of 0. Level 3 is specified in Equation Findings/Results: (Please insert table 1 here) (Please insert table 2 here) Our preliminary analyses find that overall 338 CSRP-enrolled children attended kindergarten at the time of data collection and had valid information on the covariates. To examine the roles of exposure to poverty-related risk and to the CSRP intervention in their enrollment of low-performing schools in kindergarten, we conduct preliminary analyses using the three-level hierarchical logistic regression model specified above and present the results in (Please insert table 3 here) As shown in Based on these preliminary findings, we will conduct further analyses to examine the effects of children's current exposure to poverty-related risks on children's entry to lowperforming schools. In addition, we will also conduct sensitivity tests to examine whether the findings are robust when using different cut-off points (e.g., below the medians or a half of standard deviations) for the definitions of low-performing schools in kindergarten and lowquality Head Start program at pre-treatment baseline. Conclusion: Previous research has found that the CSRP intervention had significant effects on improving classroom processes as well as children's social-emotional skills, self-regulation, and pre-academic skills, and reducing their behavior problems Raver et al., in press). In this study we find that even in the period prior to the economic recession (2004)(2005)(2006), families with young children in Chicago were facing high levels of poverty-related risk. On average, the CSRP-enrolled children had high rates of attending lowperforming schools in the transition from Head Start to kindergarten. Our preliminary evidence shows that the CSRP intervention may set children on more positive educational trajectory since children in the treatment group were less likely to attend low-performing schools compared to their peers in the control group. To sustain the benefits of the CSRP intervention as well as those of Head Start, more help should be provided to these disadvantaged children throughout their subsequent school years. Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 77,[302][303][304][305][306][307][308][309][310][311][312][313][314][315][316] Raver, C. C., Jones, S. M., Li-Grining, C. P., Zhai, F., Bub, K, & Pressler, E. (in press). CSRP's impact on low-income preschoolers' pre-academic skills: Self-regulation and teacherstudent relationships as two mediating mechanisms. Child Development. SREE Conference Abstrac

Poverty as a predictor of 4-year-olds' executive function: New perspectives on models of differential susceptibility.

In a predominantly low-income, population-based longitudinal sample of 1,259 children followed from birth, results suggest that chronic exposure to poverty and the strains of financial hardship were each uniquely predictive of young children’s performance on measures of executive functioning. Results suggest that temperament-based vulnerability serves as a statistical moderator of the link between poverty-related risk and children’s executive functioning. Implications for models of ecology and biology in shaping the development of children’s self-regulation are discussed

Poverty, household chaos, and interparental aggression predict children's ability to recognize and modulate negative emotions

Abstract The following prospective longitudinal study considers the ways that protracted exposure to verbal and physical aggression between parents may take a substantial toll on emotional adjustment for 1,025 children followed from 6 to 58 months of age. Exposure to chronic poverty from infancy to early childhood as well as multiple measures of household chaos were also included as predictors of children's ability to recognize and modulate negative emotions in order to disentangle the role of interparental conflict from the socioeconomic forces that sometimes accompany it. Analyses revealed that exposure to greater levels of interparental conflict, more chaos in the household, and a higher number of years in poverty can be empirically distinguished as key contributors to 58-month-olds' ability to recognize and modulate negative emotion. Implications for models of experiential canalization of emotional processes within the context of adversity are discussed

Allostasis and allostatic load in the context of poverty in early childhood

This paper examined the relation of early environmental adversity associated with poverty to child resting or basal level of cortisol in a prospective longitudinal sample of 1,135 children seen at 7, 15, 24, 35, and 48 months of age. We found main effects for length of time in poverty, poor housing quality, African American ethnicity, and low positive caregiving behavior in which each was uniquely associated with an overall higher level of cortisol from age 7 months to 48 months. We also found that two aspects of the early environment in the context of poverty, adult exits from the home and perceived economic insufficiency, were related to salivary cortisol in a time dependent manner. The effect for the first of these, exits from the home, was consistent with the principle of allostatic load in which the effects of adversity on stress physiology accumulate over time. The effect for perceived economic insufficiency was one in which insufficiency was associated with higher levels of cortisol in infancy but with a typical but steeper decline in cortisol with age at subsequent time points

Poverty-Related Adversity and Emotion Regulation Predict Internalizing Behavior Problems among Low-Income Children Ages 8–11

The current study examines the additive and joint roles of chronic poverty-related adversity and three candidate neurocognitive processes of emotion regulation (ER)—including: (i) attention bias to threat (ABT); (ii) accuracy of facial emotion appraisal (FEA); and (iii) negative affect (NA)—for low-income, ethnic minority children’s internalizing problems (N = 338). Children were enrolled in the current study from publicly funded preschools, with poverty-related adversity assessed at multiple time points from early to middle childhood. Field-based administration of neurocognitively-informed assessments of ABT, FEA and NA as well as parental report of internalizing symptoms were collected when children were ages 8–11, 6 years after baseline. Results suggest that chronic exposure to poverty-related adversity from early to middle childhood predicted higher levels of internalizing symptomatology when children are ages 8–11, even after controlling for initial poverty status and early internalizing symptoms in preschool. Moreover, each of the 3 hypothesized components of ER played an independent and statistically significant role in predicting children’s parent-reported internalizing symptoms at the 6-year follow-up, even after controlling for early and chronic poverty-related adversit

Data from: Closing the achievement gap through modification of neurocognitive and neuroendocrine function: results from a cluster randomized controlled trial of an innovative approach to the education of children in kindergarten

Effective early education is essential for academic achievement and positive life outcomes, particularly for children in poverty. Advances in neuroscience suggest that a focus on self-regulation in education can enhance children’s engagement in learning and establish beneficial academic trajectories in the early elementary grades. Here, we experimentally evaluate an innovative approach to the education of children in kindergarten that embeds support for self-regulation, particularly executive functions, into literacy, mathematics, and science learning activities. Results from a cluster randomized controlled trial involving 29 schools, 79 classrooms, and 759 children indicated positive effects on executive functions, reasoning ability, the control of attention, and levels of salivary cortisol and alpha amylase. Results also demonstrated improvements in reading, vocabulary, and mathematics at the end of kindergarten that increased into the first grade. A number of effects were specific to high-poverty schools, suggesting that a focus on executive functions and associated aspects of self-regulation in early elementary education holds promise for closing the achievement gap

Ready to Enter: What Research Tells Policymakers About Strategies to Promote Social and Emotional School Readiness Among Three- and Four-Year-Old Children

A recent and compelling study entitled Neurons to Neighborhoods, conducted by the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the Institute of Medicine, calls attention to the importance of early emotional development in young children. Based on a careful review of neuroscience and developmental science, it highlights compelling evidence that a child's earliest experiences and relationships set the stage for how a child manages feelings and impulses, and relates to others. It also highlights emerging and perhaps surprising evidence that emotional development and academic learning are far more closely intertwined in the early years than has been previously understood. This policy paper focuses on what emerging research tells policymakers about why it is so important to intervene to help young children at risk for poor social, emotional, and behavioral development and what kinds of research-based interventions seem most effective