Full-day preschool found to benefit boys, black students more

Montgomery County boys as well as African Americans of both sexes benefit more from full-day pre-kindergarten programs, according to a study announced Monday by school officials.

The findings come at a time when educators increasingly are using programs aimed at the youngest students as the surest way to close persistent gaps in performance between economic and racial groups. Maryland schools are among the most generous in the nation in terms of early childhood spending.

The study found that among African American students and boys in general, those who attended full-day pre-kindergarten classes outperformed their Head Start peers who had only half-day programs on reading benchmarks. But the results also applied more broadly.

"Controlled for the demographics, and for their baseline performance, students who attended full-day pre-kindergarten did better than their counterparts not in full-day programs," said Huafang Zhao, one of the researchers who wrote the report.

As school systems around the nation scour their budgets for possible cuts, defenders of early childhood programs are pointing to studies showing that increased instruction at an early age helps better prepare students for schooling when they are older.

Early education programs have expanded over the past decade, and though that expansion slowed during the recession, almost 40 percent of 4-year-olds attended some sort of public preschool program in the 2008-09 school year, according to a report released last week by the National Institute for Early Education Research, at Rutgers University.

The study found that Maryland was sixth in the country in terms of total preschool spending. Virginia was 13th. The District was not included in the rankings, but it has expanded public preschool programs in recent years.

Maryland requires all of its school districts to run half-day pre-kindergarten programs for children from low-income families. In the 2007-08 school year, 10 Montgomery elementary schools that meet the federal low-income requirements known as Title I expanded their Head Start programs to a full day.

But the Montgomery study appears to show that the type of program is important in achieving gains. No significant performance difference was found between the half-day and full-day Head Start programs for girls or Hispanic, low-income and English-language-learning groups of students. Too few white or Asian American students were in the study to draw conclusions about them.

The study also found no measurable difference in performance on math benchmarks, though researchers said that probably is because the pre-kindergarten programs focus mainly on language skills.

The study also made a separate comparison between full-day Head Start programs and half-day non-Head Start pre-kindergarten programs run by the Montgomery County schools. African Americans, boys, girls and low-income students in the full-day program performed significantly better on reading benchmarks. No significant difference was found for Hispanic or English-language-learning students.