A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
On average, North Carolina is slightly ahead of the rest of the country in terms of getting kids ready for kindergarten – but children from lower-income families are lagging behind their peers, new federal data shows.
The latest survey on kindergarten readiness from the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative found that roughly two-thirds of children nationwide were “on track” for kindergarten, but also identified significant disparities by income. The analyzed data was from 2023-24.
The same was true – and potentially amplified – here in North Carolina.
On the whole, 66.1% of North Carolina students were found to be “on track” for kindergarten compared to the national average of 65.7%. But only 44% of students making less than the national poverty level were on track. Nationally, that number was 53.9%.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, kindergarten readiness levels tracked closely with poverty levels, both in North Carolina and across the country. In other words, kindergarten readiness increases with income.
So while 53.9% of students across the country below the poverty level were on track for kindergarten, that number increased for students at 100-199% the poverty level, to 57.3% – and again to 66.9% for students at 200-399% of the poverty level. At 400% or more of the poverty level, 75.1% of students were ready for kindergarten.
That’s a 21.2 percentage point disparity between the poorest and wealthiest kids in the U.S. And that gap was even wider in North Carolina. While 44% of kids in the lowest poverty level here were on track for kindergarten, 82.4% of the wealthiest kids were on track – a whopping 38.3-point disparity.
It’s worth noting that the dataset includes a footnote warning users to use caution when interpreting the North Carolina data for students below the poverty level – its confidence interval is a little high, a fancy way of saying the number may not be 100% reliable, likely due to a lower sample size.
Still, as the Associated Press reported earlier this month, the new data calls attention to local and state programs around the country that aim to expand affordable access to pre-K and other opportunities prior to starting kindergarten. And those efforts might be leading to some improvements.
As the AP noted, the percentage of students below the poverty level and on track for school has increased from 48.8% in the 2022-23 data release to 53.9% in this latest 23-24 release. North Carolina also saw an increase, from 35% to 44%.
The Charlotte area has four public pre-K options that aim to expand access to pre-K: Head Start, Meck Pre-K, Bright Beginnings and NC Pre-K. They all have various eligibility requirements. But the application periods are going on right now.
If you’re interested in public pre-K but don’t know where to start, I wrote about the four options and broke down their differences in this newsletter.
