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Pages 13-52

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From page 13...
... Recommendation 8: The federal government, in partnership with state and local governments, philanthropy, and relevant public and private organizations, should support policies and interventions targeting social determinants of health that create and perpetuate opportunity gaps at the community level. To further the development of targeted policies and interventions for addressing the opportunity gap at the community level, the following actions should be taken by federal, state, and local entities and private philanthropic organizations: • Federal and state governments should expand existing safety net programs that have been shown to address poverty and food inse curity as social determinants of health, including the Special Sup plemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the earned income tax credit, as well as the 2021 expanded child tax credit.
From page 14...
... For children living in poverty and those from other marginalized populations, inequities in experiences and access to resources that support healthy developmental outcomes can vary greatly, leading to persisting opportunity gaps for young children. State and local governments have opportunities to examine existing policies that have demonstrated promising outcomes for young children and to leverage resources and partnerships with the private sector to invest in interventions with the potential to promote healthy development and close opportunity gaps for young children.
From page 15...
... and philanthropic organizations should support and prioritize historically marginalized communi ties and groups to improve their access to professional development programs, apprenticeships, and scholarships, and to diversify the pipeline of health care professionals, public health practitioners, teachers, early educators, and early childhood researchers. • National professional organizations and accreditors should im prove curriculum training and require minimum competencies in antiracist approaches; social determinants of health inequities; and culturally competent, trauma-informed, and resilience-building health care, ECE, and early grade education.
From page 17...
... A central emphasis of this report is that, although the opportunity gap is usually defined in terms of its effects on future academic performance, one must understand the interconnectedness of gaps in other domains, such as physical health, mental health, and social-emotional development, in order to develop strategies for closing this gap that address the healthy development of the whole child. In recognition of this essential interconnectedness, the opportunity gap is defined in this report as the unequal and inequitable distribution of resources and experiences on the basis of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, English proficiency, disability, immigration status, community wealth, familial situations, geography, or other factors 1Racialization is defined as the act of giving a racial character to someone or something or the process of categorizing, marginalizing, or regarding according to race (Merriam-Webster, 2022)
From page 18...
... In responding to its statement of task, the committee focused on opportunity gaps in three domains -- education, physical health and health care, and social-emotional development and well-being. In each of these domains, the committee examined the numerous gaps that prevent young children from having equitable access to resources and experiences.
From page 19...
... • Review evidence on promising federal and state government policy and program interventions that have addressed opportunity gap concerns for children from birth to age 8. • Develop recommendations for education policy, practice, and research to better understand the opportunity gap and promote success for all students pre-K to grade 3.
From page 20...
... Given the limited number of national studies estimating the impact of opportunity gaps with large-enough sample sizes to enable subgroup analyses, the committee also considered high-quality correlational research studies making clear whether intervention effects are associations or causal and for which groups. 3The Proceedings of a Workshop -- in Brief for this meeting is available at https://www.nap.
From page 21...
... • Science and Engineering in Preschool Through Elementary Grades: The Brilliance of Children and the Strengths of Educators (2022) The statement of task asked that the committee examine the connection between the opportunity gap and potential resulting achievement gaps for young children.
From page 22...
... 6) ; ensure the development of institutions, facilities, and services for the care of children and the right of children of working parents to benefit from child care services and facilities for which they are eligible (Art.
From page 23...
... UNDERSTANDING THE HISTORICAL AND STRUCTURAL DRIVERS OF THE OPPORTUNITY GAP As background for the detailed discussion in the following chapters, the remainder of this introduction provides historical contexts and examines structural factors that have created and continue to perpetuate the opportunity gap. Also provided is an overview of the changing demographics of children from ages 0 to 8 and evidence showing that the effectiveness of public policies designed to provide opportunities for these young children will increasingly be evaluated on how they affect the well-being of children of color and children of immigrants.
From page 24...
... These drivers and factors continue to interact and shape experiences in later stages of the life course. NOTE: ECE = early care and education.
From page 25...
... . Even with the growth in access to and investment in ECE over the last five to six decades as a mechanism for bridging early opportunity gaps -- accomplished through the growth of Head Start, state pre-K, and the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG)
From page 26...
... Many federal funding streams and state licensing for child care programs still reflect this historical aim of subsidizing safe child care to enable adult workforce participation instead of being oriented primarily to providing an early learning environment for children (Kostelnik & Grady, 2009)
From page 27...
... Examples in the United States include federally mandated programs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as Head Start, which provides early learning opportunities for young children from low-income families. The learning environments in these programs are influenced by other care and education traditions, and as they have become well established, these programs have also influenced other settings and services (Kostelnik & Grady, 2009)
From page 28...
... . Intersectional historical analyses of educational opportunity in ECE and in the early elementary grades are necessary to understand and reduce opportunity gaps among young children.
From page 29...
... . Residential segregation is the main driver of school segregation, which in turn is associated with inequitable exposure to qualified teachers, class size, curriculum, and pedagogy.
From page 30...
... . Research has found that high levels of residential segregation appear to be related to worse outcomes for Black infants (Polednak, 1991; Bird, 1995; Collins, 1999; Kotecki et al., 2019)
From page 31...
... Strict zoning codes are one example of the opportunity hoarding by which privileged families can sequester themselves in exclusive areas with neighbors and school populations that reflect local demographics. School Segregation School segregation is perhaps the most critical pathway by which residential segregation impacts child well-being, given that 84% of public school students attend assigned schools, usually based on place of residence (Noel, Stark, & Redford, 2016)
From page 32...
... . Schools with lower levels of concentrated poverty lead to improved achievement through a number of mechanisms, including "more equitable access to important resources such as structural facilities, highly qualified teachers, challenging courses, private and public funding, 6School choice allows public funds to follow students to the schools they attend and permits families to select alternatives to public schools, such as charter schools, private schools, or home school.
From page 33...
... . Disability Segregation Research indicates that inclusion in high-quality general ECE programs is associated with a host of positive social and academic outcomes for children with and without disabilities, and that early inclusion is associated with inclusion later in children's school trajectories (Rafferty, Piscitelli, & Boettcher, 2003; Green, Terry, & Gallagher, 2014; Lawrence, Smith, & Banerjee, 2016)
From page 34...
... . Each of these deficits contributes to the existing opportunity gaps for these children.
From page 35...
... Many dual language learners and English learners are segregated at the classroom level for at least part of the school day to focus on English acquisition. Often these blocks of segregated English learning time are long, reducing the time students have to engage in learning other subjects, such as math and science.
From page 36...
... . A consequence of these national-level gaps is state variations in allocation of benefits that meet children's basic needs, resulting in deficits that can create opportunity gaps and lead to underserved groups of children (Bruch, Gornick, & Van Der Naald, 2022)
From page 37...
... children under 18 in 2020, fewer than half, 35.4 million, were aged 0–8 -- the focus of this committee's work. There were 17.3 million White children aged 0–8, more than 9 million Hispanic children, 4.7 million Black children, 1.8 million Asian children, 2.3 million multiracial children, and fewer than 250,000 American Indian children (Figure 1-3)
From page 38...
... child population, about 18 million children under 18, lived in immigrant families, defined as having at least one foreign-born parent (Urban Institute, 2022)
From page 39...
... ; for example, a much higher share of the second generation of children in immigrant families will need ECE. By design, children in immigrant families face opportunity gaps due to their exclusion from eligibility for antipoverty programs and other family policies based on their own and their parents' or other family members' immigration status (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2021b)
From page 40...
... Although on their face, restrictions based on immigration status are race neutral, they have disproportionately negative impacts on Hispanic children. Recent waves of immigration, primarily from Asia and Latin America, are driving changes in the racial/ethnic composition of the child population as a whole and the portion of that population in immigrant families.
From page 41...
... To reduce economic opportunity gaps driven by structural changes in the labor market, an ecosystem of supports is needed for parents to supplement low wages and provide health insurance, paid family and medical leave, and highquality child care.
From page 42...
... . Thus, this policy created an opportunity gap by disproportionately decreasing economic stability and wealth building for Black women and their families.
From page 43...
... . Despite the many substantial advances in increasing equality achieved during the civil rights era, these efforts also coincided with an important paradigm shift in the early 1960s: instead of providing public funds to support mothers in caring for their own children, policies shifted to requiring work for public benefits and subsidizing child care as part of these work requirements (Vogtman, 2017; Minoff, 2020)
From page 44...
... . Although some children living in poverty may be resilient in the face of these negative effects, evidence shows that poverty is significantly linked to multiple negative effects that create opportunity gaps.
From page 45...
... As discussed previously, segregation can be a strong predictor of opportunity gaps, especially when it leads to differential concentrations of groups in high- and low-poverty schools. In general, high-poverty schools cannot provide the types of opportunities provided by low-poverty schools, a differential that creates, maintains, and perpetuates opportunity gaps (Reardon, 2021)
From page 46...
... . Other research found that neighborhood characteristics predicted outcomes for low-income Latino and African American children in such areas as exposure to violence, risky behaviors, physical and behavioral health, education, marriage and childbearing, and youth labor market outcomes, even after controlling for many household, child, and caregiver traits (Santiago et al., 2014)
From page 47...
... . Several recent studies using the COI have found significant associations between neighborhood opportunity and a range of child health outcomes.
From page 48...
... This section summarizes program characteristics that can impede access to and uptake of these programs, contributing to the persistence of opportunity gaps. Further detail can be found throughout this report.
From page 49...
... presented to the committee on barriers to accessing benefit programs and described two of the major social and behavioral costs related to administrative burden -- learning costs and compliance costs (Herd, 2021; National Academies, 2021)
From page 50...
... Policy interventions that recognize the diversity of needs of families and the challenges they encounter in accessing supports have the potential to improve health and education outcomes for young children and help close the opportunity gap. Reducing administrative burdens could help eliminate barriers to accessing and participating in programs designed to achieve this goal.
From page 51...
... Chapter 4 examines the effects of social determinants of health on physical health and how disparities in physical health and access to health care can be drivers of opportunity gaps from the prenatal period through the early years of life. Chapter 5 focuses on how gaps in opportunities to foster positive social-emotional development and well-being and mental health in parents and children create persistent opportunity gaps across the life course, and how community resources and targeted policies and practices that improve family functioning and mental health and well-being can help close these gaps.
From page 52...
... . A policy equity analysis of the earned income tax credit: Fully including children in immigrant families and Hispanic children in this key anti-poverty program.


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