%0 Journal Article
%T Will Public Pre
%A Rachel Valentino
%J American Educational Research Journal
%@ 1935-1011
%D 2018
%R 10.3102/0002831217732000
%X Publicly funded pre-K is often touted as a means to narrow achievement gaps, but this goal is less likely to be achieved if poor and/or minority children do not, at a minimum, attend equal quality pre-K as their non-poor, non-minority peers. In this paper, I find large ˇ°quality gapsˇ± in public pre-K between poor, minority students and non-poor, non-minority students, ranging from 0.3 to 0.7 SD on a range of classroom observational measures. I also find that even after adjusting for several classroom characteristics, significant and sizable quality gaps remain. Finally, I find much between-state variation in gap magnitudes and that state-level quality gaps are related to state-level residential segregation. These findings are particularly troubling if a goal of public pre-K is to minimize inequality
%K early childhood education
%K public pre-K
%K classroom quality
%K achievement gaps
%K segregation
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0002831217732000