Recent Trends in Socioeconomic and Racial School Readiness Gaps at Kindergarten Entry (CEPA Working Paper No. 15-02)

Academic achievement gaps between high- and low-income students born in the 1990s were much larger than among cohorts born two decades earlier. During the same period, racial achievement gaps declined. To determine whether these trends have continued in more recent cohorts, we examine trends in school readiness, as indexed by academic achievement and self-regulation, for cohorts born from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. We use data from nationally-representative samples of kindergarteners (ages 5-6) in 1998 (n=20,220), 2006 (n=6,600), and 2010 (n=16,980) to estimate trends in racial and socioeconomic school readiness gaps. We find that readiness gaps narrowed modestly from 1998-2010, particularly between high- and low-income students and between white and Hispanic students.