Study Cites Educational Disadvantages of Minority Working Class

Just as poor minority children have had limited access to preschools and quality child care, so middle-income minority families have had fewer opportunities for early education than their white or more affluent counterparts--a premise borne out in the San Fernando Valley, a new study has found.

That’s because there is less neighborhood child care available to working-class minority families than more affluent ones, and what does exist is often unaffordable, according to the joint study by UC Berkeley and Harvard University professors.

The study, which appears this month in the quarterly magazine Child Development, was undertaken to see how middle-class families will fare as the welfare system changes and the need for child care increases. It reaffirms that some amount of formal, preschool experience helps prepare children socially and intellectually for elementary school.

“Kids attending preschool did better overall in terms of pre-reading, math and motor skills,” when they entered kindergarten, said UC Berkeley professor Susan Holloway, a co-author of the study.

“If you’re at home or family day care . . . you don’t have that same degree of learning about the daily life of schooling that a preschool offers,” Holloway explained.

The study’s results come as legislators are examining ways to expand child-care choices so mothers on welfare can go to work. California, ranked among the top third of states in spending on child care and early education according to the Children’s Defense Fund, is expected to receive $100 million in federal funds to expand those fields as welfare is being dismantled.

But the study suggests that policymakers need to look beyond the needs of welfare families and also provide more options for the working class.

“If there were more child-care centers built and the prices were less exorbitant, there may be an increase” in enrollment, said Bruce Fuller, an associate professor of public policy and education at UC Berkeley and co-author of the study.

The study surveyed 2,800 families nationwide with children ages 3 to 5, and found significant disparities in preschool enrollment rates based on ethnic groups and their annual incomes. Researchers also tallied preschool availability according to regions and family income in Los Angeles County, home to 2,389 preschools and child-care centers and 4,833 licensed family day-care homes.

In the West Valley and West Los Angeles, the availability of preschool space was three times greater than that in Eastside or downtown neighborhoods. An average of 35 enrollment slots were available in areas such as Tarzana, Studio City, Brentwood and Westwood--compared to only 10 openings in neighborhoods such as Arleta, Van Nuys, South Los Angeles and Highland Park.

“Middle-income families are between a rock and a hard place,” agreed Alice Walker Duff, executive director of Crystal Stairs Inc., a state-funded, child-care resource and referral agency. “They don’t have enough income to pay for care, and if they did the quality of care is frequently not high.”

Duff cited a 1995 study that found that child care at most private centers in the United States is poor to mediocre. “The situation is really terrible for people who have some money to pay for child care, but not enough to pay for the quality their children need and deserve,” she said.

The new Berkeley-Harvard study also found that poor white parents--earning less than $10,000 a year and qualifying for federal subsidies--enrolled their children in preschool far less often than African American and Latino parents. About 75% of poor African American children and 62% of poor Latino children attend preschool programs compared to 55% of poor white children, the study noted. Most of the minority children were enrolled in Head Start preschool programs, established in 1965 primarily in impoverished African American neighborhoods, it said.

“Head Start and state-funded preschool programs in California and Massachusetts have succeeded in boosting enrollment rates for the poorest households,” Fuller said.

But Duff cautioned that the study gives a misleading impression about Head Start and the working poor. Head Start “was not a child-care program to enable parents to work,” Duff explained. “It was designed as a part-day, part-year educational enrichment program. It doesn’t work for parents who work.”

She also noted that poor families receiving welfare still endure long waits for subsidized child care, a point the study does not address. “The child-care system does not work well for any group,” Duff said.

Fuller and Duff said the solution for parents--especially the working poor--is to provide some type of subsidy, allowing them to afford quality child care.

“The good news is that California is expected to receive $100 million to expand child care,” Fuller said. “What’s important is how the state Legislature is going to divide that money and whether low-income families are going to be left out again.”