Early Care and Education Enrollment and School Readiness Among Children Who Experience Homelessness

Young children who experience homelessness face more co-occuring risks and display lower reading and math readiness in early elementary school compared to students in poverty who have not been homeless (Brumley et al., 2015). Early care and education (ECE) can be protective for school readiness among children in low-income families (Yoshikawa et al., 2013), but little is known about whether ECE is protective for children who experience homelessness. Federal child care policy specifically prioritizes and promotes ECE enrollment for families experiencing homelessness through existing Head Start program policies and new policies in the recent re-authorization of the Child Care Development Fund, but deep poverty and continued residential instability may still be barriers to enrollment (Taylor et al., 2015). The relative influence of these supports for and barriers to enrollment and their implications for children’s school readiness, however, has gone unexplored.

Our paper uses a novel dataset from a multi-site experimental study of housing interventions for homeless families to explore relationships between homelessness and housing instability, ECE enrollment and school readiness among young homeless children. We use parent survey and child developmental assessment data collected 20 months after families entered an emergency shelter from a multiethnic sample of 925 children age 1.5 to 4 years. Associations were analyzed using multiple regression, controlling for a robust set of child, parent, and site factors. We tested ECE assistance as a moderator of homelessness and ECE enrollment using bilinear interaction terms. We also will conduct an instrumental variable analysis using random assignment to the housing interventions as an instrument for the effects of homelessness to strengthen causal inference.

Twenty months after an initial shelter stay, housing instability and deep poverty were common, but enrollment rates in Head Start and other center-based ECE were comparable to low-income families in study communities. Subsequent homelessness was not associated with reduced ECE enrollment, and receipt of ECE assistance moderated this relationship. Children evidenced moderate disadvantage in pre-reading skills (-0.5 SD), small disadvantage in pre-math skills (-0.2 SD), and elevated rates of behavior problems (+14pp) compared to normative samples. Center-based ECE enrollment was associated with a 0.3 SD increase in both math and reading readiness compared to parental care, with no differences in behavioral problems. Public policies promoting ECE enrollment among homeless families appear to be working and may help reduce gaps in school readiness for children who experience homelessness.