Children in families with low incomes, who attend schools where the minority population exceeds 75 percent of the student enrollment, under-perform in reading, even after accounting for the quality of the literacy instruction, literary experiences at home, gender, race and other variables, according to a new study.
The majority of black and Hispanic children in the United States attend such "Minority segregated" schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The study, by the FPG Child Development Institute (FPG) and the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examined reading development from kindergarten to third grade for 1,913 economically disadvantaged children. The children were part of the Children from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort, a nationally representative sample of more than 22,000 children enrolled in approximately 1,000 kindergarten programs.
"Good instruction is essential, but it's not enough," said Kirsten Kainz, an investigator at FPG, senior research associate in the School of Education and author of the study.
"Most current reading instruction initiatives and policies are aimed at improving classroom instruction," Kainz said. "This research shows that characteristics of the child, the home, the classroom and the school influence reading development, and that maximally effective reading policy should address all four systems simultaneously."
Kainz and her colleagues found that classroom and school characteristics had a larger affect on low-income students long-term reading abilities than the method of instruction or a child's background, such as the parents employment patterns or size of the household.