What is the role of early childhood policies in fighting intergenerational transmission of poverty?

inequalities remain, and these present a major challenge in fighting intergenerational transmission of poverty. Although racial and ethnic disparities in educational outcomes have narrowed, there are large and growing achievement gaps between children from low and high socioeconomic status families. These growing socioeconomic status gaps in achievement have occurred in parallel with growing gaps in family resources—a phenomenon that Sara McLanahan calls “diverging destinies.” McLanahan finds that since the 1960s, educational attainment is increasingly associated with a variety of outcomes, so that children born to women with high levels of education also benefit from resources of parental time and money, while those born to women with Three panelists addressed the relationship between poverty and early care and education. Jane Waldfogel summarized current evidence on early childhood policies and suggested that expanding policies that promote early learning, improving income supports, and implementing complementary policies during a child’s years in K–12 schooling could help reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Terri Sabol considered the question of what constitutes “high-quality” early care and education, which is often associated with better outcomes for children, and described two studies of quality assessment tools, suggesting that measures of structural quality such as class size and teacher-child ratios are not consistently associated with children’s learning, whereas measures of the quality of teacher-child interactions are. Christina Weiland considered the implications of scaling up preschool programs that have been successful in improving academic achievement and reducing inequality. She presented the results of a pilot study to expand the Boston Public School’s prekindergarten model to community-based preschools, which brought to light a number of facets of these centers that presented barriers to implementation, but also identified some advantages and opportunities in locating preschools in community-based organizations. This set of articles summarizes their presentations.