Children Enter School Ready to Learn (Queen Anne's)
Story Behind the Curve
There have been improvements over the past five years in school readiness scores due to an intense effort by the school system and community partners such as the Judy Center Partnership to develop and implement a comprehensive early childhood effort. While the data has been improving, there still remains a gap between the rates of the entire population as compared to minorities and low income students. Academic gaps between low income minorities and middle income white students have occurred for decades.
It has become more difficult (at least in the short term) to monitor continued progress in this area due to the fact that the State recently changed measuring tools and the two measures can’t be compared with each other. For that reason charts from both the MMSR and the KRA are posted above. When comparing the overall Queen Anne’s County KRA results for “Demonstrating Readiness” with the State averages Queen Anne’s County fairs better. However, a deeper look at the breakdown by ethnicity shows some concerning data. Not only did all of the Queen Anne’s County ethnic subgroups perform worse (on average) than the composite but the Queen Anne’s County subgroups of African American and Asian were worse when compared to the State averages (African American 43% & Asian 14%) for those same two categories.
Some research suggests that both in-school factors and home/community factors impact the academic achievement of students and contribute to the gap. American education researcher David Berliner indicated that home/community influences are weighted more heavily, in part, due to the increased time that students spend at home and in their communities compared to the amount of time spent in school, and that the out-of-school factors influencing children in poverty differ significantly from those typically affecting middle income children. The LMB will work closely with the School System, the QAC Early Childhood Council, the Judy Center Partnerships organizations and others to close this gap.Strategies to improve these indicators
- Healthy Families
- Chesapeake Helps
- Queen Anne’s County Early Childhood Council
- Judy Center Partnership
- Chesapeake Childcare Resource Center
- Children’s Council
- Alpha Best Out of School Time Program
Why Is This Important?
A strong system of care for children ages prenatal through the start of their school experience not only shows an increased preparation and success in school but it also yields other positive results such as: stronger cognitive skills, lower school dropout rates, social and emotional strength, and lower rates of teen pregnancy and incarceration. In Queen Anne’s County it is especially important to reach and affect the subgroups. In most cases they have lower scores than the County average and without intervention at this level there will be negative repercussions as they move through the lifespan.
Measures
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Trend
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