The school entry gap: Socioeconomic, family, and health factors associated with children’s school readiness to learn. Early Education and Development 18

Notwithstanding the constant debate in the scientific and policy literature on the pre-cise meaning of school readiness, research consistently demonstrates a wide varia-tion between groups of children resulting in a gap at school entry. Recently, the teacher-completed Early Development Instrument (EDI), a new measure of chil-dren’s school readiness in 5 developmental areas, was developed, tested, and imple-mented in Canada. EDI results confirmed the existence of a school entry gap. In this article, we explore factors in 5 areas of risk: socioeconomic status, family structure, child health, parent health, and parent involvement in literacy development. In a se-ries of logistic regressions, we demonstrate that variables in all 5 areas, as well as age and gender, contribute to the gap. Child’s suboptimal health, male gender, and com-ing from a family with low income contribute most strongly to the vulnerability at school entry. As the purpose of a tool like the EDI is primarily to assist in popula-tion-level reporting on children’s school readiness, the results of our study provide additional and much-needed evidence on the instrument’s sensitivity at the individ-ual level, thus paving the way for its use in interpreting children’s school readiness in the context of their lives and the communities in which they live