Comparing stress risk exposure to early education quality in Austin neighborhoods

Children in communities of concentrated poverty face profound threats to their wellbeing and developmental health. The poverty they experience is often transmitted from one generation to the next – a symptom of an America that data indicate is increasingly defined by decreasing intergenerational socio-economic mobility. Decades of research have provided helpful context on how concentrated, intergenerational poverty impacts children, but researchers are still struggling to unpack the full complexity of the issue. However, a consensus has emerged that familial and community poverty adversely alter a child’s developmental trajectory and decrease social-economic mobility, which ultimately reinforces and perpetuates intergenerational poverty. Research strongly supports the potential of high-quality pre-kindergarten to improve outcomes among low-income children. In Texas, pre-kindergarten quality is largely determined by the school district and, to a lesser extent, the resources of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, not all children grow up in resource-rich neighborhoods. Further, children in lower-wealth neighborhoods also face myriad neighborhood stressors linked to poverty. In other words, children most in need of high-quality pre-kindergarten to offset the effects of poverty are often the least likely to receive it. In this paper, I assess stress levels in Austin neighborhoods using an index composed of four sub-indices: family distress, social stress, environmental stress, and geographic stress. Neighborhoods are defined by the attendance boundaries of Austin elementary schools which allows for a direct comparison between stress index values and pre-kindergarten quality (defined using empirically-derived standards) to determine if and how access to high-quality pre-kindergarten and its developmental benefits changes based on geography. Findings indicate substantial district-wide consistency on measures of pre-kindergarten quality that is attributable to state and district guidelines. However, differences emerge on measures of student-to-teacher ratios and teachers’ years of experience. Schools in higher-stress neighborhoods have slightly better ratios than schools in lower-stress neighborhoods, whereas schools in lower-stress neighborhoods have teachers with slightly more experience than schools in higher-stress neighborhoods. In all, AISD has done a good job ensuring equality of access to pre-kindergarten quality, although whether they have done as good a job ensuring equity is another question entirely. Using the particular context of Austin and Austin ISD, I offer best practices and recommendations for aligning resources with need to increase this equity.