Abstract
Early reading and math achievement help set trajectories of positive school performance over children’s entire school career, particularly for children in poverty and for minority children. However, longstanding evidence shows that African American and Latino children enter school with less optimal reading and math scores. School trajectories can be even more strained in rural areas, especially low-wealth rural areas, where teachers have less training and where children and families have fewer opportunities to access high-quality resources such as libraries and after-school programs. Lower reading levels at kindergarten entry can then translate into lower literacy levels during adolescence and adulthood, contributing to lower lifetime earnings, higher unemployment levels, and a continued cycle of poverty. Thus, inequities related to poverty play out during the earliest years of school. This chapter provides a background on the transition to school for rural ethnic minority children, with a focus on ecological factors that have been linked to school readiness in this population. Ecological factors discussed in the chapter include rural economic restructuring; parental educational attainment and constraints on parental investments; family stability; child care accessibility, stability, and quality; and parenting characteristics such as warmth, discipline, home learning stimulation, and cultural socialization. The end of the chapter includes recommendations for future study with rural ethnic minority children, including implementing effective interventions in rural schools and conducting sensitive and efficacious studies in rural minority communities.
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Bratsch-Hines, M., Baker, C., Vernon-Feagans, L. (2016). Minority Families in the Rural United States: Family Processes, Child Care, and Early Schooling. In: Crockett, L., Carlo, G. (eds) Rural Ethnic Minority Youth and Families in the United States. Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20976-0_9
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