2011 The Palm Beach County Family Study (Full Report)

As shown in Table 66, the results of this analysis show little relationship between the ECHOS assessmentof children’s school readiness and overall service use. It also shows that when we control for otherbackground characteristics, the racial/ethnic and nativity differences we saw in the descriptive data arenot significant. On the other hand, the results do show an effect of parenting practices in the first year andchildcare arrangement the year prior to kindergarten. Specifically, an increase of one standard deviation(0.15) in the parenting score at year 1 for a mother meant her child was 9 times as likely to score ready forschool on the ECHOS. In addition, children who were cared for at home by a parent in the year beforekindergarten were only a third as likely to be assessed as ready for kindergarten as children in QIS sites.With regard to the FAIR assessment of literacy, we first examined if service use and selected mother andchild characteristics were associated with children being screened with a greater than 67 percentprobability of reading success on the FAIR. The descriptive data in Table 67 suggest that scores on theFAIR assessment are associated with several characteristics measured at baseline, including use ofprenatal care in the first trimester, language spoken at home, mother’s education, employment, povertystatus, and the overall parenting score. In addition, there appears to be an association with childcarearrangement in the year prior to the child’s entry into kindergarten, in that children who were screenedwith less than 67 percent probability of reading success on the FAIR were more likely to have been caredfor at home than children who did.Next, we conducted logistic regression analyses to determine which of these characteristics aresignificantly associated with the likelihood of children’s reading success, after controlling for possiblecorrelations between the explanatory variables. As shown in Table 68, we again found little relationshipbetween the FAIR assessment of children’s probability of reading success and our measure of overallservice use. However, the evidence does suggest that an increase of one standard deviation in theparenting score at year 1 for a mother means her child is more than 4 times as likely to have a score ofgreater than 67 percent likelihood of reading success. Type of childcare arrangement the year prior tokindergarten did not appear to be a significant predictor of FAIR scores. However, mothers who wereemployed in year 1 and who were not living at or below poverty were more likely to have children whoscored in the highest category on the FAIR. In addition, we also observed that black foreign-born motherswere more than 5 times as likely to have children who scored in the highest category than Hispanicforeign-born mothers.A contributing factor to these racial/ethnic differences is likely to be language spoken at home. Thus, weconducted a second regression that included Spanish as the home language as a separate variable. Theseresults are shown in Table 69. The findings were very similar to the results of the first regression in thatChapin Hall at the University of Chicago 126