Preparing Low-Income Latino Children for Kindergarten and Beyond: How Children in Miami’s Publicly-Funded Preschool Programs Fare

To address questions regarding the influence of early care and education programs on Latino children’s early academic development, we analyzed data from the Miami School Readiness Project (MSRP) in Miami-Dade County, Florida, which has a large Latino population. The MSRP represents a unique, large administrative data source that has followed, over time, children who participated in various types of publicly-funded early care and education programs at age four. Two of these programs are the focus of this brief: public school- based pre-K, and center-based programs that accepted child care subsidies. In this brief, we examine how well low-income Latino children who attended these two program types were prepared for kindergarten and how they performed academically by the time they were in third grade.