Family Socioeconomic Status, Immigration, and Children's Transitions into School

Special Issue Guest Editor's Note: In this article the authors identify the personal, experiential, and social psychological factors that affect children's transition from early childhood settings into K-12 education. Their research identifies the effects of high levels of risk on children's transition and the impact of this risk on children's academic trajectory. They discuss policy and practice implications of educational inequities associated with educational stratification. This article builds from its paired article, "Child Care and Cortisol Across Infancy and Toddlerhood: Poverty, Peers, and Developmental Timing" (this issue, pp. 51-72), in which Berry, Blair, Granger, and The Family Life Project Key Investigators examine the extent to which the link between children's child care experiences and their biophysiological functioning differs for children experiencing heightened levels of contextual risk outside of child care. This research supports the conclusion that the magnitude and even direction of the link between child care hours and children's cortisol level varies for children from high- vs. low-risk contexts.The start of formal schooling, typically in kindergarten in the United States, is a major event in the lives of children as they learn many new things, take on new responsibilities, meet new people, and engage in new types of educational and social experiences (Pianta, Cox, & Snow, 2007). Yet, the significance of the start of formal schooling is far broader than what happens to any one child. Just as the transition into school is a critical period in the individual life course, it also plays a foundational role in socioeconomic and demographic disparities in educational attainment. What happens to a child during this transition sets the stage for her or his entire educational career, and systematic differences during this transition by socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and other dimensions of stratification play a role in the well-documented divergence of the educational careers of children (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2014). This potential for the transition into school to be a sensitive period on the individual and population levels has important ramifications for policy and intervention, as it suggests that acting to reduce transitional difficulties and disparities can have long-term ramifications (Lee & Burkham, 2003).In these ways, the transition into school represents a meeting point for developmental research and stratification research and between basic research and applied research. What goes on with the child matters to what is going on in society, and vice versa, and studying this multilevel phenomenon can help translate research into action. As such, it is a potential source of integration for research on children and families across multiple micro- and macro-oriented disciplines of the social and behavioral sciences. For example, the influential work of Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman (2013) on the value of early childhood education as a policy lever to reduce socioeconomic inequality has been largely based on seminal developmental intervention studies, such as the Abecedarian Project (RameyC Crosnoe & Benner, 2015). Certainly, building partnerships among family scholars and neuroscientists-the whole purpose of this special issue-is in this spirit.The purpose of this article, therefore, is to provide an overview of the literature on school readiness and the transition into formal schooling with the larger goal of elucidating future avenues of research that may bring together family scholars and neuroscientists. …