A report finds that lower-quality preschools continue to result in disadvantages for young children from low-income New York City families—many of them Black and Latinx.

That’s despite an ambitious program by Mayor Bill de Blasio to close racial disparities in early learning, the new study finds.

Early childhood education centers enrolling larger shares of white or Asian American children continue to improve in quality, on average. Signs of that quality are stronger teaching practices, richer learning activities, and better facilities, according to the report. In contrast, pre-K programs that mainly serve Black or Latinx children have shown static or declining quality since 2014.

That gap could significantly impede efforts to recover from learning losses resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, says report co-author Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Preschool can remedy the pandemic’s terrible drag on children’s early social and mental growth, but only when families hit hardest by COVID gain access to high-quality pre-K education,” Fuller says. “If quality is tilted toward well-off children, that will simply exacerbate disparities in early learning.”

The report focuses on the nation’s biggest urban center, but it offers an instructive—and cautionary—tale for educators and parents across the country.

The Berkeley researchers traced changes in the quality of 1,273 pre-K programs during the initial six years of de Blasio’s “Pre-K for All” initiative, drawing on the city’s repeated observations of classrooms. Quality levels of pre-K sites were then compared among different neighborhoods and the demographic features of children served.

Drawing on data from the city Department of Education’s on-site monitoring of pre-K sites, the researchers found that programs located in the poorest one-fourth of city census tracts were of lower quality than programs in economically better-off neighborhoods.

The magnitude of these disparities was significant, with many pre-K sites in low-income areas registering substandard levels of quality. Those gaps are linked to rates of early learning, the researchers say, with the development of young students in the lower-quality preschools trailing the average four-year-old by three to five months.

Read the full article about universal pre-K in New York City at Futurity.