The new study of preschoolers in France also shows that these differences may shape how students are perceived by their peers.

The results, which appear in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, shed new light on the persistent and early emerging disparities in education linked to socioeconomic status (SES).

“While preschool attendance has been shown to be beneficial for low-SES students’ achievement, our results suggest that early childhood education is not currently maximizing its potential as an equalizing force,” says lead author Sébastien Goudeau, an assistant professor at Université de Poitiers.

“Early schooling contexts provide unequal opportunities for engagement to children in ways linked to their socioeconomic status, which could serve to maintain or even exacerbate social class disparities in achievement,” says coauthor Andrei Cimpian, a professor in the psychology department at New York University.

“These and other findings call for redesigning aspects of early childhood in ways that foster engagement among all students, regardless of their social class.”

Previous research has primarily focused on deficits in low-SES parents’ knowledge, practices, or resources to explain disparities found in early childhood education. The new study examined how schooling itself at this age might be shortchanging children from lower-income backgrounds.

In doing so, the researchers examined students’ behavioral engagement during whole-class discussions—a core part of the preschool curriculum in Europe and North America.

Read the full article about socioeconomic status and preschool by James Devitt at Futurity.