Barriers to early childhood education for Black families and calls for equitable solutions from a qualitative study using peer researchers and an antiracist lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Idealized notions of the ECE experiences Black parents wanted diverged from their experiences. • Black parents face racialized administrative burdens to access quality childcare. • Free, universal childcare is an equitable policy solution desired by Black families. • Black families want their children to be safe, loved, and nurtured in childcare. • Parents and educators desire one connected system for enrollment. Racial disparities in early care education (ECE) utilization and quality continue to persist in the United States and have considerable implications throughout the life course. This study applied a population health framework and an antiracist lens to conduct peer-led qualitative interviews (n = 20) and facilitate community synthesis and design sessions (n = 6) with parents, ECE staff, and thought leaders. The goal was to better understand: (1) the barriers to enrollment faced by Black families seeking high-quality ECE experiences and (2) potential policy and system interventions to increase access and equity. Three key themes emerged: 1) idealized notions of what Black parents wanted for their children in ECE settings diverged from their actual experiences; 2) there were significant racialized administrative burdens or hoops to jump through to access ECE; and 3) participants cited positive and negative experiences with home-visiting programs to foster child development. Black participants expressed reservations about engaging with these programs based partly on previous discriminatory experiences and/or negative first- or second-hand experiences with state-mandated home visits from social services. The findings from this study make a significant contribution to the literature on barriers to high-quality ECE programs that Black families experience and community-identified policy solutions to address disparities. The system and policy solutions to these racial disparities in ECE enrollment cocreated by parents, ECE staff and the research team are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".