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New Destinations and the Early Childhood Education of Mexican-Origin Children

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Demography

A Correction to this article was published on 13 March 2020

This article has been updated

Abstract

This study examined differences in exposure to early childhood education among Mexican-origin children across Latino/a destinations. Early childhood educational enrollment patterns, which are highly sensitive to community resources and foundational components of long-term educational inequalities, can offer a valuable window into how destinations may be shaping incorporation among Mexican-origin families. Integrating data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort with county-level data from the decennial census, multilevel logistic regression models revealed that Mexican-origin, black, and white children had lower odds of enrollment in early childhood education programs if they lived in new Latino/a destinations versus established destinations. The negative association between new destinations and early childhood education enrollment persisted despite controls for household selectivity, state and local early childhood education contexts, Latino/a educational attainment, Latino-white residential segregation, and immigration enforcement agreements. Within the Mexican-origin subgroup, the enrollment gap between new and established destinations was widest among the least-acculturated families, as measured by parental nativity, duration of residence, citizenship status, and English proficiency. These findings highlight how both place and acculturation stratify outcomes within the large and growing Mexican-origin subset of the Latino/a population.

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Change history

  • 13 March 2020

    In the original article, the authors neglected to include information in the Acknowledgements section about one additional NICHD grant that funded the study.

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Acknowledgments

Support for this research came from the Institute of Education Sciences (Award R305A150027, PI: Robert Crosnoe), the National Science Foundation (1519686, PI: Elizabeth Gershoff and Robert Crosnoe; DRL-1760481, PI: Tama Leventhal and Robert Crosnoe), and two Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grants to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (P2CHD042849 and T32HD007081). Work for the research reported in this article was completed while the first author was at the University of Texas–Austin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Elizabeth Ackert

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Robert Crosnoe

  3. Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Tama Leventhal

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  1. Elizabeth Ackert
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  2. Robert Crosnoe
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Correspondence to Elizabeth Ackert.

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Ackert, E., Crosnoe, R. & Leventhal, T. New Destinations and the Early Childhood Education of Mexican-Origin Children. Demography 56, 1607–1634 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00814-1

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