Early Years Policy

Table 1

Decomposition of the income-related gaps in cognitive school readiness scores in the ECLS-B (US) cohort.

	Percentile point gap in mean scores between incomequintile 𝑄 and income quintile 3 attributed to domain (% of total raw gap attributed to domain)
Domain	Literacy score		Mathematics score		Language score
	𝑄=1	𝑄=5	𝑄=1	𝑄=5	𝑄=1	𝑄=5
Parenting style	−2.67	2.87	−2.98	2.96	−4.38	4.15
	[21.0]	[12.9]	[19.2]	[14.1]	[32.9]	[21.8]
Home learning environment	−2.62	3.05	−2.52	2.78	−2.24	3.10
	[20.7]	[13.7]	[16.2]	[13.3]	[16.8]	[16.3]
Maternal health & health behaviours	−0.65	0.99	−1.00	1.28	−0.47	0.52
	[5.1]	[4.5]	[6.5]	[6.1]	[3.5]	[2.7]
Child health	−0.48	0.48	−0.59	0.42	−0.53	0.54
	[3.8]	[2.1]	[3.8]	[2.0]	[4.0]	[2.9]
Child care (excluding Head Start)	−0.72	1.16	−0.64	1.44	−0.60	0.94
	[5.7]	[5.2]	[4.1]	[6.9]	[4.5]	[4.9]
Ever in Head Start	1.17	−0.62	0.85	−0.45	0.97	−0.51
	[−9.2]	[−2.8]	[−5.5]	[−2.1]	[−7.3]	[−2.7]
Mother's education	−1.85	4.00	−1.62	3.34	−0.29	1.41
	[14.6]	[18.0]	[10.4]	[15.9]	[2.2]	[7.4]
Demographics	−2.36	2.22	−2.47	2.71	−2.48	3.43
	[18.6]	[10.0]	[15.9]	[13.0]	[18.6]	[18.0]
All missing dummies	−0.07	−0.03	−0.24	0.01	−0.26	0.03
	[0.5]	[−0.1]	[1.5]	[0.0]	[1.9]	[0.1]
Residual unexplained component	−2.45	8.15	−4.36	6.44	−3.04	5.45
	[19.3]	[36.6]	[28.0]	[30.8]	[22.8]	[28.6]
Total raw gap	−12.68	22.27	−15.56	20.93	−13.31	19.06
(Sum of rows above)	[100]	[100]	[100]	[100]	[100]	[100]

N = 7950.