* Recent analyses indicate that environmental factors
associated with vocabulary development and emergent literacy skills are already present among
children as early as 15 months of age.2 By
first grade, unfortunately, the repercussions become all too clear:
children from high - income families are likely to know about twice as many words as
children from low - income families, putting these
children at a significantly higher risk for school failure.3
NCCP's national data analysis found that chronic absence in kindergarten is
associated with lower academic performance in
first grade for all
children regardless of gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status.