Predicting school failure from information available at birth

Information available from birth certificates was used to predict the psychological and educational status of approximately 1,000 randomly sampled first-grade children. The purpose of the research was to explore the feasibility of using birth certificate information as a cost-effective mechanism to identify children who were likely to need special educational services at public school entry. Multiple-regression and discriminant-function analyses revealed the following factors to be important in predicting psychoeducational status: birth order, race, educational status of the mother, month prenatal care began, survivorship of older siblings, and the child's legitimacy.