Efforts to improve preschool children's early literacy skills continue to intensify (e.g., Cabell et al., 2023; Wackerle-Hollman et al., 2024), often using tiered frameworks (e.g., response to intervention and pyramid model) to identify children needing intervention. Much research about early literacy interventions within tiered frameworks has overrepresented young Black children (i.e., 45% of participants; Stuckey et al., 2022). However, tiered frameworks can also be leveraged in ways that challenge deficit-oriented lenses often used by practitioners, schools, systems, and researchers when implementing such frameworks. Children's placement in a tiered framework was examined for fall and spring to identify strengths of 487 Black 3- and 4-year-old preschool children based on an early literacy screener, Get Ready to Read!-Revised. Estimated mean standard scores fell squarely in the average range, and the percentage of children identified for Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 at both fall and spring approximated the theoretical percentages proposed by researchers (e.g., Fuchs Stoiber & Gettinger, 2016). Children's Get Ready to Read!-Revised performance aligned with diagnostic measures of receptive vocabulary, print knowledge, and phonological awareness. Results contribute to the limited research base about early literacy strengths of young Black children and have implications for school psychologists' contributions to the response to intervention process in preschools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Albritton et al. (Mon,) studied this question.