The Head Start legislation states that the Federal grant to operate a local Head Start program shall not exceed 80 percent of the approved costs of the program. Twenty percent must be contributed by the community. The non- Federal share the 20 percent may be in cash or contributed services.
Head Start experience has show the need of the children vary considerably from community to community and that, to serve the need most effectively, programs should be individualized.
In addition, experience to data suggests that, when Head Start programs are designed in ways that take into account community resources an the capabilities of the local staff, a program can often be mounted that will improve service for children within present funding levels.
Therefore, Head Start permits local Head Start sponsors to provide children with classroom-based or home- based developmental programs. The reauthorization of the Head Start Act established a new Early Head Start program for low-income families with infants and toddlers. For over 50 years, Head Start has served millions of children and families living in poverty through comprehensive early learning, health, nutrition, and family support services. To understand the full impact of the program, it is important to understand its history.
As part of President Lyndon B. What started as a Summer program by the Office of Economic Opportunity, with the goal of breaking the cycle of poverty through the care and education of , children, Head Start has since served more than 37 million children and their families.
Head Start is now a full-fledged federally funded program that delivers comprehensive early learning, health, nutrition, and family support services to children ages 3 through 5 living in poverty.
There are more than 1, local Head Start programs operating across America, in every state and Congressional district in the country. In light of this, there is significant diversity across the communities in which the program operates—rural, suburban, urban, migrant and seasonal, and those found on American Indian and Alaskan Native AIAN reservations. Because of the overwhelmingly positive impact the program has had over the past 5 decades, Head Start enjoys broad bipartisan support among voters — and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
As it stands today, decades of research show that participation in Head Start has both short- and long-term positive effects for Head Start children and their families. Children who attend Head Start demonstrate marked academic and social progress, and are more likely to enter kindergarten ready to learn.
Research also shows that Head Start program quality has improved dramatically over the past 10 years. This is due, in large part, to Congress passing bipartisan Head Start legislation in that included policies designed to strengthen teaching in Head Start programs and improve coordination between Head Start and other early childhood programs.
Each will be later topics in our blog series this month. Research that Diane Schanzenbach and I have published shows that the effect of Head Start extends to noncognitive skills and persists into how participants parent their children: overall and particularly among African American participants, we find that Head Start also causes social, emotional, and behavioral development that becomes evident in adulthood measures of self-control, self-esteem, and positive parenting practices.
New research by Chloe Gibbs and Andrew Barr find intergenerational effects of Head Start along the same lines of the Heckman work — the children of those who were exposed to Head Start saw reduced teen pregnancy and criminal engagement and increased educational attainment.
While some have taken the initial Head Start Impact Study reports at face value, the new and carefully designed reanalyses of the Head Start Impact Study teach us not only about the positive impacts of Head Start, but about research design considerations as experiments in education become more prevalent. The Head Start Impact Study reanalyses and the decades of research on Head Start show that on a variety of outcomes from kindergarten readiness to intergenerational impacts, Head Start does work, particularly for students who otherwise would not be in center-based care.
Brown Center Chalkboard. The Brown Center Chalkboard launched in January as a weekly series of new analyses of policy, research, and practice relevant to U. In July , the Chalkboard was re-launched as a Brookings blog in order to offer more frequent, timely, and diverse content. Contributors to both the original paper series and current blog are committed to bringing evidence to bear on the debates around education policy in America.
Read papers in the original Brown Center Chalkboard series ». Related T. Sawhill , Jeffrey Tebbs , and William T. Armor and Grover J. Brown Center Chalkboard The Brown Center Chalkboard launched in January as a weekly series of new analyses of policy, research, and practice relevant to U. More on Education. Education Plus Development Holiday shopping in gender-neutral toy aisles? Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Across the whole sample, we find that attending Head Start increases later reported self-esteem by 0.
These gains were especially prominent for African American students, as well as for those whose mothers did not complete high school when compared to siblings who did not go to any preschool. Finally, we look at the effect of Head Start on the next generation through its impact on parenting practices. We find that Head Start causes participants to invest more in their own children years after their participation in the program.
Results were more mixed when Head Start attendees were compared to siblings who did not attend preschool, with statistically significant impacts overall and for African Americans but not for Hispanics, whites or children of mothers with less than a high school education. The research literature is increasingly documenting that experiences during childhood can profoundly influence later-life outcomes, and that interventions during childhood can generate cost-effective improvements in life circumstances.
This economic analysis extends what we know about the long-term impacts of Head Start, thereby contributing to the current debate about preschool policies. We find that Head Start not only enhances eventual educational attainment, but also has a lasting positive impact on behavioral outcomes including self-control and self-esteem.
Furthermore, it improves parenting practices—potentially providing additional benefits to the next generation. As described in the text, in this analysis we compare siblings who went to Head Start with those who went to a different type of preschool and those who did not attend any program. The Appendix Table below shows a series of descriptive statistics. First, in the left panel we show how Head Start children are different from other children when compared across different families—an approach not taken in this analysis.
They also have worse child-specific characteristics, including measures of birth weight and early childhood health. In the right panel, we show descriptive statistics across siblings by their preschool attendance—that is, the approach taken in this study. Here we find small and not statistically significant differences across siblings.
In other word, the sibling who attended Head Start was not systematically more or less disadvantaged in terms of measures of birth weight and early childhood health, nor did the mother or family exhibit different time-varying characteristics such as educational attainment, or income level when the Head Start participant was a child.
This is strong evidence that the study design employed here is valid. The bottom panel repeats the exercise with the children of the siblings impacted by Head Start, again finding strong cross-family differences but small and insignificant differences when the between-sibling comparison is done.
The sample is limited to those respondents who were aged 28 or above in their most recent sample year and who did not attrite after the survey year.
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