Brookings: Topics - Head Start

@ Brookings Podcast: The Forces at Work in Education Reform

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:52:00 -0400

As children head back to school for a new term, the director of the Brown Center on Education policy at Brookings, Grover "Russ" Whitehurst discusses the forces at work in reforming the nation’s education system and the legislative agenda facing Congress and the White House. After the reforms of "No Child Left Behind" in the Bush administration, and President Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative, what new directions should federal policy direct toward local schools?

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The Forces at Work in Education Reform

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@ Brookings Podcast: The Forces at Work in Education Reform

Reforming Early Education

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

August 22, 2011
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Full video archive of this event is available via CSPAN here.

On August 22, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings convened a group of experts and practitioners to discuss reforms of early education programs in the United States. A discussion with Dr. Steven Barnett of Rutgers on how preschool programs, including Head Start, should be reformed based on his article “Effectiveness of Early Educational Intervention” that appeared in the August 19 issue of the journal Science. Dr. Barnett’s presentation was followed by an overview of the Obama Administration’s Head Start reform agenda by Yvette Sanchez Fuentes of the Administration for Children and Families. The presentations were followed by brief reactions from Dr. Jerlean Daniel of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Dr. Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago and Yasmina Vinci of the National Head Start Association. A panel discussion moderated by Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children & Families, followed.

After the discussion, participants took audience questions.

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Reforming Early Education

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Participants

Panelists

W. Steven Barnett

Professor and Co-Director, National Institute for Early Education (NIEER)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Yvette Sanchez Fuentes

Director, Office of Head Start
Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Jerlean Daniel

Executive Director
National Association for the Education of Young Children

Jens Ludwig

Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy, University of Chicago
Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Yasmina Vinci

Executive Director
National Head Start Association

Investing in Young Children: New Directions in Federal Preschool and Early Childhood Policy

W. Steven Barnett and Ron Haskins — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

New rules recently proposed by the Obama administration aim to force improvements in the near half-century old Head Start program - an $8 billion per year federal initiative that accomplishes much less than some other preschool programs that boost child development and learning. This new collection of papers issued assesses federal policies for early childhood education and child care, and includes ways to reform Head Start and other early education programs to make them better targeted, more effective, and provide better taxpayer bang-for-the buck in these tough fiscal times.

Co-edited by Brookings Senior Fellow Ron Haskins and W. Steven Barnett of Rutgers University's National Institute for Early Education Research, Investing in Young Children: New Directions in Federal Preschool and Early Childhood Policy focuses on Early Head Start, Head Start, and home visiting. The editors recommend promising reforms for all three programs, including closing ineffective Head Start centers or giving other program operators the opportunity to compete for Head Start funds, and offering a few states broad regulatory relief to innovate and coordinate Head Start with other state preschool educational programs and child care.

Introduction: New Directions for America’s Early Childhood Policies » (PDF)
Ron Haskins and W. Steven Barnett argue that there has never been a better time to review early childhood education policy and to propose new directions. They say most of the major federal policies have been in effect for at least a decade, providing adequate time to judge their value after full implementation; some trimming or coordination between the programs would help eliminate the programs' similar or overlapping purposes. In addition, Congress is likely to start reducing spending on many programs in its attempt to move the federal budget, which is on an unsustainable path in the long term, toward balance. Finally, states are in deep fiscal trouble as well. Despite all these barriers to new spending, the Obama administration has made a commitment to improving early childhood programs and has proposed expanding federal support for some of these programs.

Getting the Most out of Early Head Start: What Has Been Accomplished and What Needs to be Done » (PDF)
John M. Love and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn focus on the modest impacts on a range of child and parent outcomes including cognitive, language, and social-emotional development as well as attention and engagement, noting that some, such as increased attention and reduced behavioral problems, were observed even two years after the end of the program (at age 5), although the effects on vocabulary (except for a few subgroups) and school-related cognitive abilities in literacy and mathematics did not continue. The authors also emphasize the importance of impacts on parenting and the home environment from ages 14 months through age 5 years.

Ten Ideas for Improving Early Head Start—and Why the Program Needs Them » (PDF)
Nicholas Zill argues that the Early Head Start's impacts are mostly quite small, that many expected outcomes measured at the various assessment points did not materialize, and that many of the positive impacts were found only on parent reports while direct assessments of the same or related measures showed no differences. He concludes that the "lack of sustained impacts in critical areas of children's cognitive and language development tells us that the program is not succeeding."

Leave No (Young) Child Behind: Prioritizing Access in Early Education » (PDF)
Jens Ludwig and Deborah A. Phillips argue that while the impacts of Head Start are modest, something is better than nothing - it is worthwhile and provides children with a boost, however small, that can be detected well into the teenage years and after. They propose ensuring as many children as possible receive a preschool program that is at least as good as Head Start.

Head Start: Strategies to Improve Outcomes for Children Living in Poverty » (PDF)
Craig T. Ramey and Sharon Landesman Ramey write that far too many Head Start centers are ineffective because they are of such low quality, and that despite these facts being known for years, a "culture of silence" about the program's shortcomings has protected it from being cut. In fact, Head Start's budget has grown every year from 1970 to the present under both Republican and Democratic administrations with the exception of level funding in 1975 and small declines in 1986 and 2008.

The Nurse-Family Partnership » (PDF)
David Olds is fully supportive of the current federal policy approach that focuses on low-income, first-time mothers and concentrates most of its spending on programs with the strongest empirical evidence of effectiveness.

Strengthening Home-Visiting Intervention Policy: Expanding Reach, Building Knowledge » (PDF)
Deborah Daro and Kenneth A. Dodge strongly object to adopting the Olds approach because they believe that many families will be left out, that other programs have good evidence of effectiveness, and that more effort should be placed on screening to determine who needs more extensive home visiting. They argue for a universal program of home visiting that would serve as a screening program to determine which mothers and babies need additional help, as opposed to the current program which potentially leaves out more than 90 percent of newborns. They cite evidence that the per child cost of the type of screening they favor would be around $200. But whether their proposals could prevent abuse and neglect, and improve child development, is largely untested.

Coordinating America’s Highly Diversified Early Childhood Investment Portfolio » (PDF)
Walter S. Gilliam recommends letting state pre-K programs continue to expand and eventually serve all 4-year-olds or at least all low-income 4-year-olds. Head Start could then focus on what Gilliam says it does best: namely, provide comprehensive services, work with parents, and conduct home visits. He also raises the possibility that Head Start could focus its attention on 3-year-olds and children under age 3 and calls for closer cooperation between child care programs and high-quality programs that provide services for only part of each day.

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Authors

W. Steven Barnett
Ron Haskins

Publication: The Brookings Institution, National Institute for Early Education Research

Image Source: © Rick Wilking / Reuters

Federal Policies for Improving the Head Start Program

Ron Haskins — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:10:00 -0400

The Obama administration announced changes aimed to improve the Head Start program – an $8 billion per year federal initiative that accomplishes much less than some other preschool programs that boost child development and learning. A new collection of papers co-edited by Ron Haskins, senior fellow and co-director of the Center on Children and Families at Brookings, assesses federal policies for early childhood education, and includes ways to reform these programs to make them better targeted, more effective, and provide better taxpayer bang-for-the buck in these tough fiscal times.

Head Start is Not Effective
Head Start is the biggest of the programs. We spend about $8 billion federal dollars every year on Head Start and it enrolls something like 900,000 (it is difficult to count and depends on when you count during the year because kids go in and out, but around 900,000), so it is a very big program. It has been in existence since 1965, so the charge that is has not had time to blossom is not correct. And yet evaluations have shown(especially recent and by far the best that have been done so far) that it produces very modest impacts at the end of the program year, when you would expect impacts to be the biggest, but at the end of the first year of school, there are virtually no impacts. So Head Start really leaves some questions. We are spending $8 billion on a program that does not produce very big outcomes.

Head Start's Political Turning Point
Head Start has been, more or less, untouchable for many years, primarily because Members of Congress are sympathetic to programs for children. And Head Start, over the years, has been built up as probably one of the only successful war-on-poverty programs. Over the years, every time someone tried to even criticize Head Start (and there was an onslaught of people who said 'it doesn't work') [others would say] "it's a good program," and "be quiet."

A second factor that I think is really important is that the evidence has been pretty equivocal. You could not make a strong case that Head Start produces these wonderful impacts, but you could make a moderate case [that it does], and you could make a moderate case that it did not produce very good impacts. In this regard, I think the real turning point was that a bunch of the states - 42 to be exact - created their own pre-school programs primarily for poor kids (some of them are universal all-kids schools, but mostly they are for poor kids). Now why would the states do that, since Head Start already has the program for poor kids? So the states were thinking that "it is not performing that well" also.

Now is the Time to Change Head Start
Now is a great time to be looking carefully at these programs; in fact, that is why we published this book at this point because we wanted to look at a broad sweep of the pre-school programs. The first reason it is important is because these programs have been around for a long time. They have had a chance to really mature, and so it is not like they are brand new programs that we really don't know if they are not fully implemented yet. They are implemented. They have been implemented for a long time, so now let's find out if they are really working. That is the first thing.

The second thing is the Obama administration, probably more than any previous administration, is really focused on the pre-school area. They have a lot of very good people in the administration. They have already shown they are really focused on pre-school, so now is the time to figure out if these programs are not working, and make changes when we have people in the administration. The president would really like to do that.

The third reason is that we are going to be cutting programs over the next who knows how many years. At some point, Congress must start cutting programs, because of our huge budget deficit that is just not sustainable. And when that happens, of course, we want to cut bad programs and not good ones. So that is a reason to sort through these programs and figure out "well that's pretty good - let's keep it," or "cut it only a little," or "this one's pretty bad - let's end it or cut it a lot." So that is another reason that this is a very, very good time to be looking at these programs very carefully.

Ways to Improve Fed Preschool
Our main recommendations on Head Start? We have two big recommendations - one of which, interestingly, the administration is already in the process of implementing (it wasn't when we recommended it). And that is they should re-compete unsuccessful Head Start programs, so let the market help. That is a radical proposal. People have tried to do things along those lines before. Congress has already indicated that it supports it, so I think that is going to happen. The regulation is out. It will maybe be six months before things really get rolling, but that is a very important one.

Then the other one, even more radical, is to give states more control over Head Start because they already have their own pre-school programs, and several others in the pre-school area like day care programs. So if they could better coordinate Head Start and these other programs we might get more bang for the buck.

Probably, the other most important recommendation applies to Early Head Start, and here we think the evidence is that the program is not working very well. It is not clear exactly what the program is doing. So the administration needs to try new things, and carefully evaluate them, and develop a new model (or maybe three or four models) for how it would be best to implement an Early Head Start program with children who are three, or two, or even one. So those are our three, I think, most important recommendations.

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Ron Haskins

Finally, the Obama Administration Is Putting Head Start to the Test

W. Steven Barnett and Ron Haskins — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:12:00 -0400

Head Start, the nation's most important education program for 3- and 4-year-olds, is failing too many poor students. Although no program can completely compensate for the negative effects of poverty and family background, a substantial number of Head Start programs are so ineffective that they do little or nothing to boost child development and learning. A recent evaluation sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that at the end of the first year of school, children who had attended Head Start did no better than similar children who did not attend Head Start. The bottom line is that taxpayers get little for their annual investment of $8 billion in Head Start.

No wonder, then, that last month the Obama administration took the strongest action in the history of the Head Start program to force improvements. The administration decided to follow the recommendation of a panel of experts appointed at Congress's behest in 2007 to propose a system for improving or shutting down failing Head Start programs. The panel reported its recommendation to HHS at the end of the Bush administration. Now, the Obama administration has shaken the dust off the report and is proposing a system, even better than the one recommended by the panel, to shut down failing programs.

Here's how it would work: Each of the nation's local Head Start programs would be reviewed over the next three years. They would be evaluated by HHS based on seven criteria that measure program performance, fiscal integrity, and licensing standards and operations. By far the most important and telling part of the evaluation would be the use of a well-known rating instrument in which professional observers watch the teachers in Head Start classrooms and, based on reliable and well-defined ratings, gauge teachers' ability to provide emotional support and instruction to students. What happens between teachers and students in the classroom is the key ingredient in student learning. Thus, the administration's choice of this reliable and widely used teacher rating scale, developed by researchers at the University of Virginia, will provide the most important measure of quality.

What happens if, based on the evaluation and the classroom rating, the Head Start program does not measure up? The program would then be required to compete with other programs to keep its funding. The solution, in other words: Use the market to get rid of underperforming Head Start programs and fund new programs that hold more promise. If the new program did not perform, it would also lose the Head Start money.

To ensure that Head Start programs all over the country get the administration's message, the Obama reforms require that a minimum of 25 percent of all Head Start programs be exposed to competition from other programs each year. If the new programs are better than the ineffective Head Start programs they replace, the average quality of Head Start will increase each year and more children will be prepared for the rigors of public schooling.

For almost half a century, Head Start has led a charmed existence. Through Republican and Democratic administrations, through numerous federal budget crises that led to cuts in many programs, and despite growing indications that too many of its local programs were failing, Head Start has never been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that the Obama evaluation promises. Now it seems likely that within a few years, the worst Head Start programs will be shut down, replaced by energetic programs built on the realization that they must perform or lose their funding.

Numerous evaluations provide strong evidence that high-quality preschool programs can affect children's development in ways that radiate throughout childhood and even into adulthood. Yet the single biggest source of government investment in helping poor and minority children reap the advantages of preschool has been allowed to nurture mediocrity. Now, with both Democrats and Republicans, Congress and two administrations playing lead roles, the potential for change is finally at hand. It's almost enough to restore a person's faith in the federal government.

Authors

W. Steven Barnett
Ron Haskins

Publication: The Washington Post

Image Source: © POOL New / Reuters

We Need a New Start for Head Start

Jon Baron and Isabel V. Sawhill — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:36:00 -0500

In January, we learned that the $7 billion Head Start preschool program produces far fewer positive effects on participants' lives than its advocates have assumed. A rigorous study found that the program, after producing some initial gains during preschool, had almost no effect on children's cognitive, social-emotional, or health outcomes at the end of 1st grade, compared with a control group of children whose families had access only to the usual community services.

It would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that early-childhood education never works. Clearly some programs, including some individual Head Start centers, do. This is the 10th instance since 1990 in which an entire federal social program has been evaluated using the scientific "gold standard" method of randomly assigning individuals to a program or control group. Nine of those evaluations found weak or no positive effects, for efforts such as the $300 million Upward Bound program (academic preparation for at-risk high school students), and the $1.5 billion Job Corps program (job training for disadvantaged youths). Only one - Early Head Start, a sister program to Head Start for younger children - was found to produce meaningful but modest effects.

Meanwhile, the problems these programs are designed to address have not gone away. The nation's official poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent-higher than in 1973. Similarly, the country has made very limited progress in raising K-12 reading, math, or science achievement over the past 35 years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress' long-term-trend reporting. Advances have been made in some areas of social policy, such as reducing rates of teenage pregnancy and violent crime, but in many key areas progress has been minimal.

A new approach is needed. One that has been suggested- defunding these programs-would amount to giving up the fight against major social problems such as educational failure and poverty that damage millions of American lives. A far better alternative is to use rigorous evidence about "what works" to evolve Head Start and other federal efforts into truly effective programs over time, and to use sophisticated models to trace their longer-term effects on children's life prospects.

This approach draws on the insight that most of these programs are actually broad funding streams that finance multiple models and strategies ("interventions"). Although evaluations may show that the program as a whole has little or no positive effect, certain specific interventions within it may indeed be effective. An example of this in preschool education is Project Upgrade, a Miami-Dade County, Fla., initiative that trained teachers of low-income preschoolers in language and literacy instruction. Its interventions were shown in a large randomized evaluation to increase the development of children's vocabulary and early reading skills by four to nine months over the course of a single school year, compared with the control group.

Other, nonpreschool examples of research-proven interventions include career academies in low-income high schools (shown to produce a long-term increase in earnings averaging $2,200 per year); the Success for All whole-school reform in grades K-2 (shown to increase schoolwide reading ability in 2nd grade by 25 percent to 30 percent of a grade level); the Nurse-Family Partnership, which provides nurse-visitation services to low-income first-time mothers (shown to produce sustained reductions of nearly 50 percent in child abuse and neglect); and the Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program (shown to produce 40 percent to 50 percent reductions in teenage girls' pregnancies and births).

Such instances of proven effectiveness are rare, in part because rigorous evaluations are still uncommon in most areas of social policy, including education. But their very existence suggests that evidence-based reforms in Head Start and other federal social programs could help them evolve to become much more effective.

One straightforward reform, which could be done within President Barack Obama's proposed spending freeze, would be for Congress to allocate a small portion of funds in these programs toward rigorous evaluations to grow the number of proven interventions, and then to provide strong incentives for recipients to adopt the proven interventions and put them into widespread use. The Obama administration has proposed such an approach in federal teen-pregnancy and home-visitation programs. It is clearly also needed in Head Start and other large federal programs that are not performing well.

In the field of medicine, an evidence-based approach based on randomized evaluations has produced amazing improvements in human health over the past 50 years. Such evaluations have, on the one hand, stunned the medical community by overturning widely accepted practices, such as hormone-replacement therapy for postmenopausal women (shown to increase the risk of heart disease and breast cancer) and stents to open clogged arteries (shown as no better than drugs for most heart patients).

But, on the other hand, the evaluations have provided the conclusive evidence of effectiveness for most of the major medical advances, including vaccines for polio, measles, and hepatitis B; effective treatments for hypertension and high cholesterol; and cancer treatments that have dramatically improved survival rates from leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, breast cancer, and many other cancers.

The American public is increasingly concerned about the way their tax dollars are being spent. A clear shift in direction, based on proven-effective strategies, could turn programs such as Head Start into potent, rather than ineffectual, forces against the major problems facing the nation.

Authors

Jon Baron
Isabel V. Sawhill

Publication: Education Week

Supporting Young Children and Families: An Investment Strategy That Pays

Julia B. Isaacs — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:44:00 -0500

Increasingly, research has demonstrated that investing in high-quality services for young children and their parents produces significant returns, both to individuals and to the larger economy. For instance, biomedical research shows that the development of neural pathways in the brains of infants and toddlers is influenced by the quality of their interactions with other people and their surroundings. Rigorous evaluations of a number of early childhood programs reinforce the lessons of brain research. Children who participate in effectively designed preschool programs achieve more in elementary school, are less likely to be held back a grade or to need special education, and are more likely to graduate from high school. Addressing gaps in skills at an early age gives more children from disadvantaged families a fighting chance to achieve the American Dream.

Despite this growing body of research on the importance of the early years on development and achievement, the federal government has provided little direct support to young children and families. However, there has been a significant change at the state government level, with a majority of states adopting public pre-kindergarten programs and other forms of early childhood intervention. In addition, attitudes toward public investment in the pivotal early childhood years are shifting, and the time is ripe for federal leadership in developing policies to support young children and their families as a key part of a domestic policy agenda. Below, I outline three policy proposals that have proved cost-effective and that can help to reduce burdens on young families.

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Julia B. Isaacs

Publication: The Brookings Institution and First Focus

Supporting Young Children and Families: An Investment that Pays

Julia B. Isaacs — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:00:00 -0400

SUMMARY

In the United States, public investment in children typically does not begin until they are age five or six and enter a public school system. Until that time, we regard the care of young children as the almost exclusive domain of parents, relying on them to provide a good environment – one that will promote healthy physical, intellectual, psychological, and social development. Good care early in life helps children to grow up acquiring the skills to become tomorrow’s adult workers, caregivers, taxpayers, and citizens.

Yet today, many parents, early in their own careers and family life, are stretched thin, in both time and money, trying to care for their young children. Whether a single mother working the night-shift at a fast-food restaurant, or a busy executive dashing home before the child care center closes, parents across the socioeconomic spectrum struggle to balance both their children’s developmental needs and the demands of their employers.

For families with children under age six, time is especially scarce if both parents work or if there is a working single-parent. Yet, two-thirds of young families fit one of these models. Money is scarce for the 40 percent of these families that have incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line – less than $34,000 a year for a family of three. And, there is a double squeeze on the 22 percent of families where parents work outside the home and are low-paid.

Despite the challenges facing young families, the federal government has provided little direct support. At the state government level, however, there has been a significant change. A majority of states have now adopted public pre-kindergarten programs and other forms of early childhood intervention. Attitudes toward public investment in the pivotal early childhood years are shifting, and the time is ripe for a new president to provide federal leadership in developing policies to support young children and their families as a key part of his domestic policy agenda.

The president should work with Congress to expand early childhood programs that have proved cost-effective and to promote tax and workplace policies to reduce burdens on young families. More specifically, he should:

Provide federal funding for high-quality, center-based preschool programs for three- and four-year-old children, that are open to any family that wishes to enroll a child and fully subsidized for the poorest families;
Send nurse home visitors into the homes of all first-time pregnant women in economically impoverished families to promote sound prenatal care and the healthy development of infants and toddlers through age two; and
Support young families at all income levels through a federal-state initiative to provide up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave after birth or adoption.

View the entire volume: “Big Ideas for Children: Investing in Our Nation’s Future” »

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Julia B. Isaacs

Publication: First Focus

Impacts of Early Childhood Programs

Julia B. Isaacs and Emily Roessel — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:14:43 -0400

OVERVIEW

From neuroscientists to economists, a range of researchers have focused attention on the critical importance of children’s early years. At the same time, business, education, and political leaders have underscored the goal of ensuring that young children enter school “ready to learn,” so that they can succeed in school and as the next generation of workers and citizens. Ideals of equal opportunity provide further impetus for addressing gaps in skills at early ages, so that children from disadvantaged families have a fighting chance to achieve the American Dream.

As a result, there have been increasing calls on federal and state policy-makers to expand public investments in early childhood education. The goal of this set of research briefs, Impacts of Early Childhood Programs, is to provide policy-makers with a user-friendly summary of up-to-date, high-quality evidence on several early childhood interventions and their impact on children and families.

New research on early childhood programs continues to emerge. Recent studies demonstrate that state pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs have had positive effects on children’s readiness to learn, with large impacts in some states. Findings from the National Head Start Impact Study, released in 2005, provide more rigorous evidence than previously existed of Head Start’s positive impacts on children. An earlier national evaluation of Early Head Start also found a range of small positive impacts on very young children’s cognitive skills, behavior, and health.

Long-lasting impacts of early childhood model programs from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are still being reported in follow-up studies. Children participating in Chicago Child-Parent Centers were followed to age 24 in a study released last year, and a 2005 study tracked former participants of Perry Preschools to age 40. Recently issued follow-up studies of nurse home visiting programs also document ongoing positive impacts several years after at-risk mothers and their infants graduate from the programs.

Child and family impacts for these five programs – State Pre-K, Head Start, Early Head Start, Model Early Childhood Programs, and Nurse Home Visiting – are summarized in Table 1 below. As shown in the table, all five early childhood education programs have had positive impacts on children’s cognitive skills and/or school outcomes, with the largest effects reported from some state pre-K programs and the model center-based programs.

Most early childhood interventions also have had positive impacts on children’s emotional and behavioral outcomes, including long-term reductions in criminal behavior. There also is some evidence of improvements in children’s health and safety, and some programs have had positive effects on the children’s parents.

Examples of specific improvements (e.g., reduction in special education, higher rates of high school graduation) are provided in the accompanying set of five research briefs, as well as information on the quality of research on each program and pertinent federal legislation. Taken individually or as a set, the research briefs provide evidence-based assessments of the effectiveness of five major early childhood interventions.

Individual Briefs:
State Pre-K »
Head Start »
Early Head Start »
Model Early Childhood Programs »
Nurse Home Visiting »

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Julia B. Isaacs
Emily Roessel

Invest More In Students Under Age 5

Julia B. Isaacs — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The back-to-school ritual leaves our youngest children behind. Federal investment in children does not start until age 5 or 6 when—ready or not—they enter kindergarten. Attitudes toward the pivotal early childhood years are shifting, and both presidential candidates should consider effective preschool programs in their domestic policy platforms.

Good care early in life helps children grow up with the skills to become tomorrow's adult workers, caregivers, taxpayers and citizens. Traditionally we have regarded the care of young children as the almost exclusive domain of parents. Yet many young parents today are stretched thin, trying to care for their children while early in their own careers and family life.

Whether a single mother working the night-shift at a fast-food restaurant or a busy executive dashing home before the child care center closes, parents across the country struggle to balance both their children's developmental needs and the demands of their employers. Too often, policy-makers view the need for child care, keeping children safe so that parents can work, as separate from preparing children to enter kindergarten ready to learn.

It is time to consolidate the existing patchwork of early childhood policies and programs and move them forward.

What is needed is a universal, but targeted pre-school program, under which the federal government would fund a half-day of high-quality prekindergarten services for children from low-income families and a partial (one-third) federal subsidy for services to children in higher-income families. Extended-day services should be available for children of working parents.

The estimated federal cost of such a proposal, if fully funded for all 3- and 4-year-olds whose families choose to participate, would be $18 billion a year. This includes $13.3 billion for the "free" part of the preschool program, $8.6 billion for the federal share of the partly subsidized part and $2.4 billion for "wrap-around" child care for working parents. Subtracting out the $6.5 billion currently provided through Head Start yields the $18 billion figure in new costs.

We know through rigorous evaluations that children who participate in effectively designed preschool programs achieve more in elementary school, are less likely to be held back a grade or to need special education and are more likely to graduate from high school. Program participants, later in life, have higher rates of employment, greater earnings, lower levels of criminal activity, and, in some studies, less use of welfare.

Commitment to the American ideal of equal opportunity is another strong motivation for government to invest in high-quality early education. Many of the racial, ethnic and income gaps found in school achievement begin before children set foot in kindergarten. Addressing gaps in skills at an early age gives more children from disadvantaged families a fighting chance to achieve the American dream.

A long-term goal would be to bring together the burgeoning public pre-K programs now found in most states with the existing federal Head Start program, forming an expanded national pre-K initiative that provides comprehensive, high-quality services to all three- and four-year-olds. Integration of Head Start with local early childhood education program is possible; almost one in five Head Start grantees is currently a local school district and most state pre-K programs have some classrooms in non-school settings.

Some institutional, philosophical and political barriers remain to integrating the services. Initially, the federal government might have to continue separate funding streams for Head Start and the new pre-K initiative. But eventually the two programs should be fused and have a single funding stream at the federal level.

More important, the next president should offer clear directives that early investments in children have enormous payoffs. If we want all children to enter school ready to learn, public investment in children cannot wait until kindergarten.

Authors

Julia B. Isaacs

Publication: Real Clear Politics

Candidate Issue Index: Children

Julia B. Isaacs — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:52:33 -0400

Compiled by Brookings Institution experts, this chart is part of a series of issue indices to be published during the 2008 Presidential election cycle. The policy issues included in this series were chosen by Brookings staff and represent the most critical topics facing America’s next President.

Available vote records and statements vary based on time in office.

The index displays the candidates from both major parties.

Open the Index »

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Candidate Views Series Index

Opportunity 08, a Brookings project in partnership with ABC News, aims to help presidential candidates and the public focus on critical issues facing the nation, providing ideas, policy forums, and information on a broad range of domestic and foreign policy questions. Brookings is an independent think tank (501c3) that does not support or oppose any candidate for public office. Voters should learn all they can about the candidates on a range of issues and should not rely on any single source of information before making their decision.

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Julia B. Isaacs

Investing in Early Education: Paths to Improving Children's Success

Ron Haskins — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:00:00 -0500

The Promise of High-Quality Preschool Programs

As members of this Committee know well, there is good evidence from scientific research that preschool education can be an effective tool in our nation's long struggle to reduce the achievement gap between poor children and children from non-poor families. Reducing the achievement gap holds great promise for reducing poverty in the long term and even for reducing inequality. Having spent many years studying social intervention programs, I think it is fair to say that there is no body of evidence on any social intervention that holds as much promise of producing as wide a range of positive effects as high-quality preschool programs.

Consider the evidence summarized in Tables 1 and 2 taken from work by Steven Barnett of the National Institute for Early Education Research and Clive Belfield of New York University. Table 1 shows that three of the best preschool programs ever conducted in the U.S. – the Abecedarian program in North Carolina, the Perry Preschool program in Michigan, and the Chicago Child-Parent Centers – produced major impacts on several measures of school performance, including special education placement, high school graduation, and even in one case college enrollment. Table 2 is equally impressive, showing that these high-quality preschool programs are capable of achieving even broader impacts on the well-being of children when they grow to adolescence and young adulthood. These broader impacts include reduced rates of teen pregnancy, better health, lower drug use, lower abortion rates, reduced criminal activity, and increases in lifetime earnings.

What Head Start Actually Accomplishes

The results from these three model programs have been used to argue that investments in preschool programs pay for themselves. But this claim ignores a major problem. The problem is that we have much less evidence that other programs can produce the types of impacts shown in Tables 1 and 2. Over the years, scholars, child advocates, and even members of Congress have made extravagant claims for the impacts that would be produced by investments in preschool education. The flaw in these claims is that just because small model programs with strong accountability components produce impressive impacts, it does not follow that every preschool program in which we invest money will produce similar impacts.

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Ron Haskins

Publication: House Committee on Education and Labor

Success By Ten: Intervening Early, Often, and Effectively in the Education of Young Children

Isabel V. Sawhill and Jens Ludwig — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Success by Ten is a proposed program designed to help every child achieve success in school by age ten. It calls for a major expansion and intensification of Head Start and Early Head Start, so that every disadvantaged child has the opportunity to enroll in a high-quality program of education and care during the first five years of his or her life. Because the benefits of this intensive intervention may be squandered if disadvantaged children go from this program to a low-quality elementary school, the second part of the proposal requires that schools devote their Title I spending to instructional programs that have proven effective in further improving the skills of children, especially their ability to read

The proposal is based on the principle that early intervention is particularly important because of the brain's unusual "plasticity" during a child's early years. Children from different family backgrounds currently experience very different types of learning environments during the early years. The result is that large disparities in cognitive and noncognitive skills are found along race and class lines well before children start school, even before they can enroll in the federal Head Start preschool program at age three or four years. Most of America's social policies try to play catch-up against these early disadvantages—and most disadvantaged children never catch up.

Findings from a number of rigorously conducted studies of early childhood and elementary school programs suggest that intervening early, often, and effectively in the lives of disadvantaged children from birth to age ten may substantially improve their life chances for higher educational attainment and greater success in the labor market, thereby helping impoverished children avoid poverty in adulthood. Another consequence would be to greatly improve the skills of tomorrow's workforce, thereby enhancing future economic performance. These benefits for children would be accompanied by benefits for their parents, many of whom work full time and need high-quality child care, such as the program would provide.

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Publication: Hamilton Project Discussion Paper, The Brookings Institution

Using Preschool to Close the Education Gap

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 14:00:00 -0400

Event Information

September 27, 2005
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

To introduce the Center on Children and Families, the Brookings Institution is honored to announce a public event featuring Governor Mark Warner of Virginia and Congressman Michael Castle (R-Delaware). Both distinguished guests addressed the important role quality preschool education plays in preparing poor and minority children for school.

Gov. Warner, an advocate for increased spending on education in Virginia and chair of the National Governors Association's initiative on Redesigning the American High School, has a strong record of educational leadership in his state and nationally.

Rep. Castle, as chair of the Subcommittee on Education Reform of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, plays a major role in oversight and reform of the Head Start program and other federal preschool programs.

After their presentations, Warner and Castle will respond to questions from a moderator as well as questions from the audience.

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20050927

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Strobe Talbott

President, The Brookings Institution

Hon. Michael Castle

U.S. Representative (R-Del.)

Hon. Mark Warner

Governor, Commonwealth of Virginia

Support State Experiments to Improve Head Start

Ron Haskins — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Billions of dollars are being spent on preschool education for the nation's poor children, and the effort is failing. Test scores from a representative sample of these children show that they are far behind their more advantaged peers when they enter school. Worse, national data on children who attended Head Start show that their academic skills and knowledge improve only slightly during the Head Start year. They still start school performing far below other students.

In response, the Bush administration and House Republicans have proposed allowing states to exert more control over Head Start to coordinate it with state preschool programs. House Democrats and other Head Start allies charged that Republicans were trying to destroy Head Start to save money. Republicans responded by proposing to allow only a few states to conduct demonstrations of coordinated funding. This proposal too was greeted with hostility, prompting Republicans to drop it. The status quo will be maintained, although Congress appears poised to require some long-term changes in Head Start teacher qualifications.

Four things are needed to improve the school readiness of poor children. First, Congress should clearly express its concern that poor and minority children are far behind and that Head Start is doing too little to eliminate the gap. Second, Congress should adopt a modified version of the Republican proposal by allowing a few states to experiment with improving preschool programs. To do so, states should be given the authority to coordinate Head Start funding with state funding of preschool education. But to be selected for this new authority, states should also be required to present a plan for how they will improve all preschool education in the state. The improvement plan could include better teacher training, better preschool curriculum, more parent involvement, more than one year of preschool attendance, or other reforms. Third, Congress should provide selected states with additional funding to implement their reforms. Fourth, Congress should pay for third-party evaluations of these state experiments.

With no serious changes in Head Start in prospect, and with splintered funding for preschool programs continuing, millions of poor and minority children will still be ill-prepared for the rigors of schooling. States that are now leading the charge in preschool education should be given the opportunity to coordinate all state and federal resources, to obtain new resources, and to experiment with new ways to achieve President Lyndon B. Johnson's original vision of poor and minority children entering school ready to compete.

Authors

Ron Haskins

Publication: CQ Researcher

Competing Visions

Ron Haskins — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Project Head Start was created during the heady, idealistic days of the mid-1960s. Through two seminal victories, the 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil-rights movement had won equality in the eyes of the law, but the economic and social legacies of centuries of slavery and racial discrimination remained. President Lyndon Johnson believed that it was the nation's duty to provide not just legal equality but also equality of opportunity. In his 1965 commencement address at Howard University, he called for the :next and more profound stage" in the civil-rights struggle. "We seek not just freedom but opportunity? not just equality as a right and theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result." Johnson's War on Poverty would include a host of initiatives designed to bring blacks and other disadvantaged Americans to what he called "the starting line" of American Life with the skills and abilities necessary to compete on a level playing field. The War on Poverty focused on education as a tool for upward mobility, and Head Start was to become one of the cornerstones of the federal effort.

The idea for Head Start, a preschool program for disadvantaged children, emerged from the observation that, on average, poor and minority children arrive at school already behind their peers in the intellectual skills and abilities required for academic achievement.These deficits in turn lead to poor performance in school, which narrows the economic opportunities disadvantaged children encounter when they become adults. In order to counteract the corrosive influences of turbulent neighborhoods, shoddy health care, and undereducated parents, Head Start would attempt to prepare children to flourish in school.

Nearly 40 years after its creation,Head Start has gained the favor of Democrats and Republicans alike. Its budget in 2003 was $6.7 billion, more than tripling (in real terms) since 1990 (see Figure 1 and Table 1). Real per-pupil spending increased from $1,380 in 1966 to $7,170 in 2002.However, despite Head Start's long history and ever-expanding budget, the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged, between white and minority, is still substantial, both during the preschool years and thereafter.This stubborn fact has caused many to question Head Start's strategies and direction.Housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start has in the past emphasized not just early education but also socialization and giving poor children and their families access to an array of nutritional, health, and social services.

Now the Bush administration has proposed reorienting the program to emphasize the acquisition of intellectual skills and to prepare poor kids for school. In order to achieve this objective, the administration is trying to align Head Start more closely with the public school system. After less than a year in office, President Bush implemented by administrative rule a program called "Good Start, Grow Smart," the central thrust of which is to instruct Head Start teachers across the nation in methods for improving school readiness.The program also helps local Head Start centers develop an accountability system that assesses children's learning in literacy, language, and numeracy. The administration had made an earlier proposal to move Head Start to the Department of Education, which would have signaled the program's new commitment to intellectual development. But after encountering fierce competition, in February 2003, the administration proposed an even more dramatic overhaul of Head Start. The plan is to turn control ofHead Start over to the states, as long as they commit to making school readiness the program's chief priority and to meet several other requirements.Currently, federal funds flow directly to local Head Start centers, which are run primarily by community- based groups. As a result, Head Start teachers, staff, and parents,working through the National Head Start Association in Washington, have viscerally opposed the administration's proposals, fearing the dilution ofHead Start's program of comprehensive services in favor of the focus on school readiness. They regard this as a repudiation of Head Start's historical mission as well as a threat to their control of the program. The Bush proposal, now before Congress, has rekindled a debate that began in 1964.

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Ron Haskins

Publication: Education Next

The Future of Head Start

Isabel V. Sawhill and Ron Haskins — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 12:00:00 -0400

The Nation's Dual System of Child Care and Preschool Education

There have been dramatic changes in both child care and preschool education in the nearly forty years since Head Start's birth. With the increase in labor force participation by mothers over this period, the need for child care increased apace. By 1970, about 40 percent of mothers were in the labor force; by 1985, over 60 percent; by 2000, over 70 percent. Although there have been numerous legislative campaigns since the early 1970s to create a universal federal child care program or to enact federal regulations that apply to most or all child care facilities, the federal government has not accepted general responsibility for either the financing or quality of child care. However, in 1990 the federal government did establish a major child care program for poor and low-income children called the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). The block grant provides nearly $5 billion yearly to states to help poor and low-income families (below 85 percent of state median income) pay for child care while parents are at work or school. In the face of congressional reluctance to create national standards, every state has enacted its own child care standards—standards that most child advocates feel are inadequate.

A central characteristic of state child care programs is that parents choose their own care. It follows that a diverse array of care—including centers, family child care in neighborhoods, and relative care—receives subsidies. Although many see market diversity as a strength of the system, others see it as chaos.

Alongside this bustling but arguably flawed child care market, a moderate but growing number of preschool programs aimed at stimulating school preparation have been created over the years. When Head Start began nearly forty years ago, very few children were in facilities that aimed specifically to prepare them for school. Forty states and the District of Columbia have either established their own preschool programs or have used state funds to expand Head Start. Some of the state preschool programs are elaborate, like those in Georgia, Oklahoma, and New York, while others are quite modest.

This brief overview shows that programs for preschool children have been driven primarily by two forces. First, the child care market exists largely to provide care for children while parents work or go to school. This market has facilities of diverse size and quality that are only lightly regulated. According to the Census Bureau, in 1999 there were as many as 13 million preschool children in market child care facilities. Research suggests that much of this care is of mediocre or poor quality, although a small fraction of the centers are of high quality and are probably the equivalent of preschool programs. By contrast, there is a second set of facilities designed specifically to prepare children for school. This sector includes Head Start and the preschool programs established in recent years by states. Perhaps as many as 1.5 million preschoolers are in these facilities, 900,000 in Head Start and the remainder in state-supported facilities. In addition, Head Start began a program in 1995 that provides child and family services to poor pregnant women and their children through age three. This Early Head Start program, however, enrolls only about 45,000 children.

Both child care and preschool education are important. Child care is essential to enable both single and married mothers and fathers to work. Employment in turn is central, not only to economic opportunity for women and to the health of the national economy, but also to the economic viability of families, especially mother-headed families. The 1996 welfare reform legislation that has been associated with remarkable increases in employment and earnings by low-income single mothers underlines the importance of this work support function of child care.

Preschool education programs are important because they help prepare low-income children for school. This issue bears emphasis. Since at least the 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson initiated the War on Poverty, a major goal of federal policy has been to improve the educational achievement of poor children. Now almost forty years later, we seem to have learned some hard lessons. Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on programs for poor preschool children, as a recent study by Valerie Lee and David Burkam of the University of Michigan shows, the school readiness gap between poor and more advantaged children persists. Not only do poor children enter school with serious educational deficits, but the achievement gap between poor and more advantaged children actually increases during the school years. President Johnson's goal of using preschool programs to bring all children to the same "starting line" as a strategy for equalizing educational opportunity goes largely unrealized.

Evidence on Effectiveness of Preschool Education

Even so, high quality preschool programs such as the Abecedarian program in North Carolina and the Perry Preschool project in Michigan have shown what is possible. High quality preschool can reduce grade retention, reduce placement in special education, increase high school graduation rates, increase college attendance, and produce a host of related effects. A preschool program in inner-city Chicago involving more than 1500 preschoolers conducted by Arthur Reynolds and others at the University of Wisconsin suggests that similar effects are possible in larger-scale programs.

But the effects of Head Start are not as clear. After nearly forty years of operation, there is not a national random-assignment evaluation of the long-term impacts of Head Start. A study of this type, ordered by Congress in 1997, is now underway, but even initial impacts will not be known until next year. Because high-quality studies that meet scientific criteria are not available, the Head Start literature is somewhat weak. A comprehensive review in 1985 found that most studies of Head Start were of very poor quality and would not permit reliable conclusions. But based on the best studies that existed at that time, the review concluded that Head Start produced immediate impacts on IQ, school readiness, and three measures of socioemotional development, but that the effects faded within a year or two of the time children entered the schools. Recent studies of Head Start are somewhat more encouraging. Janet Currie and her colleagues at UCLA have conducted two studies based on national data that show some effects of Head Start on the school achievement of white children, but no long-term effects on the school achievement of black students. The Currie studies did, however, show some effects on improving the health of black children as well as on reducing criminal behavior.

Results from the FACES surveys of Head Start youngsters and families in 1997 and 2000 are at best modestly encouraging. Perhaps the worst news coming from these surveys is that in both years, four- year-olds attending Head Start scored on average only slightly above the twentieth percentile on tests of vocabulary, letter recognition, early writing, and early mathematics. Better news is that these children scored slightly better at the end of the year on some skills and slightly improved their performance on letter recognition between 1997 and 2000. Even so, all the skill scores for both years were below the thirty-second percentile.

Two conclusions about preschool education seem justified. First, high quality preschool education can very substantially improve the school readiness and school performance of poor and minority children. Second, Head Start produces results that are more modest than the results produced by high-quality preschool education programs such as Abecedarian, Perry Preschool, and the Reynolds Child-Parent Center program in Chicago. Most observers, including researchers, think Head Start is a good program that needs improvement. More specifically, researchers and others point to the uneven quality among Head Start centers, the need to improve the quality of teachers, and the need for increased accountability for results. Against this background, the Bush administration has proposed a potentially radical reform of Head Start.

The Bush Proposal and Its Critics

President Bush proposes to give states the option of assuming control of Head Start and its funding. A major justification for the president's proposal is that increased coordination of Head Start and state preschool programs could lead to more efficient use of resources and greater accountability. Further, in order to gain control of Head Start funds, states would have to create a strong plan to focus all preschool programs on achieving the academic and social skills needed to succeed in school.

Thus, in order to take control of Head Start funds, a given state would have to agree to several conditions in a written proposal submitted to a Board composed of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Education. To be approved, the proposal must, among other requirements:

Explain how the state will work with the public schools to define the academic and social skills that five-year-olds must have to succeed in kindergarten

Provide a plan for developing preschool activities and materials that will help poor children acquire the academic and social skills needed to succeed in kindergarten

Outline a state accountability program for determining whether four-year-olds are acquiring these academic and social skills

Demonstrate that the state will continue to serve as many poor children as are currently being served by Head Start

Report the level of state funding of state preschool programs or Head Start supplements, and provide assurances that the state will continue spending at least an equivalent number of state dollars on preschool programs

Assure that the state will continue to provide comprehensive services that include social, family, and health services

Provide information on how the state will assure professional development among preschool teachers and administrators

Outline how the state will ensure coordination among Head Start, state preschool programs, Title I preschool programs, and other preschool programs in the state.

States that decide to accept the challenge of meeting all these conditions and assume control of Head Start would be provided with modest additional funds, paid out of the current technical assistance fund of $165 million controlled by HHS, to implement their state plan.

The Administration proposal requires states to find ways to do what Head Start has not done sufficiently—improve the school readiness of poor children. The Administration believes that states already have lots of incentive to improve preschool because of the rigors of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This Act requires states to test children in grades 3 through 8 and to publish the results in a form that reveals the performance of individual schools over time. Students attending schools that consistently fail are allowed to transfer to different schools. Many states, after reviewing years of experience with Title I and other programs designed to improve the school performance of poor and minority children, are concluding that they cannot be successful unless these children have a better preschool foundation. Hence the states' growing interest in improving and expanding preschool programs.

Critics of the Administration plan grant that Head Start has flaws, and that there are many individual programs that are of poor quality. But they argue that a large majority of Head Start programs are reasonably successful, and that it is unclear whether states could improve Head Start. They also contend that the process of turning over the program to states could harm Head Start and that the replacement programs developed by states might be worse.

Critics also contend that although coordination and efficiency may help states cover more children with the same amount of money, the size of this effect would probably be small. There is little evidence to determine whether the president's proposal will actually increase efficiency, and even less evidence to support any estimate of the number of additional children that could be served with the savings from increased efficiency. Certainly, expansion through efficiency could not be expected to allow states to cover all the 190,000 or so poor four-year-olds who are eligible but not enrolled in Head Start. Proponents of the Bush proposal respond that many of those 190,000 children are now in state preschool programs and many others are in child care paid for by the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Thus, nontrivial sums are already being spent on many of the poor four-year-olds who are not in Head Start, thereby reducing the cost of ensuring that all of them receive a high-quality program before entering the schools.

On balance, it seems very likely that additional funds will be needed if all children from poor families are to receive at least one year of preschool education. Nor is it clear that only children below the poverty level (about $15,000 for a family of three in 2003) need preschool education. If eligibility were moved to 125 percent of the poverty level, an additional 200,000 or so four-year-olds would become eligible and costs would increase by around $1.4 billion per year.

Many critics of the Bush proposal also believe that strengthening the impact of Head Start on school readiness will cost more money per child. The per-child cost of Head Start is now around $7,000 per year. States could reduce this cost by increasing classroom size, hiring teachers for lower salaries than Head Start teachers are paid (about $25,000 per year, including benefits), or through other means. Each of these approaches has drawbacks, however, and none has been demonstrated to be compatible with increased school readiness. Moreover, one of the major criticisms of Head Start is that its teachers are underqualified. A straightforward approach to improving teacher quality is to hire teachers with better qualifications. But this reform would increase the per-child cost of Head Start.

Finally, critics of the Administration proposal hold that preparing children for school is not the only purpose of good preschool programs. The current Head Start program provides comprehensive services that include health screening, dental checkups, and social services. In addition, most of the programs have parents who are active on their boards of directors and in providing assistance to classroom teachers, many of whom are themselves current or former Head Start parents.

Administration officials respond that their proposal requires states to maintain these comprehensive services and to explain in their application how they plan to do so. Further, states are responsible for administering most social service programs, thereby creating an opportunity for states to coordinate this array of services with Head Start at moderate cost. According to this view, there is little reason to worry that states will reduce the comprehensive services of the current Head Start program.

Recommendations

Perhaps the best arguments for the Bush proposal are that Head Start does not now achieve the goal of adequately preparing poor and minority children for school, and that states would have the authority to coordinate all the major preschool programs in order to increase efficiency and improve the school readiness of poor children. The evidence indicates that the average child in Head Start is probably somewhat better prepared for school than she would be without Head Start. Even so, national data show unequivocally that poor children as a group are substantially behind their more fortunate peers when they enter the schools, and that they fall further behind during the elementary school years. Given the vital importance of education to achieving equality of opportunity, the nation must find ways to improve both preschool education and the K through 12 school system. The president's plan requires states to take all the reasonable actions that would be expected to improve the school readiness of poor children, including improved curriculum, better coordination with the public schools, and increased accountability.

Though reasonable, the president's plan is untested. Moreover, the Head Start program is better than many preschool programs and much better than the average child care program. Head Start has also achieved high levels of parental involvement and even produced some evidence of lasting effects on health and school performance. In short, turning Head Start over to the states carries risks.

Thus, we recommend that Congress enact legislation this year that would allow up to five states to implement the president's proposal. In addition to the conditions states must meet under the president's plan, a further condition for state participation should be an agreement to cooperate with a five-year, third-party evaluation of state reforms. States would have a year of planning before they begin implementation, during which time the third-party evaluator would be selected and the evaluation plan established. Where possible, the plan should call for random assignment. The secretaries of HHS and Education would be responsible for working with the evaluators and the states to develop a common set of performance measures that would be used to test children across all the demonstration programs—as well as children from states still operating under the regular Head Start program. The federal government would pay for the evaluations.

Although the president's plan does not require states to coordinate with child care programs to participate in the demonstration, the secretaries should be encouraged to select at least one state that would attempt to coordinate its Head Start, state preschool, Title I, CCDBG child care, and perhaps even its preschool programs for disabled youngsters. States are now spending almost $9 billion on child care of uncertain quality through the CCDBG. Perhaps states could begin demonstrating how to coordinate their preschool and child care programs in such a way as to create or strengthen the school readiness component of child care programs. Recent experience in North Carolina and other states seems to show that operators of child care facilities, including informal family child care facilities, are quite willing to receive advice on how to improve their programs.

This demonstration plan represents a reasonable compromise between those who are concerned that the quality and even existence of Head Start would be jeopardized by turning responsibility for the program over to states, and those who believe that states can improve preparation for school through increased coordination and accountability. Given the immensity of the task and the modest success achieved thus far, new ideas are worth trying.

Conclusion

Scholars have long noted that families and neighborhoods play a major part in child development and school readiness. Whether a preschool program can completely overcome the deficits poor children acquire from their home environments is an open question. Expecting a one-year preschool program to overcome the huge gap in school readiness between poor and more fortunate children may be unreasonable. Indeed, some researchers and educators have concluded that more than one year of high quality preschool education will be required to reduce the school readiness gap, and that even such interventions will need to begin well before the age of three or four. One consequence of this conclusion would be the need for substantial additional funding. Finally, no matter what the outcome of these demonstrations, and even without the need for two or more years of preschool, additional funds will almost certainly be necessary to provide all poor children with at least a year of high quality preparation for schooling.

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Head Start's Future: Perspectives from the Bush Administration, Congress, States, Advocates, and Researchers

Wed, 07 May 2003 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

May 7, 2003
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

The Head Start program, established in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of his War on Poverty, is one of the nation's best known and most popular domestic programs. The program, which currently serves over 900,000 children and has a budget of nearly $7 billion, is up for reauthorization this year.

Under current law, funds for Head Start go directly from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to local grantees, bypassing states. President Bush has proposed to give states the option of controlling Head Start funds and integrating the Head Start program with other preschool programs. In order to obtain control of Head Start funds, states would have to present a plan that, among other requirements, shows how they would prepare poor children to succeed in the public schools.

The Brookings Welfare Reform & Beyond Initiative sponsored a public forum to discuss this proposal and its implications. The forum brought together policy-makers from the Bush administration and Capitol Hill with researchers and child advocates to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the Bush proposal and discuss the future of Head Start.

Panel 1: Overview of Administration Plan and Reaction from Capitol Hill

Margaret Spellings
Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, The White House

U.S. Representative Michael N. Castle (R-DE)

U.S. Representative George Miller (D-CA)

Panel 2: The Role of States and Communities

Edward Zigler
Sterling Professor of Psychology, Yale University

Henry L. Johnson
Superintendent of Education, State of Mississippi

Ron Herndon
Director, Albina Head Start Program, Portland Oregon

Helen Blank
Consultant, Child Care Strategies

Panel 3: What Does the Research Tell Us?

James J. Gallagher
Kenan Professor of Education, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Lynn Karoly
Director of Labor and Population Program and Professor of Economics, RAND

Craig T. Ramey
Distinguished Professor in Health Studies and Director of the Georgetown Center on Health and Education, Georgetown University

Transcript

Event Materials

Refocus Head Start on its Mission: Education

Diane Ravitch — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 00:00:00 -0500

When I was a young parent, I read to my children every day. When walking in the neighborhood, we read shop signs. They quickly learned letters and new words, and they were good readers by the time they started school. The children of parents who read with them regularly begin school with larger vocabularies than those children whose parents do not have the time or education to introduce them to literacy. The Head Start program was created in 1964 to give poor children the same kinds of educational opportunities that their more-advantaged peers get informally at home. Unfortunately, over the years, the program has abandoned its focus on education in favor of an array of social services, nutrition and counseling. After nearly 40 years and many billions of dollars, Head Start children still begin kindergarten far behind children from middle-class homes on measures of school readiness.

Most Head Start teachers do not have a college degree and are poorly paid. A large proportion of them are parents of Head Start students. As if to echo the program's isolation from educational goals, it is located in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, not in the Department of Education.

The last evaluation of the program, conducted in 1998, found that the typical entering student could not identify a single letter of the alphabet. At the end of a year, the same child could identify only one or two letters and had learned only 11 new words. Head Start children were not learning these skills because their teachers were not teaching them.

Head Start has no standard curriculum for school readiness, and the centers receive no guidance about which skills and knowledge to teach. Instead, Head Start prides itself on its extreme decentralization, regardless of its lack of success in preparing children for school experiences.

The Bush administration is trying to change this situation by proposing that Head Start teachers be trained in literacy techniques. Remarkably, leaders of many Head Start centers are opposed to the new emphasis on literacy. Some are even refusing to participate in literacy training.

Head Start will never fulfill its original promise until the program recognizes its responsibility to give disadvantaged children what advantaged children receive every day: immersion in reading, an enlarged vocabulary and the joy of learning. Head Start cannot close the cognitive gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged children until it has better-educated teachers, better-paid teachers and a determination to prepare its nearly 1 million students for school.

Authors

Diane Ravitch

Publication: The Wichita Eagle

A Fresh Start for Head Start?

Janet Currie — Thu, 01 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -0500

When Congress and the new administration debate the future of Head Start, the public preschool program for poor children, the questions will be whether the program works and whether it should place more emphasis on specific academic goals, such as reading readiness, as President George W. Bush has argued. The debate may also revolve around whether the government should increase funding for Head Start so that more low-income children can attend, or move toward support of a universal preschool program, as advocated by Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign. The best available evidence suggests that:

The program is associated with short-term gains in cognitive skills as well as longer-term gains in school completion, and even greater gains are possible if children receive good follow-up in the early grades.
Head Start may have focused too heavily on social supports at the expense of language and literacy training, but children need to acquire both cognitive and noncognitive skills before they enter school.
Given evidence that disadvantaged children are the ones most in need of a preschool experience, priority should be given to expanding Head Start rather than to funding universal preschool.
Although Head Start centers vary in quality, on average they are better than privately-run child care centers, have achieved short-term benefits, and would pay for themselves if they produced even a fraction of the long-term benefits associated with model programs. For this reason, they merit some expansion and greater attention paid to their quality.

What Is Head Start?

Head Start aims to improve the skills of disadvantaged children so that they can begin schooling on an equal footing with their more advantaged peers. Begun in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty," Head Start now serves almost 800,000 children in predominantly part-day programs, according to 1999 data from the Administration on Children, Youth and Families.

Though the program is large, enrollment represents only about 35 percent of eligible poor three- and four-year-old children. The program is not an entitlement, but is funded by an annual appropriation, which means that when funds run out, eligible children cannot be served. Head Start is a popular program—the number of children served and federal appropriations grew during both the Bush and Clinton administrations, as shown in Figures 1 and 2.

Head Start is run at the local level, but local operators are subject to federal quality guidelines. These guidelines specify that Head Start is to provide a wide range of services in addition to providing a good learning environment. For example, Head Start is required to facilitate and monitor utilization of preventive medical care by participants, as well as to provide nutritious meals and snacks. Head Start programs also emphasize parental involvement, and many provide a wide range of services to parents.

According to a 1995 report from the General Accounting Office, Head Start has served as a model for public preschools targeted to low-income children in states such as California and also for new (voluntary) universal preschool programs in Georgia and New York. In 1999, the Children's Defense Fund reported that as of the 1998-99 school year, 724,610 children were participating in state-funded enriched preschool programs. Thus, the number of children in state-funded initiatives is roughly equal to the number in Head Start.

Does Head Start Work?

Most of the evidence regarding the long-term effectiveness of early intervention comes not from evaluations of Head Start, but from studies of "model" early intervention programs such as the famous Perry Preschool project, which took place in Michigan between 1962 and 1967, or the Carolina Abecedarian project, conducted in North Carolina from 1972 to 1985. The results from these two interventions have been particularly impressive and influential.

In the Carolina Abecedarian Project, children were randomized into a treatment group that received enriched center-based child care services for eight hours per day, five days a week, fifty weeks per year, from birth to age five, and a control group that did not receive these services. The teacher/student ratio ranged from 1:3 to 1:6, depending on the child's age. Upon entering school the children were again randomized into two groups. One received no further intervention, and the other had a "Home School Resource Teacher," who provided additional instruction, a liaison between parents and the school, and served as a community resource person for the family. The investigators have now completed a follow-up assessment of the Abecedarian children at age 21. At age 21, the children who received the preschool treatment had higher average tests scores and were twice as likely to have stayed in school or to have ever attended a four-year college than children who did not.

The Perry Preschool Project intervention involved a half-day preschool every weekday plus a weekly 90-minute home visit, both for eight months of the year, for two years. Teacher/student ratios were one to six, and all teachers had master's degrees and training in child development. As of age 27, the intervention had positive effects on achievement test scores, grades, high school graduation rates, and earnings, as well as negative effects on crime rates and welfare use.

While these results are impressive, it is important to keep in mind that the typical Head Start program spends less per child, uses less qualified staff, and has higher student-teacher ratios than these model programs. Moreover, because Head Start is run at a local level, there is wide variation among Head Start centers in their levels of teacher training, relative emphasis on parent involvement vs. classroom activities, and curriculum. Thus, results from model intervention programs cannot automatically be applied to Head Start.

Evaluations of Head Start itself have found that centers tend to be of higher quality than commercially available child care, on average. This result stems from the fact that there are few bad Head Start centers. By way of comparison, the recent Child Care Cost, Quality, and Outcomes study, conducted by a team that includes researchers from the Universities of California, Colorado, and North Carolina, found that 11 percent of the child care sites they surveyed offered care that did not meet even minimal levels of quality.

Many evaluations have also found evidence that Head Start has short-term positive effects on some cognitive skills such as vocabulary. Research has shown that Head Start helps children avoid grade repetition and placement in the special education track, and that both of these factors are linked to higher schooling attainments later in life. Unfortunately, most studies have also found that gains in children's cognitive test scores are relatively short-lived, and begin to disappear by the time children reach third grade. However, my research with Duncan Thomas and the research of Arthur Reynolds and his colleagues suggest that such "fadeout" is not inevitable.

Duncan Thomas and I point out that most evaluations which find fadeout focus on inner-city, African-American children. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mothers and Children, we find evidence that long-term positive effects on white and Hispanic children are often sustained at least until early adolescence. Given that the initial impact of Head Start is very similar for whites and blacks, these findings suggest that fadeout may be due to the poor quality of subsequent schooling rather than to deficiencies in Head Start.

Research by Reynolds supports this hypothesis. Reynolds studies children who benefited from both Head Start and a follow-up program called the Chicago Child Parent Centers, which has been in place since 1967 and is designed to enhance the quality of their schooling. He finds that this program has had significant effects on schooling attainment, as well as negative effects on delinquency and criminal activity.

Both of these sets of studies rely on statistical methods to allow for the fact that children who enroll in Head Start may differ in many ways from those who do not. Currently, this is the best that can be done since there has never been a randomized trial of Head Start. The Advisory Committee on Head Start Research Evaluation, appointed by the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, recommended in 1999 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) conduct an evaluation that relies on randomly assigning children to sites where funds are insufficient to serve all eligible children. The committee felt that if some children are to be denied services in any case, it makes sense to do it randomly, so that the effect of the Head Start "treatment" can be rigorously assessed in the way that, for example, a new drug would be assessed using a randomized trial.

A Fresh Start for Head Start?

Despite considerable evidence that Head Start benefits poor children, there is a growing sense among policymakers that the program is not as effective as it could be. Dissatisfaction centers on several issues, including: uneven quality across centers; insufficient attention to pre-literacy skills; and lack of accountability in demonstrating improvements in child outcomes. During the most recent Head Start reauthorization in October 1998, Congress demanded that HHS address these problems by mandating the adoption of performance standards related to children's literacy skills and school readiness, expanding the monitoring of child outcomes (rather than program inputs), and improving the quality of Head Start teachers.

Uneven Quality of Head Start Centers

Quality of care is of particular concern given that in most cases, the alternative to high quality preschool is not home care, but lower quality child care. The National Institutes of Child and Human Development's (NICHD) Early Child Care Study found that most infants were placed in some sort of non-maternal care by the time they were four months old. Welfare reform is likely to underscore this reality, as women are pushed to join the work force rather than receive cash assistance.

Several different scales have been developed for assessing child care/preschool quality. These scales generally have two components, one that evaluates "structure" and one that evaluates "classroom process." Structure refers to such easily measurable attributes as the teacher/pupil ratio, class size, and teacher/administrator background and experience. Classroom process refers to less quantifiable qualities such as the nature of teacher/child interactions, the layout of classroom materials, and whether the activities are "developmentally appropriate."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the two types of measures tend to be correlated. The NICHD Study of Early Child Care found that child care situations with better "structures" (e.g. safer, cleaner, more stimulating environments and better child/staff ratios) also tended to be better in terms of "classroom process" (e.g. caregivers who were more sensitive and provided more cognitively stimulating care). Children in high-quality centers have fewer behavior problems and better cognitive and language development than children in poorer centers, although it is not clear to what extent this is due to unobserved aspects of family background which are associated with placement in higher quality care.

Head Start centers appear to be of higher quality on average than private centers, but the quality of Head Start is not uniform. Quality tends to be higher in programs based in areas with higher family incomes, and in those with fewer minority families. Edward Zigler, one of the founders of Head Start, argues that funds are insufficient to allow for meaningful enforcement of Head Start program standards, which may be one reason for the variation in quality.

A second reason that the characteristics of Head Start centers tend to vary with the characteristics of the children served is that many Head Start teachers are current or former Head Start parents. While the practice of hiring parents helps to involve them and may provide mothers with a way out of poverty, this practice may not be consistent with the goal of hiring the most qualified teachers for Head Start classrooms. The 1998 Head Start reauthorization directed Head Start to strive to have at least 50 percent of all teachers attain an associate, bachelor's, or advanced degree in early childhood education by 2003. Accomplishing this goal may require earmarking a higher fraction of Head Start program budgets for teacher salaries.

Head Start and School Readiness

The promotion of school readiness among disadvantaged children is one of the key goals of Head Start, yet there has not always been agreement on what this means. The Carnegie Foundation's 1991 survey of kindergarten teachers found that only 65 percent of new students were deemed ready to learn. This figure has received a great deal of attention, and many people assume that the teachers were referring to shortfalls in the children's cognitive skills. Yet when asked to name the most important determinants of readiness to learn, the attributes cited most often by teachers, in order, were: being physically healthy, rested, and well-nourished; being able to communicate needs, wants, and thoughts verbally; being enthusiastic and curious in approaching new activities; taking turns; knowing how to sit still and pay attention.

Teachers did not emphasize knowledge of specific "academic" skills. For example, only 10 percent of kindergarten teachers thought that it was important that children starting school know the alphabet. More recently, the National Academy of Sciences published a landmark study called "Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children," which argues that learning to read, write, and understand the printed word is one of the most important elementary school tasks, and that children who have not mastered certain pre-literacy skills before they enter kindergarten are "at risk" of reading difficulties and other academic problems later in life.

Knowledge of word meanings, an understanding that print conveys meaning, phonological awareness, and some understanding that printed letters code the sounds of language all contribute to reading readiness, and these skills can be enhanced by reading to children and encouraging activities that direct attention to the sound structure of words (such as rhyming games). In general, children should be exposed to a rich language and literacy environment that promotes vocabulary, the understanding of print concepts, and phonological awareness. The National Academy notes, however, that other preschool abilities such as identifying letters, numbers, shapes, and colors are correlated with reading readiness but have not been found to play any causal role in learning to read.

While little hard evidence is available, some critics feel that Head Start has been promoting the "social" skills identified in the Carnegie Foundation survey at the expense of the "cognitive" pre-literacy skills identified in the National Academy report. Head Start program guidelines focus on the emotional development, health, and nutritional needs of the child, and until recently have said little about promoting cognitive development.

While it is not clear if they are referring specifically to Head Start, the National Academy report concludes that "Preschools and other group care settings for young children, including those at risk for reading difficulties, too often constitute poor language and literacy environments." The 1998 Head Start reauthorization addresses these concerns by directing the program to monitor specific child outcomes. In particular, every child is to "know that the letters of the alphabet are a special category of visual graphics that can be individually named; recognize a word as a unit of print; identify at least ten letters of the alphabet; and associate sounds with written words."

Head Start is also required to develop a system to track these outcomes, although this system has not yet been implemented. It is important, however, that the pendulum not swing too far the other way. There is increasing evidence that children need both cognitive and noncognitive skills to succeed in the classroom and outside it.

An Optimal Age for Intervention?

In 1997, the White House Conference on Early Childhood brought to light research suggesting that the first three years are a critical period for brain growth and learning, and hence for early intervention. However, it is not easy to make the leap from basic scientific research on brain development to public policy, largely because there is no direct correspondence between brain growth and increases in capabilities. Moreover, critical periods have only been established for a few specific functions, such as vision and language, and they may extend well into the elementary school years. Finally, while we know that extreme deprivation can do terrible harm, there is no evidence that extra stimulation in the first few years produces lasting benefits for normal children. Compounding the problem is the fact that literature on child attachment suggests that infants who are separated from their primary caregivers too early may suffer psychological damage.

These arguments suggest that while early childhood is important, we should not focus early childhood interventions exclusively on birth to age three at the expense of other periods of childhood. Nor should we conclude that interventions aimed, for example, at four- and five-year-old preschool children, are too little, too late. In fact, some experts believe that in order to have any effect, intervention must be continued at least into the early grades, but the available evidence on this point is sparse and conflicting.

The 1994 reauthorization of Head Start created a program called "Early Start" which serves children from birth to age three. Currently, the program serves 35,000 infants and toddlers, and evaluations of it will shed important light on the wisdom and efficacy of intervening with very young children.

Public Preschool for Everyone?

If the government were to provide an enriched child care experience to all poor children whose parents or guardians desired it, as would be the case if Head Start were fully funded, it would raise the question of whether it was legitimate to exclude children who could also benefit, but who were not quite as poor. Thus, an important question for policymakers seeking to know where to draw the line is whether the benefits of early intervention are greater for more disadvantaged children than for others. Benefits may be greater for more disadvantaged children if they are more likely to be in poor quality care absent intervention.

The question of whether preschool has greater effects on disadvantaged children than on others affects how we should view proposals for universal developmental preschool programs. It is possible that a universal program could significantly benefit disadvantaged children by improving their chances for success, while for less disadvantaged children, the program would effectively function as a child care subsidy, and not improve their development.

The available evidence suggests that the benefits of developmental preschools are indeed larger for disadvantaged children, particularly children whose mothers have low levels of education; children whose mothers are depressed, distant, cold, or abusive; and children of non-native English speakers. Thus, where budgets are limited, it is appropriate to target early intervention to the most disadvantaged children. In defining which children are disadvantaged, factors in addition to family income—including risk of abuse or neglect, lack of maternal education, and limited English-language proficiency—should be considered.

Ensuring Head Start's Future

The goal of extending Head Start to all eligible, poor three- to five-year-old children has been pursued with less urgency in recent years, as policymakers have increasingly emphasized the program's alleged deficiencies and its lack of demonstrated long-term benefits. However, given the numerous documented shorter-term benefits of the program, Head Start would pay for itself if it generated even a fraction of the long-term benefits associated with model programs such as Perry Preschool, and thus the program merits some expansion.

While the long-term benefits of Head Start have not been documented, the problem reflects an absence of research rather than any proof that the program does not yield long-term benefits. To remedy this problem, the Head Start Bureau should take steps to implement the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Head Start Research Evaluation, which urged HHS to rigorously test the effects of Head Start on young children.

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Authors

Janet Currie