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Study: Head Start’s impact fades
A study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seems to indicate that we’ve spent quite a lot of money on a program with very little impact. The study looks at Head Start, the early education program that began in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty. Researchers studied 5,000 3-year-old and 4-year-old children, randomly assigning them to either a Head Start group or a control group that had access to other early childhood programs. They found that Head Start makes a little difference at the beginning, but the impact fades:
Providing access to Head Start has a positive impact on children’s preschool experiences. … However, the advantages children gained during their Head Start and age 4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole.
The Cato Institute argued last year that early childhood government programs are more costly than effective. Yet Cato notes that $5 billion of the stimulus package went to Early Head Start, Head Start and other early education programs.
back to top21 Comments to “Study: Head Start’s impact fades”
But, one never knows unless unless one trys.
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All that study is showing is that Head Start is not significantly better than other early childhood programs. I thought the whole point of Head Start was that it was for children from families that did not otherwise have access to early childhood programs, and did not have parents who were going to be doing the kind of stuff with them at home.
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My understanding is that all of that early stuff is pretty much a wash by about second or third grade. Though reading to a child and good music are still recommended, having the youngest reader on the block is no longer necessary, or the first recognizer of colors or letters or numbers. In other words, it is a place to employ some people.
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This is old news. I heard it years ago. It is like the DARE program, however. Most don’t believe the studies about these programs, because they don’t fit their preconceived notions.
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I do know a couple of senior volunteers at Headstart. They are paid a mileage stipend for being ‘grandparents’ at Headstart. They have big hearts and love working and being with the little ones. They may do more for these children than any statistics may show.
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FWIW, here is an Amazon reader review of a book called Better Late than Early by Raymond and Dorothy Moore:
For a long time there has been a push by many concerned citizens, educators, politicians, and others to improve the education of children by getting them into school sooner. The idea being that the sooner children were taught to read, write, and do arithmetic, the more mastery they’ll have of these subjects. I was surprised to learn that a hundred years ago in some states it was against the law for children to go to school until they were at least eight years old.
Raymond & Dorothy Moore spent years investigating the results of early education. They examined other studies and did their own studies. They found that in the early years, up to somewhere around ages 8 to 10, it is best for children to be at home in a loving and supportive environment. They found that children who are kept home until they are ready for school quickly catch up with the early starters.
One of the main points is children can’t effectively learn until they are developmentally ready. The book explores readiness issues dealing with eye sight, hearing, coordination, ability to focus, emotional stability, and others. Once children have hit a certain level, then their ability to learn is amazing. The book explores some of the problems that can happen when a child is forced to learn before they are ready.
Another main point in the book is how the home is the best place for young children. It is acknowledged that in some situations, like a working single parent, a child may need to be put in preschool, but that the optimal environment is a home where the child feels secure and is free to develop at his own pace. They are free to make mistakes without 25 other students making fun of them. They feel loved. One of the problems with sending children off to preschool is how many of them feel rejected by their parents.
The second half of the book covers various age ranges and gives insight on what is happening to children at this age and advice on how parents can best support and help their children.
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I should mention that, although I have not read Better Late than Early, from what I’ve read about it, and from the discussions I’ve heard about it on the radio, its findings seem generally consistent with my observations as a father of five.
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Buzzy, I’ve heard the same thing. Also that by about the 3rd grade no matter how early a child learned to read, they all start leveling out. So pushing your child too early doesn’t help them, it just robs them of their babyhood.
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This is a government program that cold be done away with. It is only baby sitting.
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SInce my wife and me both worked for head start and my wife is a director of a Child Care Center. The programs are only as good as the teachers and the parnters who are working togetter.
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Plus, we’re living on borrowed money, and the hope of ever paying it all back is beginning to fade. See:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/34848783
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…and this excellent documentary:
http://www.iousathemovie.com/
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KI makes the best argument for HeadStart. Getting “Grandparents” together with the kids, giving them the love and acceptance they need as children so that when it is time to go to school, they will be prepared emotionally.
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I actually thought the original point of Head Start was to intervene with kids whose social situations were unpromising. So Head Start would feed them, stimulate them, read to them and given them opportunities they were not getting at home.
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When I lived in a poor neighborhood in Chicago, my roommate and I were simply present to neighborhood kids, who came by the house most afternoons (in the early years) in groups of two to six children. We made crafts with them, but also made cookies (teaching math skills and other things) and otherwise did mother/daughter things together.
One of the things that struck me most was that these children’s homes had no books in them. (They did sometimes have a huge-screen TV, often with a mother’s boyfriend sitting on the couch watching dirty movies, but somehow that didn’t seem very educational.)
I had two shelves of books to which the children had free access when they were in my home. They could read them or have me read them. The books they turned to most often were Ella Lindvall’s Read-Aloud series (Bible stories rewritten in biblically accurate ways for young children about four and five, with colorful illustrations). Now, these children were four and up, but the kids up to twelve consistently chose these books for the first couple of years. It was as though they had simply missed the stage in their development in which adults read simple books to them and they read the books aloud themselves at times.
Since all the books on those two shelves were child-friendly, I did sometimes say, “How about reading this book?” to introduce them to one they hadn’t tried yet, but generally let them set their own pace. After a couple of years they finally went beyond those very easy books, and a couple more years and they weren’t coming to my home nearly as often.
It struck me that for all the rhetoric about kids in such homes failing scholastically because of “bad schools,” the real answer was that they were doing poorly because they didn’t have books in the home, or parents who read with them, or parents who taught life skills like following a recipe or going grocery shopping on a budget. Forget teaching three-year-olds to read, but do read to them (and if they start sounding out a few words on their own, fine).
I personally doubt that I gave the children much academic benefit in what limited time they spent reading in my home, but it probably helped some–they learned that books could be fun, and they had a little bit of reading practice. But they were all woefully behind the average white child of their age, and really all I was doing was helping them not be quite so far behind. It’s hardly reassuring when a 12-year-old can successfully read a book written for a four-year-old on her twelfth time through it.
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I remember my wife showed a study that said the same thing from her sociology class at the University in the 1970’s.
From what I’ve heard that push for Head Start came from a program called Home Start that, if I remember correctly, greatly mimicked what Cheryl D. did in Chicago, though maybe putting the resources in the individual homes and teaching the mothers how to implement it. I think that Home Start showed much better results.
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i.e. – Business as usual for the Feds. I think unburdening the taxpayers with this socialist program will fix it.
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The Moore’s book is a great one on early childhood education. His study showed that with the home environment he proposed, when you actually put a child into a classroom he would usually be in the top half of the class before the year was out. Putting kids into a classroom too early was found to be detrimental.
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Fuzzyface, and that’s especially true for boys, from what I understand. Trying too early to “push” a boy academically backfires.
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I have come to the conclusion that exams should be mandatory to finish kindergarten. Obviously, this will take the form of a readiness checklist. Far too frequently, I see children in the primary grades who started too soon for their development (especially boys born in Dec.) If they were held back until they were ready to begin grade one, physically and mentally, many of the problems in middle school can be eliminated.
Head Start and other similar programs are designed to make up for parental failure. If there is no parental failure, the children will receive minimal benefit. However, as some anecdotes here suggest, children who have poor home environments, will have a lasting benefit from these type of programs.
In order to assess this program you need two groups from the same neighborhood and with similar parents and then follow these children until at least high school.
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Actually, HRW, I’m pretty sure that Head Start (not sure about similar programs) has been shown not particularly beneficial to any child, long term. I know little to nothing about the program, but it may be that it’s more a “program” than a relationship, and that children who form relationships with one teacher or aide over several years are benefitted more.
What I’ve read about the program suggests, however, that Head Start is trying to help academically before the child should be receiving any academic sort of situation, and thus it backfires because the kid is “institutionalized” in a school-type setting for too many years, and burned out by the time they are old enough for school. The best help for children’s future academic years is as informal a setting as possible in those early years–not daycare, not preschool, not Head Start, but home with Mom or as close to that as possible.
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