Fifty Years of Head Start Research

In a National Journal article, "How Everything We Know About Early Childhood Has Changed Since Head Start Was Founded", Janell Ross and Amy Sullivan provide an excellent overview about how researchers have evaluated the impact of the Head Start program over the past 50 years.  They open and conclude their article....

"In 1912, a teacher in the one-room schoolhouse outside Stonewall, Texas, made a decision that would ultimately lead to billions of dollars in federal investment, volumes of research, and ongoing, decades-long debate about the value of early childhood education.

"The teacher agreed to admit a 4-year-old boy who would go on to become President Lyndon Johnson....

"When President Johnson signed the bill authorizing Head Start back in 1965, he had some research to back up the idea of early childhood interventions — and a lot of hunches.  Nearly half a century later, researchers have the benefit of long-term studies to give them more answers, although that hasn't ended debates on the subject.

"It seems clear that the most effective efforts to help low-income children get an early start go beyond teaching numbers and letters — they involve the family, community, everything.  Everything is expensive.  But the kind of class-based achievement gap that led Johnson to fight for Head Start in the first place may be a cost the U.S. can't afford to pay as kids of color, many of them from families of modest means, become a majority of the future student population and workforce."

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