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The Perry Preschool Study and Head Start

March 8, 2013

This guest post is an open letter in response to The Wall Street Journal editorial “Head Start for All.”

Your Review & Outlook “Head Start for All” (Feb. 25) makes several incorrect claims about the HighScope Perry Preschool Study. As director of the study, I’d like to set the record straight.

Your review claims that the Perry study and the Abecedarian study are the sole evidence that preschool works. But they are just the best known of a large number of studies finding that preschool works, that is, has its intended effects on children. Along with the city-wide Chicago Child-Parent Centers study, these studies go a big step further by finding strong long-term effects and return on investment.

In the presence of large returns on investment, the initial cost should be a secondary consideration. That said, the Perry Preschool cost per child was well below the $16,000 per child per year or more you said it cost. In current dollars, it cost $11,107 per child per year, about the same as the cost per K-12 student in the U.S. The Perry Preschool program is not that hard to replicate—and have its return on investment widely realized. We simply need to insist on reasonable program standards – qualified teachers using a proven curriculum, partnership with parents, and regular evaluation. Unfortunately, far too many existing preschool programs do not meet these standards.

The disappointing results of the national Head Start Impact Study are hardly a reason to abandon the program when other studies, like the Perry Preschool Study, show its enormous potential. The Head Start Impact Study does suggest a course correction, bringing the resources of Head Start more fully to bear on contributing to the development of young children living in poverty. Such improvements are achievable and, with them, widespread improvements in educational achievement, economic productivity, and reduced costs to taxpayers.

- Larry Schweinhart, President, HighScope Educational Research Foundation

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Federal Proposal Would Build on State Efforts

February 26, 2013

President Obama’s call to action on early education is a watershed moment that has the potential to improve education for millions of American students. Ensuring all students have the opportunity to attend high-quality preschool, regardless of income and geography, is a key component of an effective education system that prepares students for success in school and society.

State-funded pre-K has grown substantially over the last decade to serve 28 percent of 4-year-olds, up from 14 percent in 2001. Yet, this is only part of the picture. As many as 40 percent are served by public programs when Head Start and preschool special education are counted, though the latter may consist of only a few hours of therapy a week. Over 80 percent are in some type of out of home arrangement including private programs and family home child care. Unfortunately, research now makes it clear that the quality of many of these arrangements as assessed by direct observation is far too low to promote educational opportunity. Some are so poor they may actually increase children’s risk of school failure. Head Start’s weaknesses have been noted by many as debate over this proposal has unfolded, but Head Start is far better than many of the private centers and day care homes children attend. NIEER has just released an in-depth look at what the research tells us about the outcomes of early education which can help clarify some confusion seen in media report.

That is why it is so important to understand that the President’s pre-K proposal will raise quality and educational effectiveness, not just increase the number of seats available. And, it will do this by lifting up the entire field. The models of successful pre-K for all already operate show the way. Oklahoma, New Jersey’s Abbott program, and West Virginia all integrate private providers and Head Start into state-funded pre-K. What does this mean? Head Start teachers nationally are paid barely more than pet sitters and dog walkers. This is Head Start’s Achilles heel. Teachers in private child care make even less. To use the New Jersey example, when integrated into state pre-K these teachers were given the opportunity to go back to school and get stronger preparation, they were assigned teacher coaches who worked with them as partners to improve their teaching, and their salaries were doubled. Of course, this came with accountability for results, but the vast majority delivered. Teaching quality in all classrooms, private and public, was raised from poor/mediocre to good/excellent.

Planning for this reform process has already begun in most states through their state early learning advisory councils. In addition, 35 states and the District of Columbia developed reform plans when they applied for funds to expand early education through the federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge in 2011. However, only nine states were awarded funds. These applications demonstrate a clear interest and capacity by state governments to partner with the federal government to start all children on the right path. States have never been better poised to prioritize early education and the federal government’s role is welcome support.

The White House preschool proposal has a few key words that are important in understanding how this would play out: “federal-state partnership” and “cost-sharing.” This isn’t the federal government signing a blank check to foot the entire bill for early education; it is limited support based on the number of low-income children in a state and tied to a small number of standards already adopted by many states. If other states do not want to raise quality, they do not have to participate. If they do participate, they will be in charge, not the federal government, which could list its requirements on a single page. The list of states that we believe might qualify with little or no change to state policy includes not just Oklahoma and Georgia, but also Alabama, Alaska, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia. Mississippi is currently advancing legislation that would meet the test as well.

Once it is understood, the President’s pre-K plan should be endorsed by practically everyone. It supports equity and excellence in the pre-K policies advanced by governors of both parties. Both critics and supporters of Head Start should welcome it as Head Start reform that will strengthen that program and improve its effectiveness. Those who want to see more choice and competition should applaud federal support for state programs that incorporate private providers. To return to our New Jersey example, two-thirds of the children are served by private providers supported by local school districts responsible for ensuring quality through teacher coaching and supports to help children with special needs succeed in regular classes.

Given all of its advantages, the primary objection in Congress to the President’s proposal is likely to be that we can’t afford new spending when deficits loom so large. Yet, this is fundamentally a pro-growth, deficit reduction proposal. The biggest returns to this investment will kick in years down the road when the deficit is projected to become a more serious problem. And, it addresses root causes of the deficit–slow growth and rising costs of government including health care costs. Quality pre-K will enhance productivity to increase growth, decrease the costs of school failure and crime, and reduce smoking and other risky behaviors that harm health. Sure, it’s just one small contribution to deficit reduction, but a $50 billion investment over 10 years could contribute a few hundred million dollars to deficit reduction.

Rejecting the President’s pre-K plan is the far more costly alternative. We cannot afford to leave so many children behind with more than a third not ready to succeed at kindergarten entry. We cannot afford the lost growth and increased costs to government when they subsequently fail. We cannot afford failing to recognize that this is not just a problem for the 45 percent of our children who live below 200 percent of poverty, but for the vast majority of families. Deficit hawks, education reformers, and civil rights activists should unite to lead the charge for this proposal in Congress. States–red and blue–have already shown the way forward. Congress should follow.

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

This entry is cross-posted to The National Journal and is in response to the post “Holy Preschool, Batman” by Fawn Johnson.

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Not Just Wishful Thinking

January 10, 2013

Ensuring that all our children are ready to succeed when they enter kindergarten is a tremendous task, made much more difficult in the United States by high levels of poverty and low levels of parental education. One in four preschoolers lives in poverty, nearly half in low-income families. Twenty-seven percent are born to mothers without a high school diploma or GED. Assessments at kindergarten entry show that surprisingly many children from middle-income families are poorly prepared to succeed. There are many public policies that could contribute to reducing this problem, and there is no single solution, but let us consider one that seems obvious and for which there is considerable evidence, public preschool programs.

Public preschool education could be an important part of the solution, but currently it is not given a chance. Ensuring school readiness through preschool education is precluded by low levels of investment and high levels of wishful thinking. Far too many children lack access to preschool education, and it is least available to those who could benefit most. The majority of 3-year-olds in homes where Spanish is the primary language don’t attend any preschool program. Some don’t qualify for publicly funded programs because their parents work long hours to keep them out of poverty. Others live in states that don’t fund any preschool program at all or in neighborhoods that aren’t served. As a nation we spend far more public money on prisons than on preschools. Federal and state governments together spend less on preschool education than Americans spend on pet food.

The latest research on preschool program outcomes to cross my desk is the third grade follow-up of the national randomized trial of Head Start. It is now clear: Head Start produces no perceptible lasting gains in any domain of child development. This does not rule out very small persistent gains, but Head Start is not meeting its goals. Yet, much of the field seems to be in denial, responding that bad public schools erode the effects of Head Start. Somehow they fail to see that even initial gains are quite small and that children in the study made much larger gains in kindergarten and the early grades than they did in Head Start. Other studies confirm that learning gains in kindergarten are much larger than in Head Start. The root of the problem is that Head Start is locked into a program model that fails to focus on intensive education and pays teaching staff abysmally. This model has failed every true experimental test (Early Head Start, the Comprehensive Child Development Program, the Child and Family Resource Centers).

State pre-K programs often are little better than Head Start since they too usually lack the funding and standards of public education for kindergarten. State subsidized child care (as opposed to preschool education) is so poor that it may actually harm child development on average. Clearly, just shifting Head Start to the states is not enough to solve the problem. However, for all the faults of public education, one only has to look at growth curves for learning over time to conclude that if preschool were supported like kindergarten, children would be much better prepared. And, looking at the programs found to produce substantive lasting gains for children in well-controlled studies, the common theme is that they are much more educationally intensive than our current preschool programs. It is time to face facts and change directions.

If the United States is to effectively address the school readiness problem, public preschool programs must provide much more intensive education to many more children. Only public preschool education for all children is likely to achieve this goal. Means-tested programs exclude too many children who need help. The federal government should incentivize states to offer preschool programs that meet a small number of well-defined criteria for quality and set a goal to serve all children by a certain date. Then let states innovate as they have a track record of creating flexible public-private preschool partnerships. The focus of accountability should be on strong teaching and truly substantive gains in broad child development. Head Start should be integrated into public education as a funding stream to enhance the education of young children in poverty so that they start early and receive the best teachers and smallest classes. Once we stop thinking of preschool as charity and start thinking of it as an investment in everyone’s future we might actually do what is necessary to meaningfully improve the education of young children.

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

This entry is cross-posted to The National Journal and is in response to the post “Pre-K for Everyone?” by Fawn Johnson.

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The Importance of Having Data; Or What Would Sherlock Holmes Do?

January 8, 2013

“‘Data! Data! Data!’ he cried impatiently, ‘I cannot make bricks without clay!’”
— “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes isn’t the only one relying on data. As anyone in the education world—researchers, parents, teacher, principals, and students—can tell you, decision-making in education is increasingly based on data that shows us what is and isn’t working. So what happens when we don’t have the data we need? Schools that receive federal and state education funds often have specific data reporting requirements, making centralized data collection and analysis relatively convenient. But early childhood education, fragmented across states, localities, programs, and sectors, presents a challenge to the data wonk.

Sherlock Holmes muses on some data points.

Lisa Guernsey and her team at the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative have been leading a recent charge to improve data collection. Last month, they released their updated Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP), an impressive database of federal data on education spending and enrollment at the district level. For the first time, FEBP sought to provide pre-K spending data at the state and district level, but noted that many state-funded pre-K programs are not necessarily governed by the same district borders as are K-12. Their policy brief accompanying FEBP’s release sums it up:

“Pre-K and kindergarten data at the local level are labyrinthine and disorganized, hampering any ability to craft policies for equitable access and funding. States must collect more complete and comparable data from school districts and CBOs if policymakers and the public are to understand the state of education for young children in their communities and states.”

So how do we improve early education data? Elementary, my dear Watson.

Improve Existing Information Collection

We don’t just need more data, we need more of the right data, presented in a clear and timely way. The U.S. Census Bureau asks about pre-K participation in its American Community Survey. However, this question suffers from several methodological short-comings: it relies on parent reporting of participation (rather than data from the schools) and includes children ages 3 to 4 enrolled in nursery school or preschool during the previous two months, which may then include children who do not remain enrolled for most of the year, while excluding children enrolled earlier or later. Ultimately, as acknowledged by Alex Holt at the New America Foundation, this question “is so convoluted that we consider the data from it to be effectively useless. Even at the federal level, the U.S. government has no idea how many children are enrolled in pre-K.” Likewise, the information collected on prekindergarten enrollment by the National Center for Education Statistics through its schools survey includes only those children served in programs operated in public elementary schools, without differentiating between 3- and 4-year-olds. Across all data sets there is considerable uncertainty regarding the extent to which we can accurately identify all classroom participation regardless of the name attached (child care, special education, state pre-K, local public school, Head Start, private preschool, etc.) and even more uncertainty regarding whether we can identify types of programs. Even separating public and private is difficult because of ambiguities. (For example, many state pre-K programs are operated by private providers, and even Head Start providers are mostly private non-profits.) So, information is widely available to researchers but it may not answer the questions they’re asking.

Develop Comprehensive Data Systems

The Early Childhood Data Collaborative advocates for coordinated longitudinal early childhood data systems, which are state efforts to collect data to track children’s progress from early childhood and beyond. Their 10 fundamentals of data systems seek to improve data collection and allow stakeholders to link information both longitudinally and to other key programs, while ensuring the system is well-managed, secure, and maintains privacy. Their recent brief on those states who addressed longitudinal data systems in their Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) applications highlighted important trends, including filling gaps in current data (including information on the workforce) and collaborating across early childhood education systems and agencies.

The very inclusion of data systems as an optional component of RTT-ELC indicates the need for data has been elevated to a place of important within the federal government and hopefully drives continued collaboration among states to improve their current systems.

Fund Quality Data Collection Efforts

Finally, as a field, we need to continue supporting high-quality research collecting data on policies within early childhood education programs. In a piece at The Huffington Post, Lisa Guernsey writes in support of NIEER’s State Preschool Yearbooks, noting:

“The idea behind the yearbooks, Barnett said, was ‘to create an archived data set that would be consistent across the states.’ By making the information available to all, he explained, reporters and policymakers who wanted data would not have to call all 50 states, ‘and state officials could provide information that was comparable to what was provided by the state next door.’ NIEER … sought to halt the spread of misinformation about which states were offering good pre-K programs and enrolling high numbers of children, and which ones weren’t.”

After the Pew Charitable Trusts ended their 10-year investment in the Yearbooks, NIEER has been seeking for a new funder for what’s become one of the most well-respected, well-cited data sources on American early education. Guernsey refers to the times before the Yearbook as “the dark ages,” and it’s hard to imagine going back to a time without it, without media coverage from CBS and NBC and the support of the U.S. Secretary of Education. We’ve seen tremendous growth in not only the media attention on pre-K, but in state-funded pre-K itself: by the 2010-2011 year, nine more pre-K programs were available than in the 2001-2002 year, and quality standards have increased overall even as the Great Recession has worn away at program funds.

Our annual Yearbook publication is a true labor of love, one we’re proud to produce each year, and we’re overwhelmed by the positive response of the early childhood community in supporting and sharing our work. Yet, even this work only covers one of the major segments of the field. We need good data to make the right decisions for early education and the future of America’s students. Only by supporting, collecting, analyzing, and sharing this information with the field will we be able to live up to this advice from the esteemed Detective Holmes: “No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive to the logical faculty.”

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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State Support for Head Start Over the Years

March 27, 2012

In addition to offering state pre-K and child care subsidies some states support pre-K by adding on to the federal Head Start program. Supplementing Head Start programs with state funding allows states to build upon the federal Head Start program–funding more children, providing extended-day and/or extended-year services, or making quality improvements. This is especially important for several states that don’t otherwise fund pre-K at the state level. In 2009-2010 this included Idaho and New Hampshire. Delaware, Minnesota, and Oregonserved enough additional children through their Head Start state supplements for these to qualify as de facto state pre-K programs by NIEER’s definition.

It’s been a long time since we’ve looked longitudinally at states’ supplements to the federal Head Start program. Unfortunately, we haven’t had good news to report. Data from The State of Preschool 2010 indicate that states have cut funding and serve fewer children since we started tracking these numbers in The State of Preschool: 2003 State Preschool Yearbook.

Between fiscal years 2002 and 2010, the total number of states supplementing Head Start dipped only from 17 to 16, with Indiana and Ohio halting state funding of Head Start programs while Idaho began providing a state supplement. In addition, Hawaii began funding a state supplement to Head Start in the 2003-2004 school year, but then stopped this funding in the 2007-2008 school year. Overall, as indicated in Table 1, adjusted and nominal spending, as well as enrollment, have all declined in this time period; adjusted spending was nearly cut in half.

Table 1: Changes in Head Start Supplements, 2001-2002 to 2009-2010

Changes, 2001-2002 to 2009-2010
Spending (2010 $)	-$122,028,988	-45%
Nominal Spending	-$48,221,791	-25%
Enrollment, 3s and 4s	-10,968	-39%

As shown in Table 2, the decreases took place at the beginning of the last decade, followed by an uptick until the 2009-2010 school year when it is likely that the recession started taking its toll.

Table 2: Longitudinal Changes in Head Start State Supplements

As we prepare for the release of the 2011 edition of the State Preschool Yearbook, we are seeing more of this downward trend. States are reporting less support for the 2010-2011 school year and are indicating that the 2011-2012 school year will fare even worse. Some states are completely eliminating their supplement to the federal program as a budget closing measure. This could present a double-whammy as stimulus money that benefitted federal Head Start is simultaneously disappearing at a time when the high child poverty rate makes clear how much young learners need these services. Stay tuned for when The State of Preschool 2011 is released on April 10^th.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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Investing for Today and Tomorrow: Early Learning in the Federal FY 2013 Budget Proposal

February 15, 2012

Starting the week on an exciting note for elected officials, advocates, and policy wonks, President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 on Monday morning. Education was a clear priority throughout the press conference at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Virginia, particularly on preparing students for 21^st century jobs by focusing on career and technical skills. As readers of this blog can attest, early education is an important building block in preparing students for a life of learning and earning.

Details of the budget are still being fleshed out, but there seems to be good news for early education in the White House’s proposal, as outlined below.

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed budget:

Department-wide discretionary budget of $76.4 billion, a $0.3 billion increase over the FY2012 level.
Head Start and Early Head Start: Set to receive more than $8 billion to serve about 962,000 children and families, which would maintain the enrollment expansion seen in the 2009-2010 program year. The proposal acknowledges that it will support the implementation of the new Head Start re-competition regulations.
Child care subsidies: Additional $7 billion over 10 years to support child care subsidies for low-income children.
Child Care Development Block Grant: Additional $300 million to improve the quality of child care facilities.

Department of Education proposed budget:

Department-wide discretionary budget of $69.8 billion, a $1.7 billion increase over FY2012 level.
Race to the Top (RTT): $850 million for another round. According to a Department of Education press release, a “significant portion” of these funds would be allocated for an expansion for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, which would continue under the joint tutelage of the Departments of Education and HHS.
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): $472.7 million in Grants for Infants and Families, to provide early intervention services to children birth through age 2 with disabilities and $372.6 million for IDEA Preschool Grants for children ages 3 through 5 with disabilities.
Promise Neighborhoods: Proposed increase of $100 million for this competitive grant program that seeks to help high-need communities develop cooperative strategies to improve outcomes for children through both educational reforms and life outside the classroom. Past winners have focused energies specifically on early education as a tool.
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3): Requests $150 million for the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) to build on three previous i3 competitions. The Department’s budget summary only goes so far as to suggest that priority “could be given to projects proposing to improve early learning outcomes.”
Institute for Education Sciences (IES): $30 million in new research and development grants for early learning and elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education.

In addition, the National Women’s Law Center has information on additional federal programs in the FY13 proposal that support families with young children, including the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. Of course, not all child care funding goes to children under 5 (though most does) and early education will only be a modest fraction of such high-profile initiatives such as i3, Promise Neighborhoods, and RTT.

Laura Bornfreund, Maggie Severns, and Clare McCann at Early Ed Watch compiled the helpful table below to track changes since FY2011 in some key programs used for early education.

As noted by the New America Foundation’s Key Questions on the Obama Administration’s 2013 Education Budget Request, there are still a number of questions surrounding the place of early education in this budget, including whether the portion of RTT funds earmarked for early learning would be distributed at the state level or district level. They also note that the budget proposal encourages districts to redesign school schedules to better serve students through the 21^st Century Community Learning program, though it is unclear so far whether states will be encouraged to apply this to the early grades, such as extending half-day kindergarten into full-day services.

It’s worth noting that a presidential budget proposal is, according to Birth to Thrive, just “the first move in a high-stakes game that will be complicated this year by presidential and congressional politics.” Considering the sharp partisan divisions seen in recent legislative battles, the pressure of the Budget Control Act to cut spending by $900 billion over 10 years, and the high-profile politics of an election year, it is hard to say exactly how much of this proposal will ever see funding. The great strength of the budget proposal, though, is to allow the president to lay out his priorities in greater detail than any speech or campaign ad could. Early education is clearly an administration priority, though perhaps not as high a priority as we would like. All of us concerned about the future of America’s youngest learners must ensure that elected officials remember that high-quality early education programs are a good economic investment both short-term and in the future.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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Eating Right, Learning Right

October 10, 2011

The important link between children’s health and their education is being highlighted this week with the celebration of National School Lunch Week. This year’s theme is “School Lunch – Let’s Grow Healthy,” as part of a three-month long campaign by the School Nutrition Association to highlight the importance of school lunch programs. Common sense tells us that children with empty stomachs can’t concentrate on classroom learning or homework. With this in mind, schools and pre-K programs often offer snacks and meals throughout the day to make sure children are fully prepared to learn and excel. The federal Child & Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), administered through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides guidelines for serving nutritious meals and snacks in child care centers and afterschool programs. In addition, providing nutritious meals to children is a key component of the federal Head Start program’s services to low-income children and families.

Each year, NIEER gives state pre-K initiatives a rating based on meeting 10 quality standards benchmarks, which address a variety of quality components including services such as meals. As we stated in The State of Preschool 2010, “these items are included because children’s overall well-being and success in school involves not only their cognitive development but also their physical and social/emotional health.” In order to meet our benchmark on meals, state programs must require by policy that all programs, regardless of hours of operation, offer at least one meal each day.

Unfortunately, in the 2009-2010 school year, only 24 of 52 state-funded pre-K programs met the benchmark of at least one meal being required in state policy. (See Table 1 for a list of the programs meeting the benchmark for required meals.) Twenty of these 24 programs specifically mention lunch in their meal requirements.

Table 1. State programs requiring at least one meal in all pre-K classes

Alabama	Louisiana LA4	Oregon
Alaska	Louisiana NSECD	Pennsylvania HSSAP
Arkansas	Maryland	Rhode Island
Delaware	Minnesota	South Carolina CDEPP
Georgia	New Jersey Abbott	Tennessee
Iowa Shared Visions	New Mexico	Washington
Kentucky	North Carolina	West Virginia
Louisiana 8(g)	Oklahoma	Wisconsin Head Start

However, only five programs – Pennsylvania EABG, Pennsylvania K4 & SBPK, Vermont Act 62, Vermont EEI, and Virginia – reported that no meals or snacks are required by state policy. The remaining 23 programs either reported that snacks were required and/or that meals are required for full-day programs but not half-day programs.

For the 2009-2010 school year, we also asked states to report on whether meals and snacks need to meet nutritional guidelines and found that all but 10 programs require this. (See Table 2 for a list of those programs not requiring programs to use nutritional guidelines.) Of those meeting nutritional guidelines, all were using federal nutrition guidelines set by the United State Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Table 2. State programs not requiring the use of nutritional guidelines

Florida	Pennsylvania K4 & SBPK
Illinois	Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts
Nevada	Rhode Island
New Jersey ELLI	Vermont Act 62
Pennsylvania EABG	Vermont EEI

The federal Head Start program’s nutritional guidelines play a role here as all five state programs that are Head Start supplements met the benchmark for meals. This is particularly noteworthy in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the states’ other pre-K initiatives do not meet the meal requirement benchmark while the Head Start supplements do.

As with any other of the quality standards we report on in the State Preschool Yearbook series, it is important to remember that we are discussing policy here and not necessarily practice. While not every state policy requires that all programs offer at least one meal, some, or perhaps even all, of those programs may exceed the policy and do so. Still, with only 24 state pre-K programs on the record with a commitment to providing their students with at least one meal a day, we have a long way to go before we can truly celebrate school nutrition.

Child nutrition is of increasing concern as childhood obesity rates increase while food insecurity also spreads. President Obama’s proclamation of this week pointed to the need for collaboration throughout communities to bring students healthy food every day at school, a goal toward which we still work. At a time when Sesame Street has created a new Muppet to address the issue of food insecurity—the 17 million children in families who don’t know where their next meal comes from—it is clear that providing nutritious, consistent meals to children in school can go a long way to improving their daily lives.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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Head Start: Mend It, Don’t End It

August 19, 2011

One of the most neglected questions in the ECE policy arena is “How should we respond to the failure to find lasting effects for Head Start and Early Head Start after investing years and many millions in nationwide randomized trials of those important programs?” I say neglected because there is far less awareness of what the research says than one might expect given the importance of the high-quality research effort that represents our best shot at unbiased estimates of program impacts. For instance, I find that few people even know that Early Head Start’s long-term effects have been evaluated through fifth grade. I addressed this long-simmering question in an article published today in the journal Science. At the outset, I wish to make clear that the evidence does not lead me to the conclusion that we should end these programs, but that they need major reform. Let’s start by quickly reviewing the evidence.

One randomized trial evaluated the impacts of a year of Head Start by following 4,667 children and their families from entry in Head Start through kindergarten and first grade. After one year of Head Start cognitive effects were positive, but fairly small, and the broader the domain the smaller the effects. In follow-up the effects were even smaller. No cognitive or school progress effects were found in kindergarten or first grade, though one might argue that there is a persistent effect on IQ of about 1/10^th of a standard deviation. This would close about 10 percent of the gap between Head Start children and the average child on IQ. No effects were found on any teacher-reported measure of social-emotional development or behavior.

Upward adjustments can be made to the findings because not every child followed the random assignment (some assigned to Head Start did not attend, some assigned to the control group found their way into Head Start). Yet even after such adjustments, follow-up results remain weak. Additional adjustments could be made for participation in other programs, but these would make little difference, particularly at age 3 when high-quality alternatives are scarce.

A randomized trial of Early Head Start with more than 3,000 infants and toddlers produced results similar to those for Head Start even though most children and families participated two or more years. Effects at ages 2 and 3 were quite small for cognition and social-emotional measures including aggression. By age 5 no effects were found for cognition and only one small socio-emotional effect was found. In the grade 5 follow-up no effects were found on any of 49 measures and the estimated effects were near zero for both cognitive and social-emotional development.

For some in the early childhood field the reaction to these long-term findings has been denial. One claim is that bad public schools offset Head Start’s positive effects. The national Head Start study finds, to the contrary, that gains in literacy and math accelerate for both Head Start and control groups after they enter kindergarten. Any wash-out in Head Start effects from the public schools occurs because control children quickly make up the small advantage from attending Head Start. Others claim that non-experimental studies consistently find long-term effects despite a lack of short-term gains in achievement. However, the non-experimental studies are not really consistent among one another in either their short- or long-term patterns of effects. Their positive long-term results likely result from chance variation and methodological failings rather than real effects. If effects are not evident at fifth grade, they won’t be later.

Once we accept these disappointing findings, why not just end the programs as Joe Klein recently argued in Time magazine? I offer two reasons. First, America cannot afford to let so many children fail academically and socially because they are poorly prepared. Second, some other preschool programs have succeeded to a much greater extent, and Head Start can be reshaped to be similarly effective.

Table 1 compares the initial impacts of Head Start and some other large-scale programs. Pre-K programs with above average standards and funding are found to produce larger effects than Head Start in rigorous studies including a recent randomized trial. The Chicago Child Parent Centers, which are similar in key respects to the state pre-K programs in Table 1, have been found to produce effects on achievement and social development into adulthood as well. Reshaping Head Start to more closely resemble these programs would enhance its effectiveness. A quantitative summary of research on early educational intervention over the past 50 years adds weight to this argument as the Head Start and Early Head Start comprehensive services approach is associated with weaker effects, possibly because it reduces the educational focus.

Table 1. Achievement Gains from Pre-K

My prescription for improving Head Start includes increasing the percentage of funds spent inside the classroom, building a stronger connection to public education, and eliminating much federal oversight and related paper work. Early Head Start needs the same freedom from regulation, but should adopt home-based models that have a strong evidence base (Olds’ Nurse Family Partnership) as well as strengthen center-based options. Give programs a set amount of money, audit the books, and assess teaching and learning. Teaching should be highly intentional and include direct instruction one-on-one and in small groups. A new continuous improvement process should be put in place for learning and teaching. The Obama administration’s plans for re-competition of low-performing Head Start agencies should be implemented as soon as possible based on both measures of teaching and broad measures of child progress. Early Head Start should be regarded as an experimental program and subject to large-scale research for at least the next five years.

No doubt, these recommendations will be as controversial as is my longstanding recommendation to increase the amount and quality of education required of Head Start teachers and to increase their compensation accordingly. Head Start teachers should be given the opportunity to return to school with tuition and fees paid by government loans that would be forgiven if they remain in Head Start five years later. The quality and content of the programs they attend should be subject to an approval process to be eligible for these forgivable loans.

Even if they were not controversial, it would be foolhardy to reform Head Start based entirely on my recommendations given the limitations of current knowledge. The evidence is just not that strong given what is at stake. Fortunately, we have a better alternative. Allow Head Start and Early Head Start agencies to innovate, experiment, and find their own way to strong results. A systematic program of research should be launched in which Head Start and Early Head Start agencies propose new approaches to be tested in randomized trials. Experimental programs should be given a blanket waiver from Head Start and Early Head Start performance standards and most nonfinancial reporting requirements as long as they adhere to their own proposed plans (which will be monitored as part of the randomized trial). This systematic program of research would provide much better guidance for early educational intervention than is now available. In relatively short order Head Start and Early Head Start could fulfill their promise.

– Steve Barnett, Director, National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)

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Why I’m Going to Head Start

August 15, 2011

As many of you know, I recently transitioned to a new position as Senior Vice President for Early Learning, Research and Training at Acelero Learning and will no longer be co-director of NIEER. I’ve loved my job at NIEER – the research has been interesting and my colleagues here and elsewhere have been a pleasure and inspiration. I am especially grateful to the Pew Charitable Trusts for the funding that has formed the foundation for NIEER’s work. My reasons for moving on are numerous but I wanted to take this opportunity to explain why I decided to move to Head Start. Acelero Learning is a Head Start grantee that works with delegate agencies in three states to deliver services to children and families. At the Support Center in Harlem we provide the delegates with technical assistance and guidance across all areas of Head Start services.

Why Head Start?

I started my career in early education in Head Start teaching in the Ann Arbor public schools’ Head Start classroom, but even before I knew what career I wanted I worked as a Head Start summer volunteer in high school. I have since served on Head Start boards off and on and I have a firm belief that Head Start can make a significant difference in the lives of young children and their families. It has worked in the past, and it works in certain places now. As a nation, we have to figure out how to make it work everywhere, consistently, while protecting and even expanding the funding required for Head Start to be effective. I am coming home to Head Start because I want to figure out how to produce in every center the lasting impacts on achievement that I know are possible in Head Start. Of course, this means that we in Head Start must face facts and resist the temptation to reject criticism or make excuses.

Why Acelero Learning, Inc.?

Acelero is unique. We are the only for-profit Head Start provider, and outside of the municipal “super” grantees, we are one of the largest Head Start providers in the nation, serving more than 3,800 children ages zero to 5. Our mission helps explain my choice:

The mission of Acelero Learning is to bring a relentless focus on positive child and family outcomes to close the achievement gap and build a better future for children, families, and communities served by the Head Start program.

We are serious about closing the achievement gap and every decision is made in reference to this mission. We use data to drive our decisions as well and have instituted a rigorous continuous improvement system at every level of the program from child to family to classroom to center to delegate to grantee. We measure our objectives in multiple ways at each level. For example, for child progress we implement performance-based assessments and are initiating a system for ensuring reliability of scoring and we select a random sample of children for administration of pre-post assessments of standardized measures. At the classroom level, in addition to CLASS observations in every classroom, we also developed a Teacher Success Rubric for teacher self-evaluation and professional development as well as for annual performance appraisal. To increase our ability to close the achievement gap, we operate all classrooms on a year-round basis – this summer alone, we will provide more than 500,000 hours of summer learning time that children enrolled in our Head Start programs would otherwise not have been able to access. We also offer full-day Head Start and extended-day programs whenever possible.

I’m excited to be involved at Acelero with an entire network of dedicated and remarkably capable colleagues. Together we will show that Head Start is a program of which we can be proud. We are determined to close most of the gap at kindergarten entry and significantly reduce the longer-term achievement gap. I look forward to calling on many of you to help us reach our goal and best wishes to you all.

– Ellen Frede, Senior Vice President for Early Learning, Research and Training, Acelero Learning

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Pre-K Disparities: What You Get Depends on Where You Live

July 20, 2011

When we analyzed the data for The State of Preschool 2010, a disturbing trend that we noticed the previous year continued to appear: during these difficult economic times, disparities among states in providing high-quality preschool education are growing larger. Consequently, children’s access to and quality of experiences in preschool vary drastically depending on where they reside. For instance, a relatively small percentage of children (6 percent) in Alabama have access to a high-quality program (meeting all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks) while their peers to the south in neighboring Florida have a better chance of having access (68 percent) to a lower quality program (meeting only three of 10 benchmarks). Alabama’s neighbors to the west in Mississippi have no state-funded preschool program at all to attend. This problem is not limited to the deep South – patterns like this repeat across the country. And tight state budgets are only exacerbating the problem.

While some states continued to move forward during the recession, others fell further behind, and some have dropped precipitously. Oklahoma remains the only state where almost every child has the opportunity to attend a quality preschool education program at age 4, but other states are at least approaching the goal of offering some state-funded education program to all children. In 10 states, the majority of children attend a public preschool program of some kind (see Table 1). At the other end of the spectrum, 10 states have no regular state preschool education program, although children may receive early learning experiences through Head Start and special education (see Table 2). In six states, fewer than 15 percent of 4-year-old children are enrolled in any public preschool program including Head Start.

Table 1: Top 10 States Serving 4-Year-Olds in State Pre-K

State	Percent of 4-year-olds served
	State Pre-K	State Pre-K and Special Education	State Pre-K, Special Education, and Head Start
Oklahoma*	71	71	86
Florida	68	70	78
West Virginia	55	57	78
Georgia	55	57	63
Vermont	52	61	69
Wisconsin	52	55	63
Texas	47	48	57
New York	45	51	59
Arkansas	41	50	60
Iowa	38	43	51

* All 4-year-old special education children in Oklahoma are in the state pre-K program.

Table 2: No-Program States

State	Percent of 4-year-olds served
	Special Education	Special Education and Head Start
Hawaii	5	15
Idaho	6	15
Indiana	7	15
Mississippi	7	37
Montana	5	22
New Hampshire	7	11
North Dakota	7	24
South Dakota	8	25
Utah	6	13
Wyoming	17	26

Other important disparities across the states include:
• State spending ranged from less than $1 million in Arizona to more than $790 million in both California and Texas. Ten states spent nothing on state pre-K.
• For states with initiatives, state funding per child exceeded $5,000 per child in 13 states, while in six others it fell below $2,500.
• Most states failed to meet NIEER benchmarks for teacher and assistant teacher qualifications. Seven states had programs that met fewer than half of our benchmarks for quality standards. The states failing to meet most benchmarks include three of the four states with the largest number of children — California, Florida, and Texas.
• There are no maximum class sizes or limits on staff-child ratios in Texas, the only state that fails to set either. California and Maine have limits on staff-child ratios but no class size limit. Most other states limit classes to 20 or fewer children with a teacher and an assistant.

3-Year-Olds Losing Ground?

Disparities aren’t limited only to geography but also extend to age – by and large, state preschool programs are for 4-year-olds. Even in states that enroll high percentages of their 4-year-old population, 3-year-olds have little or no access to state-funded preschool education.

Already low, enrollment of 3-year-olds decreased during the 2009-2010 school year, reversing an upward trend since the 2003-2004 school year. State pre-K programs served 170,885 3-year-olds, a decrease of almost 5,000 children from the previous year. Only 4.1 percent of the nation’s 3-year-olds are served in state-funded pre-K, meaning that even small declines in service provision can be dramatic. Thirteen states decreased their enrollment of 3-year-olds while11 states increased.

Illinois, New Jersey, and Vermont are clear leaders in enrollment of 3-year-olds (see Table 3), although no state serves even a quarter of their children in state pre-K at age 3. However, while Illinois is still the leader in serving 3-year-olds, the state actually declined in the percentage of 3-year-olds served from the 2008-2009 school year to the 2009-2010 school year.

Even when accounting for state pre-K, special education, and Head Start enrollment, only Vermont, Illinois, and New Jersey serve more than a quarter of their 3-year-old population. Arkansas is close behind with 24.5 percent of their 3-year-olds served through the state pre-K, special education, and Head Start programs. Interestingly, although it does not have a state-funded pre-K program, Mississippi serves more than a quarter of their 3-year-olds in Head Start and special education, surpassing most states that do have state-funded pre-K with access for 3-year-olds.

Table 3: Top 5 States Serving 3-Year-Olds in State Pre-K

State	Percent of 3-Year-Olds Served
	State Pre-K	State Pre-K and Special Education	State Pre-K, Special Education, and Head Start
Illinois	19	21	29
New Jersey	18	22	28
Vermont	17	25	29
Nebraska	11	13	18
Kentucky*	10	10	20

* All 3-year-old children in Kentucky’s preschool program are special education students who have either a developmental delay or an identified disability.

While we are encouraged by success stories such as Oklahoma’s near universal status with a high-quality program and West Virginia’s move toward a high-quality universal program, we are troubled by the fact that many children are growing up in states with little or no access to preschool education or access to programs of low quality. As the expression goes, states are the laboratories of democracy, but wide disparities in educational opportunities for children bring to mind mad scientists rather than the Curies. We remain concerned as pre-K programs face difficult budget choices that can exacerbate today’s disparities and hope all stakeholders can work together to preserve the future for the youngest learners.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER
- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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