Education Week - August 31, 2016 - 15

Shane Bevel for Education Week

Long-Term
Head Start
Gains Seen
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

differences between the Head Start
students and the comparison group
that might affect the magnitude of
the results, though they attempted
to control for these factors.

Addressing 'Fade-Out'
The most common critique of Head
Start is that its academic beneﬁts
fade out by the time children are a
few years into elementary school.
The touchstone study in this area
was the 2009 federally funded National Head Start Impact Study,
which followed a group of students
who enrolled in Head Start and
compared them with another group
of students who did not enroll because the program in their area was
oversubscribed. (Some of those children did go on to other preschools,
or to other Head Start programs
that had room for them.)
That study found initial positive
impacts but also found that by the
end of 3rd grade, Head Start students were performing very similarly to their peers. No other Head
Start research has matched the
large-scale, randomized experimental design of the impact study.
But supporters of Head Start
have argued that the program offers beneﬁcial "sleeper effects" that
are best measured later in a participant's life. These two new studies,
while not having the same "gold
standard" research design as the
federal study, still offer important
information, their authors say.
The Tulsa research followed children who enrolled in the Head Start
program that is run by the Community Action Project of Tulsa. It found
that 7th graders who had attended
that program had measurably higher

math scores than students who had
not enrolled in Head Start or in another preschool program that was
run by the Tulsa district.
The Tulsa research also found
that the former Head Start students were less likely to be retained
prior to 8th grade: 14 percent of
them had been retained, compared
with 20 percent of the students in
the control group.
And while 9 percent of the control
group had been absent more than
18 days in the school year, that was
true for only 6 percent of the former
Head Start students.
Phillips said the Tulsa research
shows that some academic effects
are still measurable, along with
nonacademic effects that are important, such as showing up for
school regularly.
But when breaking out results
into subgroups, the Tulsa study did
not ﬁnd any statistically signiﬁcant
Head Start effects on boys and on
African-American children. The
measurable positive effects were
found for girls, Hispanic students,
white students, and students who
were eligible for free lunches.
"This caught us by surprise," Phillips said. "Unfortunately, we do not
have a lot of data about what happens in the schools. These kids got
a strong boost into school, but something is happening between 3rd and
8th grade that is not supportive of
African-American kids and boys."
That finding merits deeper research, she said.
It's also noteworthy that CAP
Tulsa in 2005-06, when these children were enrolled, was different
from other Head Start programs.
Although Head Start is federally
funded, the government does not
directly run the programs. Instead,
public agencies and community
groups such as CAP Tulsa provide
space, personnel, materials, and
professional development for the
Head Start programs they manage.
Oklahoma has a universal pre-K
program, and CAP Tulsa meets
many of the same requirements
that the school-run programs do.
The lead teachers all have bach-

elor's degrees and special training
in early childhood, which was not
true of all Head Start programs in
2005-06. The teachers are also paid
wages that are comparable to public school teachers. The program
also scored high on measures of
academic instruction and instructional quality. That means the effects seen here might not generalize to Head Start nationally.
But Head Start has undertaken a
variety of different quality-improvement measures, Phillips said. Lead
teachers are now required to have
a bachelor's degree, and low-rated
programs have been forced to compete for renewed funding.
"What's very encouraging today
is that the national Head Start
program is moving in the direction
of what's going on in Tulsa," Phillips said.

Impacts on Adulthood
Another study of Head Start effects goes much further than middle school. The Hamilton Project,
an economic-policy initiative of the
Brookings Institution, used the
National Longitudinal Survey of
Youth, which measures a wide variety of economic and social factors,
including whether participants enrolled in Head Start.
The researchers compared Head
Start participants with their siblings who either attended another
Head Start program or did not go
to preschool.
That study found that participating in Head Start increased a person's likelihood of graduating from
high school, pursuing post-highschool education, and completing
a post-high-school program, which
might include a certiﬁcate, associate
degree, or bachelor's degree.
Another result from the long-term
study was that some children who
took part in Head Start grew up
into adults who invested more in
positive parenting practices, such
as reading to their child or showing
physical affection. That is in comparison with their siblings who attended another preschool program.

"This is the ﬁrst of its kind in terms
of a ﬁnding, so there's much more to
explore here. But it gives us some
hope that this will continue to spill
over into the next generation," said
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a coauthor of the research as well as the
director of the Hamilton Project.
When broken out into subgroups,
however, the parenting ﬁndings were
only significant for former Head
Start students who were black. For
Hispanic and white participants, the
effects were not statistically different
from those on their siblings who attended a different preschool.
Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the
director of the Brown Center on
Education Policy at Brookings, said
that these studies don't offer proof
of Head Start's effectiveness. For the
longer-range study, that's because,
despite attempts at statistical controls, the studies cannot measure all
the factors that might prompt a parent to enroll one child in Head Start
and not a sibling. Or, in the case of
the Tulsa research, there's no way
to determine why one family might
seek out Head Start while another
family might look for another type
of early-care arrangement.
"I don't think either of these two
studies adds credible information to
what we know about the impact of
Head Start," Whitehurst said. "The
parent was observing something
about the child, or observing something about her own circumstances
that year. That is almost surely correlated with the measures of later
outcomes."
Schanzenbach said that the sibling-comparison method used in
the Hamilton Project study, which
also controlled for a number of additional child, maternal, and household factors, can produce important
ﬁndings.
"What we want to know is what
are the long-term impacts of preschool, and we're not going to know
that from an experiment unless we
have a time machine," Schanzenbach said. But this long-term-evaluation approach "adds a nice new
dimension to the broader literature
on this really important topic."

Head Start employee
Melissa Gill, left,
welcomes students
and parents during
the first week of school
at the Skelly campus
of the program's
Community Action
Project in Tulsa, Okla.

What we want
to know is what
are the long-term
impacts of
preschool, and
we're not going
to know that from
an experiment,
unless we have
a time machine."
DIANE WHITMORE
SCHANZENBACH
Hamilton Project,
Brookings Institution

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Education Week - August 31, 2016

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