Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Marianne Miller, the director of the Central Vermont Community Action Council’s Head Start and Early Head Start programs since 1988 and the New England Head Start Association representative to the National Head Start Association Board.
Since 1965, Head Start has served millions of children, their parents and families, with the ultimate goal of helping low-income children start school on par with their more advantaged peers. Two hundred seventy-four of our nation’s top early childhood development experts, researchers and educators urged Congress in 2011 to avoid cutting Head Start noting that “Head Start works. It’s been proven.” They listed several study findings about Head Start’s impact on children:
• A greater likelihood of graduating high school and college.
• A decreased need for special education services.
• 50 percent reduction in mortality rates among 5 to 9 year olds.
• Decreased Medicaid costs.
• Decreased smoking rates as adults.
• Decreased likelihood of being charged with a crime as adults.
Head Start also demonstrates significant outcomes for parents and caretakers. A higher proportion of Head Start parents read to their children more frequently than parents of children who were not enrolled in Head Start. Head Start parents are also found to have greater quality of life satisfaction, increased coping skills, and decreased feelings of anxiety, depression and sickness.
Families involved with Head Start are supported in pursuing educational and career goals, in accessing local services and resources, and training to be the best parents and teachers they can be.
Head Start is held to extremely high standards and is guided by regulations and best practices that guarantee a breadth and depth of high quality services to our most vulnerable children and families in a world where there are few guarantees for the economically disadvantaged. Programs are subjected to regular, rigorous federal reviews for both programmatic and fiscal compliance.
Head Start children receive health screenings, nutritious meals, access to medical, dental and mental health services, a safe and nurturing environment, and high-quality early learning experiences. Families involved with Head Start are supported in pursuing educational and career goals, in accessing local services and resources, and training to be the best parents and teachers they can be. In fact, Head Start increases parents’ participation in their children education by 15 percent of a standard deviation while children are in the program and 6 percent as they continue through school. Fathers who don’t live with their children get more involved and stay more involved if their children attend Head Start.
Critics of Head Start rush to the most recently released installment of the Head Start Impact Study and argue that it proves Head Start is ineffective; that the gains Head Start children demonstrate at kindergarten entrance flatten out by third grade. Nobel Laureate in Economics, James Heckman, University of Chicago, writes, “It (the fadeout argument) also overlooks the fact that many Head Start children move from a nurturing early education environment into a low-quality elementary school. Gains made in early childhood must be sustained with quality education.” Professor Rucker Johnson, a researcher from UC Berkley, found that Head Start children who attend better quality schools end up with lasting gains compared to children who attended low-quality schools.
Dr. Josh Sparrow, a Harvard researcher and director of the Brazelton Touchpoints Foundation adds, “Most researchers looking at this (Impact Study) data believe that this is because Head Start provides long lasting improvements in skill areas such as self-control, motivation, and social skills that are critical for long term economic success that the 3rd grade test simply does not pick up.”
Head Start is cost effective. In a 2009 article published in the Journal of Applied Economics, Harvard’s David Demming estimates that Head Start provides 80 percent of the effects of the well-known early childhood programs Perry Preschool and Abecedarian at 60 percent of the cost.
Does Head Start work? Yes. Does investing in early childhood development matter? Absolutely. Common sense alone tells us that meeting children’s needs for health care, nutrition, high quality early education, and parent engagement are essential to supporting children’s development. Let us raise our expectations about the quality and legitimacy of the information, opinion and media coverage that drives public discourse and commit to understanding the full picture. Our children deserve the best that we can give them. Their future and ours depends on it.
