Articles about head start programs

Families and children experiencing homelessness, and children in the foster care system are also eligible. Additionally, Head Start services are available to children with disabilities and other special needs.

Head Start programs deliver services through 1, agencies in local communities. Most Head Start programs are run by non-profit organizations, schools, and community action agencies. They provide services to more than a million children every year, in every U. These include:. Head Start programs promote the school readiness of children ages 3 to 5. Most of these programs are based in centers. In other programs, children and families may receive services from educators and family service staff who regularly make home visits.

Infants, toddlers, and pregnant women are served through Early Head Start programs. Early Head Start programs are available to the family until the child turns 3 years old and is ready to transition into Head Start or another pre-K program. Services to pregnant mothers and families, including prenatal support and follow-up, are also provided by Early Head Start. Other Early Head Start programs are located in centers which provide part day or full day programming for children.

Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships are programs that are dedicated to offering Early Head Start services to eligible families within the childcare system. Based on the needs of local communities, programs offer traditional language and cultural practices to provide high-quality services to young children and their families. Migrant and Seasonal programs provide specific services to children whose families are engaged in agricultural labor.

MSHS programs work with both migrant farmworker families, who migrate to a number of geographic locations annually, and with seasonal farmworker families who are permanently settled in their communities but continue to do agricultural work.

Head Start Programs. What We Do Head Start programs promote the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families by supporting their development in a comprehensive way. Learn More. How to Apply Head Start and Early Head Start programs provide free learning and development services to children ages birth to 5 from low-income families.

Center-Based Option. Home-Based Option. Family Child Care Option. The sample is not restricted by age at response for the dependent variables. For the index of self-control as well as the self-esteem measure, the most recent response was taken and for the education outcomes and parenting index, the highest values across the survey waves were used. Birth year fixed-effects are used in each specification and age at response is additionally controlled in the self-control and self-esteem regressions.

Each regression also controls for gender and pretreatment characteristics, for which missing values were imputed. Using this dataset, this method was used by Currie and Thomas and Deming. Alternatively, Carneiro and Ginja use variance in program eligibility rules to identify the effect of Head Start.

To test whether there is bias arising from the differential treatment of siblings or from time-varying characteristics of the mother and family, Head Start and other preschool participation are regressed on indices of child, maternal, and household pretreatment characteristics Table 1. Estimates will be biased if the differential treatment of children by parents or maternal or family characteristics that change over time are related to participation in Head Start, and these characteristics are also related to the outcome.

See Appendix Table 1 for the results. These results are very similar to those by Deming , who calculated high school graduation rates on the more limited cohorts that were available when he conducted his work. We also calculate impacts for a wider variety of subgroups. Each scale is standardized by year and then given equal weight in a restandardized index for each respondent. See footnote i. The Pearlin Mastery Scale measures the degree to which respondents see themselves as having agency.

The Risk-Taking Behavior Scale measures attitudes toward self-control and risk-taking. The Schieman Anger Scale asks how frequently in the past week the respondent has felt out-of-control or angry.

We resample to identify families where at least two siblings are over the age of 28 and have had at least one child. The index is created from respondent answers to questions only about their first child. The gender of the child is controlled for in the model. Overall and particularly among African American participants, we find that Head Start also causes social, emotional, and behavioral development that becomes evident in adulthood measures of self-control, self-esteem, and positive parenting practices.

We find that Head Start participation increased positive parenting practices for each ethnic group and for participants whose mothers did not have a high school degree when compared with the outcomes of children who went to a preschool other than Head Start. There are two issues of note regarding the social, emotional, and behavioral analyses: For each of the behavioral development analyses, the estimates of the effect of Head Start is larger when compared with their siblings who went to a different preschool than when compared with a sibling who did not attend preschool.

While these data do not have measures of center quality, this finding does suggest that the preschool alternatives were of poorer quality than a seat in Head Start. Because the sample size is smallest for Hispanics, small effects would be difficult to observe. Regardless, more research is needed to better identify and understand these patterns. Appendix As described in the text, in this analysis we compare siblings who went to Head Start with those who went to a different type of preschool and those who did not attend any program.

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