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Does Head Start work? The debate over the Head Start Impact Study, explained [1]

['Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach', 'Ryan Nunn', 'Lauren Bauer', 'David J. Armor', 'Grover J.', 'Russ', 'Cameron F. Kerry', 'Norman Eisen', 'Nicol Turner Lee', 'Samara Angel']

Date: 2024-03

Sections Print

Head Start, the federal early childhood education program, has expanded access to preschool to eligible students in low-income families. Head Start was established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The goal of the program is to promote school readiness through the provision of health, educational, nutritional, and social services. In 2019, Congress authorized more than $10 billion on Head Start. Based on the most recent data, Head Start enrolls almost 1 million children annually. This substantial investment in children is justified by evidence that early investments—and preschool in particular—change outcomes for children.

The base of what we know about the effects of early childhood education on long-term outcomes is the result of experiments. Decades-spanning longitudinal studies of experimental preschool programs like HighScope/Perry Preschool and Abecedarian find those who participated in these early childhood educational interventions persist in education, have higher earnings and commit fewer crimes than the control group. New research on the intergenerational effect of Perry Preschool by Nobel laureate James Heckman and Ganesh Karapakula finds that participants were more stably married, that their children were less likely to be suspended from school, and more likely to graduate from high school and be employed. Would these experimentally determined findings from model preschool programs be replicated in Head Start? Since 1969, the federal government has asked researchers to answer the question: Does Head Start work? In 1998, Congress authorized the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to contract an independent national random assignment study of Head Start to determine whether Head Start improved school readiness: the Head Start Impact Study. The Head Start Impact Study followed about 5,000 3- and 4-year-olds who were randomly assigned to a treatment group (in which they had a seat in Head Start) or a control group (in which parents made their own choice without the initial offer of a Head Start seat). The study started in the fall of 2002 and continued to collect information on students through third grade, in the spring of 2007 and 2008. In 2005, the first report about the Head Start Impact Study found that one year of Head Start improved cognitive skills, but the size of the effects was small. While this first report affirmed Head Start’s impact on school readiness, the final HHS report published in 2010 showed that by the end of first grade, the effects mostly faded out. According to the 2012 HHS report on third grade follow-up, by the end of primary school there was no longer a discernible impact of Head Start. Due in part to these reports, some have concluded that while Head Start has some initial impact on kindergarten readiness, the fadeout in impact over early elementary school qualifies attempts to invest more in early childhood education. Yet, these reports are not the final word on the Head Start Impact Study, in part because of the ways in which the experiment played out in the field. New research reanalyzes the Head Start Impact Study and finds that Head Start does improve cognitive skill. Let’s take a closer look at the problems with the experiment and what we can learn from the evidence in retrospect. The Head Start Impact Study The Head Start Impact Study was an experiment, but it was not a lab experiment. In a lab, experimental criteria like double-blind random assignment (where neither the tester nor subject knows whether she is in the treatment or control group) can be controlled. In a large field experiment that takes place in the real world, such conditions may not hold. We can look at a handful of criteria to see the extent to which a field experiment is meeting the lab experiment conditions: assignment to the treatment or control group must be random, whether or not the child was in the treatment or control group should be unknown to the Head Start center and the parent and child, and only the treatment group can receive the treatment. While the Head Start Impact Study set out to meet two of these conditions―random assignment and no crossover between the treatment and control group―there were issues. 1. “Random assignment” was not always random. Assignment to treatment and control groups was not fully random. Random assignment in Head Start Impact Study treatment and control groups was performed at each Head Start Center in the study. A Head Start center staff-person was part of the research team and assisted the independent researcher in the randomization process and in keeping touch with study participants. One scholar on the advisory panel reported that Head Start directors in the study “were finding ways to circumvent the random assignment.” Depending on the types of students for whom the Head Start directors were bending the rules, the results of the study could be biased in a positive (taking a high ability student) or negative (taking a high-need student) direction. 2. A substantial share of the control group received the treatment; a substantial share of the treatment group did not. And there were significant problems with compliance to random assignment. According to the Head Start Impact Study Technical Report, about one in six children in the control group enrolled in Head Start in the first year of the Head Start Impact Study. It is also the case that about 15% of children assigned to the treatment group did not enroll in Head Start. This is in part because the study contractors could not have “totally monitored or compelled” treatment Head Start centers to deny a seat to a child in the control group. Luckily, researchers have techniques to account for this issue, as the reanalyses described in the next section show. Learning from study imperfections The Head Start Impact Study wasn’t fully random and did not have a clean control group. If the Head Start Impact Study foundered along these critical dimensions, what can we learn from it? Counterintuitively, perhaps, Head Start Impact Study’s imperfections can teach us a lot about the effect of Head Start. Two new studies, the first by Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters and the second by Avi Feller, Todd Grindal, Luke Miratrix, and Lindsay Page, leverage Head Start Impact Study random assignment noncompliance to identify the effect of going to Head Start against going to a different center-based preschool or to no preschool at all. Once they account for the experimental breakdowns of the Head Start Impact Study, they find that Head Start improves school readiness for children who would otherwise be in home-based care.

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[1] Url: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/does-head-start-work-the-debate-over-the-head-start-impact-study-explained/

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