Does Head Start Work? History, Structure, and Impact

Introduction: Head Start's Legacy

Head Start is regarded today as one of the most successful experiments in public programming ever created and implemented in the United States to help children. Head Start has a 30-plus-year tradition of helping prepare children for school, and it is especially focused on children in the socioeconomic high-risk category — those considered to be living at or below the poverty line. The program is available in most areas on a sliding scale to those who exceed the federally determined poverty threshold.

The history of Head Start begins with its creation as part of the 1960s War on Poverty conceived by President Lyndon Johnson. The program was a direct response to early problems in the implementation of the Community Action Program (CAP), a grant-provision program created through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 — the same legislation that established Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA, a domestic Peace Corps) and the Job Corps, which provided job training and education to teenagers and young adults. CAP was dedicated to creating projects and services at the local level to help poor people gain training and eventually employment, and it focused primarily on adults or older children.

Origins in the War on Poverty

Near the end of CAP's first year, with a congressional budget of $300 million but only $26 million spent, Sargent Shriver — director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) — feared losing future funding for projects that could genuinely advance the war on poverty. He began searching for alternative programs to utilize the surplus. A study revealed that almost half of the nation's poor were children, and that without helping children, a war on poverty would be futile (Zigler and Muenchow 2–3):

"The [distribution of poor] chart informed him [Shriver] that nearly half of the nation's 30 million poor people were children, and most were under the age of 12. 'It was clear that it was foolish to talk about a "total war against poverty," the phraseology the president was using,' said Shriver, 'if you were doing nothing about children.'" (Zigler and Muenchow 3)

Previously, the fundamental problems of poverty had been considered an adult issue — one that would be resolved by helping adults, with the assumption that their children would benefit in turn through their parents' success. The flexible manner in which programs were overseen during this era allowed far greater opportunities for change than is typically possible today (Zigler and Muenchow 2).

Shriver had an inherent interest in helping children, rooted in his own and his wife's professional histories (Zigler and Muenchow 5). He also believed that poor children represented a far more appealing cause to the general public, since they could not be accused of laziness or bad behavior and would be unlikely to attract the kinds of complaints that had plagued the CAP program (Zigler and Muenchow 4).

After further research, Head Start was launched to prepare children for school through programming and structures designed to teach pre-reading skills and classroom expectations (Zigler and Muenchow 2–3). Shriver modeled the program in part on one he had visited that was previously funded by the Kennedy Foundation:

Program Design and Early Models

"As Shriver was thinking about how he could use the Community Action Program surplus for children, he recalled a Kennedy Foundation project he had visited near Nashville, Tennessee. Conducted by Susan Gray, a psychologist at George Peabody Teachers College (now part of Vanderbilt University), the Early Training Project served some 60 black preschool children who were at risk of educational failure. It was designed, according to Gray, to offset 'progressive retardation.' The program gave the children an intensive period of stimulation experiences, primarily aimed at developing their intellectual capacity as well as their attitudes toward school." (Zigler and Muenchow 4)

The aspect of the program that most struck Shriver was the finding that, with proper implementation, it could measurably increase the IQs of children with intellectual disabilities — a concept that was not widely accepted in academia at the time (Zigler and Muenchow 11):

"The program used the same materials as a traditional nursery school, but in a manner designed to stimulate attitudes and aptitudes necessary for later school success. For example, the children loved to ride tricycles, but were only allowed to do so if they asked for them properly and identified the particular tricycle they wished to ride. Later on, the teachers set up the tricycles in a miniature traffic situation. The children learned to respond to traffic signs and to play traffic officer." (Zigler and Muenchow 5)

One of the programs Shriver patterned Head Start after also emphasized early reading skills and read to children at least twice a day from traditional reading materials, encouraging them to dramatize the stories so that the content would be retained and their positive attitude about school and learning would be reinforced. Shriver's intention was to reduce children's fear of school and give at-risk children a running "head start" for learning in the later grades (Zigler and Muenchow 6).