When the researchers combined both groups, it was a wash — no clear long-term effects, good or bad. Other research has shown that the benefits of Head Start are larger when children also attend well-funded K schools with better teachers.
But school funding has generally risen over time, so declining K school quality seems an unlikely explanation. Deming hypothesizes that conditions for low-income families have improved since earlier research on Head Start.
Since later groups of students were born to mothers who were more educated and into families with somewhat higher incomes, perhaps some of those Head Start services were less necessary. It can be hard to make sense of the competing research on early childhood education. One reason is that by the time researchers can see the long-run effects, the program in question is decades old.
More recent research on pre-K, including Head Start, usually finds immediate benefits — though they may dissipate as students move through school. Complicating matters further: the benefits sometimes reappear. And the researchers in the latest study say that they want their findings to be replicated using different approaches before any policy decisions are made based on the results. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to providing the information families and educators need, but this kind of work isn't possible without your help.
Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. A few promising pilot programs in the s and s got the ball rolling by demonstrating eye-popping results: vastly improved educational outcomes for kids who attend preschool.
The gap between poor and rich students looked like it could nearly vanish if we could figure out how to scale up and replicate those results. A new working paper from economists at the University of Michigan takes a new approach: It looks at census data from to to dig into the long-term outcomes of Head Start for its students. Using census results allows this study to analyze life outcomes for one-quarter of US adults, which can help identify effects that are hard to be confident of with a small sample size.
The adults whose outcomes in they examined would have been preschool age during the rollout of Head Start from Using this approach, the study finds that Head Start looks like a stunningly cost-effective program — since kids who attended preschool do better later in life, government revenue is actually increased by sending kids to preschool.
In addition, Head Start increased economic self-sufficiency in adulthood by almost 4 percent of a standard deviation — gains driven largely by a percent reduction in adult poverty and a percent reduction in public assistance receipt. By reducing adult poverty and use of social services as an adult for the children who were enrolled in it, the paper suggests that Head Start pays for itself.
This goes against a recent narrative that has been building against Head Start. Or they may have heard about a natural experiment created in when Tennessee had to assign spots in its Head Start program by lottery. How should we interpret this new finding in light of that evidence? How can the benefits of Head Start fade away after a few years — and then crop up 10 years after that?
When we take a deeper look at the Head Start literature, it looks like the new study is pointing at something real. About the Author. Andrew J. Coulson Former Senior Fellow. Page Contents. Prados Chicago, IL. Gelber, A, and A.
National Bureau of Economic Research. Cambridge, MA: link. Green, B. Greenberg, M. Johnson, R. School-quality and the long-run effects of Head Start; Unpublished paper. Karoly, L. Klein, S. Lipscomb, S. School readiness is children living in non-parental care: Impacts of Head Start. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 31 1 , Lee, R.
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28 4 link.
0コメント