Investigating the Effectiveness of Head Start: Evidence From a Meta-Analysis and The Family Life Project

Two empirical studies were undertaken to examine the effectiveness of the federal Head Start preschool program. The first study examined the effect of Head Start participation compared to public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) participation on children’s school readiness skills. A systematic review of the literature and meta-analysis were undertaken to consider this issue. A total of six studies met the inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis, and effects were considered across the school readiness domains of language, emergent literacy, mathematics, and social-behavioral skills. The meta-analysis found a negative effect of Head Start participation on children’s emergent literacy skills, which indicated a modest benefit of public pre-K participation compared to Head Start participation. Additionally, the meta-analysis found no reliable effect of Head Start participation compared to public pre-K participation on children’s language, mathematics, and social-behavioral skills. The second study examined the effect of Head Start participation on children’s language, literacy, and mathematics skills in the spring of preschool and in the spring of kindergarten. This study also examined if kindergarten classroom quality sustained the effect of Head Start into the spring of kindergarten. To consider these issues, data were drawn from the Family Life Project (Vernon-Feagans, Cox, & The FLP Key Investigators, 2013), a population-based sample of children born in two historically low-wealth, rural regions of the US located east of the Mississippi: the region labeled as the “Black South” by demographers (Dill, 1999) and the Appalachian mountain region. Propensity score weighting was used to establish baseline comparability between the Head Start and comparison groups. Three domains of kindergarten classroom quality were assessed with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008), including Instructional Support, Emotional Support, and Classroom Organization. Head Start participants were found to outperform the comparison group in literacy in the spring of preschool by a small margin, but no reliable Head Start effect was found on language or mathematics skills. Evidence of moderation was found for children’s spring-of-kindergarten literacy skills such that Head Start participants continued to outperform the comparison group if they experienced higher-quality Emotional Support in kindergarten, but not average-quality or lower-quality Emotional Support.Doctor of Educatio