Ten Things the 114th Congress Can Do on Head Start to Improve Mobility

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Head Start, which has provided millions of children with a chance for success in life during its five decades of existence by offering social, emotional, and health supports during their most critical developmental years. By opening the window of opportunity for children at a young age, Head Start seeks to provide a pathway out of poverty and towards mobility, increasing the chance that the nation’s poorest, most vulnerable children have the potential to prosper in life. This Congress could mark the first time the program is reauthorized since 2007—giving policymakers an incredible opportunity to shape the way we educate our nation’s children during their early and most crucial developmental years.

Our recommendations for how to approach this reauthorization fall into three categories: 1) doubling down on what has made Head Start effective since 1965, 2) incorporating new research and updated standards to bring Head Start into 2015, and 3) teeing up future breakthroughs and best practices for Head Start reauthorizations of 2025 and beyond. Some of these recommendations will require increasing funding—but the data behind them and the bipartisan nature of the politics of early childhood education both support doing so. Furthermore, none of these proposals are meant to be applied as additional mandates on already overburdened Head Start grantees. They are simply evidence-based reforms that should be incentivized and encouraged in the new Head Start reauthorization legislation.

Crafting policies that maximize the positive effects of early childhood education is more important today than it has ever been—because laying a strong foundation of academic and social-emotional skills in every child at a young age is not only crucial for the children who participate and their families, it can also make Head Start an even more effective force for promoting mobility.

1. Doubling Down on What’s Worked Since 1965

Head Start has served as a bulwark against poverty and a stepping stone to kindergarten for more than 30 million low-income American children since it was established in 1965.¹ Coming out of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Head Start was originally designed to help break the cycle of poverty by addressing the full-spectrum of comprehensive “emotional, social, health, nutritional and psychological needs” of low-income children and their communities.² Yet for all the success that Head Start has had and the children it has helped, there is still room for improvement. The recent Head Start Impact Study found that children who participate in Head Start as three-year-olds show many benefits including improved vocabulary, letter-word identification, perceptual motor skills, behavior, health status, and familial interaction (like reading and cultural enrichment activities)—but that many of those advancements fade by the end of third grade.³ Our hope with these recommendations—both in this section and in the paper as a whole—is to build upon the achievements Head Start has already demonstrated while introducing reforms that may decrease fade-out. The aims of Head Start are even more necessary today than they were 50 years ago, and a new reauthorization should double down on two principles at the heart of the program’s accomplishments: an emphasis on the whole child and a focus on providing two generations of care for both children and their parents.

1965 Principle: Embracing the Whole Child

Head Start has always focused on the needs of the “whole child”—providing medical assistance, emotional support services, and other forms of comprehensive care rather than focusing on merely cognitive or academic development. It was for this reason that Head Start was initially established within the federal government Office of Economic Opportunity and today is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families rather than being housed in the Department of Education.⁴ Recent advancements in the field of child development research, along with 50 years of Head Start experience, have proven how crucial this focus on the whole child is to meeting the goals of the program. We offer three recommendations for how the next Head Start reauthorization can double down on this principle: 1) maximize home visitations, 2) expand emotional wellbeing services, and 3) provide a full day of services.

A. Maximize home visitations

Currently, Head Start grantee programs that offer center-based care are required to “develop and implement a system that actively encourages parents to participate in two home visits annually.”⁵ The 2015 reauthorization should endeavor to maximize the number of home visits each child receives, either by increasing the minimum in the legislation or by incentivizing programs to offer additional home visits on a voluntary basis, as some programs already do.

Studies show that early childhood home visiting programs lead to a better ability to follow directions, finish work on time, and work with others in first grade. Additionally, students who participated in home visiting programs as young children have higher grade point averages and test scores at age nine as well as increased rates of high school graduation.⁶ A recent study found that center-based Head Start programs offering more than three home visits per year increased social-emotional skills and executive functions like persistence, self-control, curiosity, and conscientiousness a statistically significant margin more than programs providing three or fewer—and also showed larger effects on cognitive skills like language development and literacy.⁷ Under the 2015 reauthorization, every family should be encouraged to participate in home visits and every Head Start grantee program required or incentivized to offer as many as possible.

B. Expand emotional wellbeing services

One in four children will experience a traumatic event before reaching preschool.⁸ And with every traumatic experience a child endures, the stress on their system compounds, impacting their brain development and making it more and more likely that they will struggle later in life.⁹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, children living in poverty or in at-risk communities are the most likely to suffer adverse experiences that can affect them throughout their lifetimes—and these are the same children Head Start aims to support. Head Start programs, then, are early access points to the emotional wellbeing services from which children growing up in difficult circumstances will significantly benefit, and reauthorization should emphasize the value of such access and care.

One successful model of expanded wellbeing services is Trauma Smart, a mental health care initiative currently being used by several Missouri Head Start programs to provide students with the services needed to address the emotional effects of violence and trauma.¹⁰ According to Trauma Smart, 100% of the children receiving support have benefitted from the program in some way, whether through a decrease in aggressive behavior and oppositional defiance or an increase in the ability to remain attentive in school or sleep through the night.¹¹ The 2015 Head Start reauthorization should increase access to emotional wellbeing services by incentivizing (though not mandating) grantee programs working with at-risk children to adopt the successful Trauma Smart initiative—or something like it.

C. Provide a full day of services

Head Start programs can currently provide either a full or a half day of services to the children they serve. Nationwide, slightly less than half of programs elect to provide a full day.¹² But data from the last 50 years have shown that full-day care has significant benefits for both enrolled children and their families, and the 2015 reauthorization should reflect that importance by incentivizing more programs to offer longer hours. A stronger, reauthorized Head Start could provide even more benefits to its students and their families through longer service hours. Reauthorization should require the Department of Health and Human Services to seek to shift new or renewed Head Start grants to full-day (and, for that matter, full-week) schedules—and should adjust the amount of funding these grantees receive to allow them to do so.

The children Head Start serves show substantial benefits from all-day rather than half-day care—they score higher on social-emotional development, language, math, and physical health and have better attendance and reduced chronic absences.¹³ And full-day Head Start can help parents work full-time jobs or attend school or job training programs and relieves them of much of the need to pay for outside childcare—which today can cost more per year than a college education.¹⁴ This increases family income and economic opportunities for parents, which in turn makes their children more likely to grow up to be upwardly mobile themselves.

1965 Principle: Investing in a Two-Generation Model

Head Start has long been implemented with the understanding that parents are the principal leaders of their children’s education and development. A two-generation approach to early childhood education recognizes the importance of families by developing partnerships with parents to facilitate the development of the whole child and their family life.¹⁵ Positive parenting creates a buffer, protecting children from the increased risk of harm created by the circumstances of poverty.¹⁶ Knowing this, Head Start must continue to engage parents in early childhood education, but it must do so more meaningfully—ensuring that parents and children are receiving the support they need to not only set goals at school and inside the home, but also to achieve them. We offer three recommendations: 1) focus on family goals, 2) facilitate bridging activities, and 3) make parenting classes interactive.

A. Focus on family goals

Among the many comprehensive services provided by Head Start, one with great but untapped potential is the formulation of family goals.¹⁷ Head Start providers are required to show that each student has an individual family partnership agreement, which contains a list of goals the family wants to achieve that year—anything from a parent getting a job to a child learning their colors or shapes. But while legislation requires the establishment of these goals, at no point are families or the providers ever asked to return to them to evaluate progress or identify challenges. The 2015 reauthorization should incentivize Head Start providers and families to review these goals at the end of the year—not as a high-stakes measurement of performance that can be held against the program if the goals are not achieved, but as a means of checking in with the families and making sure that they have the support they need to achieve those goals and establish new ones.

B. Facilitate bridging activities

Parental involvement has always been one of the four main components of Head Start—and for good reason. One recent study found that the home environment (as measured by the HOME* score) is responsible for up to half of the relationship between socioeconomic status and children’s cognitive test scores.¹⁸ That’s why the 2015 reauthorization should encourage grantee programs to offer “bridging activities” that link the school and home learning environments. Bridging activities, which can take many forms, deepen the connection between what a child learns in Head Start and the way their parents teach and interact with them at home to improve the learning environment outside of the classroom.

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) Inventory is used to score the quality of a child’s home environment by measuring stimulation and support the child receives from objects, events, and familial transactions.

Some examples of successful bridging activities include parents attending the first few days of school with their preschooler, teachers making home visits, and even two-to-three week summer programs for the whole family that prepare students to start school and parents to continue their children’s education at home. Research has shown that these types of bridging activities lead to positive student outcomes—particularly for low-income children like those eligible for Head Start.¹⁹

C. Make parenting classes interactive

One of the major components of Head Start’s two-generation model is parenting classes, which are offered by many providers. This is especially impactful because research shows that parenting style accounts for 21% of the literacy gap, 19% of the math gap, and 33% of the language gap between low- and middle-income children.²⁰ However, not all parenting education classes are equally effective—and Head Start reauthorization should incentivize programs to adopt the most effective practices. In this case, that means moving away from didactic, lecture-style parenting classes that rely on worksheets and readings and instead emphasizing modeling of positive parenting styles and opportunities for participants to practice and receive feedback. A recent meta-analysis of 88 studies of early childhood education programs found that when parenting classes follow the latter model, parental warmth and responsiveness improve and children experience larger increases in cognitive and pre-academic skills. In contrast, didactic parenting classes show no additional benefits.²¹

2. Bring Head Start into 2015 Using New Research and Standards

New research on brain development and Head Start outcomes has expanded our understanding of child development since Head Start was first created in 1965—and since it was last reauthorized in 2007. We now know that the ways in which children interact with adults in the first years of their lives can affect the development and even the architecture of their brains long-term, making Head Start and Early Head Start even more crucial to their later success.²² But Head Start’s 2,400 Performance Standards are overly long and stuck in the past—the Department of Health and Human Services hasn’t released a revised version since 1998 and they aren’t consistent with the last reauthorization, much less this one. To bring Head Start into 2015, we focus on two principles: the importance of intervening early and continuously in the lives of low-income children and the need to update and streamline the unwieldy Performance Standards.

2015 Principle: Intervening Earlier and Continuously

We offer two recommendations for Head Start reauthorization that would improve the ability of grantee programs to intervene early and continuously in the lives of low-income children: 1) make all Head Start grants Birth-to-Five and 2) incentivize early enrollment and participation.

A. Make all Head Start grants Birth-to-Five

When children participate in Early Head Start, which provides child and family development services for pregnant women and children under age three, they demonstrate above average cognitive and language development, more emotional engagement with parents, less aggressive behavior, and sustained attention to play objects.²³ And yet while 42% of eligible kids are enrolled in Head Start programs for three-to five-year-olds, less than 4% are enrolled in Early Head Start for kids under age three.²⁴

Currently, Head Start grants are differentiated by age—zero to two and three to five—which creates an arbitrary division in services that makes it more difficult for grantees to provide high quality, continuous care to the low-income kids who need it the most. This barrier can result in children being kicked out of Early Head Start programs mid-year when they age out of the grant, create gaps in access, and make it impossible for many programs to target the important first years of life when achievement gaps between low- and high-income children start to open. Instead, the 2015 reauthorization of Head Start should scale up the current “Birth-to-Five” pilot program which is already ongoing in five localities (Baltimore, Detroit, Washington D.C., Jersey City, and Sunflower County, Mississippi) to allow all providers to apply for combined Early Head Start and Head Start grants encompassing ages zero to five in a single streamlined application and funding process.²⁵

In a promising trend, many Early Head Start providers have begun to enter into partnerships with traditional Head Start providers, state-funded pre-K programs, child care centers, and/or day care providers to expand the network of providers able to offer quality comprehensive care to young children and improve the continuity of their education. This is something that expanding the Birth-to-Five grant program could assist in and should encourage.²⁶

B. Incentivize early enrollment and participation

The 2015 reauthorization should incentivize families to sign up for Head Start services as early as possible. The Department of Health and Human Services should propose innovative outreach strategies, provide assistance to grantees, and incentivize and reward programs for successfully prioritizing early enrollment.

Parents can enroll their child in Early Head Start as early as during pregnancy—and the children of parents who do so have better outcomes. As noted above, participation in Early Head Start, the program for children under age three, leads to higher cognitive development scores and a decreased likelihood of falling in the “at-risk” range of developmental functioning and language skills.²⁷ Parents of children who participate in Early Head Start are more likely to enroll their children in later early childhood education programs, such as Head Start or state pre-K classes.²⁸ And not only does early enrollment lead to better outcomes and higher participation rates, it also provides low-income children with the continuity of care that is crucial to early development—continuity that they are already less likely to have in life than their higher-income peers because of family housing and job instability. The stability established through early enrollment allows children to better form trusting relationships with adults and helps parents form deeper relationships with educators and development experts who understand their children’s needs.²⁹

2015 Principle: Update and Streamline Performance Standards

Head Start grantees must currently comply with 2,400 Performance Standards, which are defined as “Head Start program functions, activities and facilities required and necessary to meet the objectives and goals of the Head Start program.”³⁰ They include everything from who should be given Fluoride supplements (depending on the community and/or extent of tooth decay) to the spacing between cribs (“at least three feet”) to when and how meals should be served (family style, evidently).³¹ But the last time these Performance Standards were revised was 1998—almost two decades ago.³² The Department of Health and Human Services is in the process of using its regulatory authority to update the standards to comply with the 2007 Head Start reauthorization legislation, but has not yet completed the process—eight years later.³³ That means Head Start programs are now faced with an unwieldy checklist of activities they must complete that is disjointed and at times unconnected to the current version of Head Start’s authorizing legislation, much less its aspirations for 2015.

Not only should the Administration move with haste to update and release new Performance Standards as soon as possible, but the 2015 Head Start reauthorization should endeavor to streamline standards going forward so that grantees can worry less about checking boxes and more about the quality of programming they provide to our nation’s neediest children. A shorter, tighter list of standards can put the emphasis on outcomes rather than compliance and allow programs to innovate and be more flexible to meet the current, local needs of the communities they serve. Bringing Head Start into 2015 means more than just reauthorizing its legislation—it needs to address the out-of-control and out-of-date standards as well.

3. Identifying Best Practices for the Head Start of 2025

The goals of the 2015 Head Start reauthorization should not only be to double down on what we knew worked in 1965 and to bring the program up to date with new research and standards. It should also begin to set the stage for further improvements in the future by giving the best-performing Head Start grantee programs an opportunity to innovate and develop new best practices that Congress can expand upon in 2025 and beyond. We recommend that, in order to identify the best practices that should be incorporated into the Head Start of the future, reauthorization should reward top performers with flexibility.

2025 Principle: Reward Top Performers with Flexibility

The current Head Start designation renewal system ranks grantees within a group of their cohorts in order of performance to identify the lowest ranking programs, which then must re-compete for their grants. While this system penalizes poorly performing programs, it does nothing to reward top performers or figure out what they are doing that makes them so effective. The 2015 Head Start reauthorization should address this oversight by rewarding the top performers in each cohort with more flexibility in their programming and the ways they can spend their grant dollars. So long as those high-performing programs continue to meet the Head Start objectives and goals, the 2015 reauthorization should grant them the freedom to deviate from the 2,400 current Performance Standards in doing so—at the very least until this or a later Administration releases a streamlined and more flexible list of Performance Standards. Giving the very best Head Start providers more freedom to innovate and focus on what they know works will free up program dollars so more students can be enrolled—and it will allow these grantees with proven records of success to pilot new potential best practices that can be incorporated into the Head Start of 2025.

Conclusion

Head Start has changed the lives of millions of children and their families, and in many cases it serves as the first opportunity to help low-income children break the mobility barrier. While Congress has a substantial agenda planned for 2015, few pieces of legislation can do as much to address poverty, inequality, and our nation’s mobility crisis as the reauthorization of Head Start. Our ten recommendations are far from exhaustive on how Head Start can be improved and there are many contentious reform ideas we did not discuss—but our list is comprehensive in terms of addressing the issues most important in promoting upward mobility among the nation’s disadvantaged children. This Congress, Head Start reauthorization should be a top priority—and it should double down on what we know works, incorporate new research and updated standards to bring the program into 2015, and tee up future breakthroughs.