Testimony of Olivia Golden
Assistant Secretary Administration for Children and Families
before the
Children and Families Subcommittee
Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee and the Early Childhood, Youth and Families
Subcommittee House Education and the Workforce Committee
March 26, 1998

 

I am pleased to appear before you today to offer the Administration's strong support for prompt and bipartisan reauthorization of the Head Start program. This joint hearing exemplifies the cooperative spirit that Congress and the Administration have traditionally committed to America's premier early childhood development program.

Together in 1994, we engaged in an historic effort that critically reexamined every feature of the Head Start program. Following this review, the Congress enacted bipartisan legislation that created a blueprint for quality and expansion of the Head Start program and established a solid foundation for moving Head Start into the 21st century.

Today, I would like to urge you to enact a bipartisan reauthorization that maintains the strong foundation set down in 1994 and continues to move toward meeting the President's goals. Therefore, we recommend extending the authorization for another four years at such sums as may be necessary. We also urge the Congress to build upon the innovative Early Head Start program you initiated in 1994 by gradually increasing it to 10 percent of program funds by 2002.

By keeping the core provisions of the 1994 legislation, and making these and a few other small changes, we can reaffirm the bipartisan consensus for program quality and accountability, combined with community flexibility in program planning, implementation and decision making. Further, this straightforward approach to reauthorization retains promising new improvements, including performance outcome measures and a variety of research and evaluation initiatives.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE HEAD START PROGRAM

Head Start's mission is to help prepare young economically disadvantaged children for success in school and life through a comprehensive program of early education, health and nutrition services. In addition, programs work hard to educate, support, and advance the economic and social progress of Head Start parents. This year, 830,000 children will attend Head Start in more than 16,000 community-based centers and 595 home-based programs. They come from low-income families; 60 percent of Head Start families earn less than $9,000 per year and 45 percent receive benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Head Start is very much "locally owned and operated". Over 1,400 public and private non-profit community agencies manage Head Start programs, guided by a common framework of national standards and policies. There are 42,200 Head Start classes meeting across the country every day. Head Start agencies have considerable flexibility in designing programs to meet the needs of local families and to mesh with the efforts of other community early childhood agencies and programs.

Most importantly, research is showing that Head Start works. Data from our new Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey, the Department of Education's National Household Education Survey, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Study of Youth, show that:

Head Start children are more advanced in early literacy and verbal skills compared to similar children who have not attended early childhood programs;

Parents are involved at high levels in Head Start activities and in supporting their children's learning at home; and

There are long-term positive effects of participation in Head Start on academic achievement and reduction in grade repetition.

This pattern of positive outcomes is further bolstered by conclusions of the Packard Foundation's Center for Children's recent analysis of nearly 150 studies of high quality early intervention programs in the U.S. and other nations, including Head Start.

Since its inception in 1965, one of the key reasons for Head Start's success has been sustained, bipartisan support for the program and the ability of leaders from the Administration and Congress to work hand in hand to make continued program expansion and improvement a top priority. This support was clearly demonstrated in Secretary Shalala's Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion where we worked together to develop a set of recommendations for the future of the Head Start program. The Committee concluded that Head Start of the 21st century must:

Ensure quality and strive to attain excellence in every local program;

Respond flexibly to the needs of today's children and families, including those currently unserved; and

Forge new partnerships at the community, state, and federal levels, renewing and recrafting these partnerships to fit the changes in families, communities, and state and national policy.

This vision of Head Start formed the basis of the 1994 reauthorization and since that time we have worked to successfully implement the key provisions of this legislation.

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE 1994 HEAD START REAUTHORIZATION

I would now like to summarize some of our key accomplishments over the past four years to expand and strengthen the quality of this program across the nation.

Enhancing Program Quality

We have taken four important new steps to promote continuous improvement and a stronger focus on outcomes in every local Head Start program. The first step called for in the 1994 legislative mandates was to complete the first revision in 20 years of Head Start's Program Performance Standards, our template for holding programs accountable for delivering high quality services to every child and family. The revised standards, effective January 1, 1998, are clearer and easier to use, provide valuable new guidance on quality practices in program management and in serving infants and toddlers, and reflect the latest research on the best ways to work with young children and their families.

A second important provision in the 1994 reauthorization was support for tough enforcement to make sure that every agency lives up to the Performance Standards. We have taken a new tough stance whenever our on-site program monitoring teams found serious deficiencies in program compliance with the Performance Standards. We have replaced 90 grantees that were unable to correct performance problems promptly, in each instance making arrangements to continue services through another local agency. In many other cases, grantees targeted as deficient were successful in making substantial improvements in management and program practices and moving back into compliance with Head Start standards. Taken together, these efforts led to significant improvements in the relatively small proportion of agencies with quality problems.

Step three in our quality initiative was to complete the design and initial implementation of a new system to define, measure and track progress on the key outcomes of Head Start services. Our performance measures encompass outcomes in key areas from enhancing children's health and learning, to strengthening families as the primary nurturers of their children, to ensuring that Head Start is a well-managed program that involves parents in decision-making. We established four new Quality Research Centers to develop and field test a system to assess and track these outcomes. And we have completed collection and analysis of pilot data on a nationally representative sample of 2,400 children and families from 40 Head Start programs across the country through our Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES). Initial results from FACES show that the quality in Head Start classrooms is good; no classrooms are rated in the poor range. Perhaps most importantly, program quality -- including small class sizes, favorable child:adult ratios, a variety of learning materials, and more sensitive and responsive teaching -- is positively related to child outcomes in vocabulary, prewriting skills, and knowledge of numbers. Data on parent involvement is equally impressive; 80 percent or more are attending parent-teacher conferences and observing in their child's classroom, more than 70 percent are volunteering in the classroom, and one-third are involved in program planning and decision-making.

Fourth, we made program quality a priority in the way we fund programs. Based on Congressional mandates, a portion of each year's funding increase has been allocated to locally-designed quality improvement initiatives and investments in staff salaries and fringe benefits. Over the last four years agencies hired additional family service workers to work more intensively with parents on adult literacy, job training, parenting education, and substance abuse treatment. These additional staff members will be a vital asset in supporting Head Start parents as they participate in new welfare reform initiatives.

Local agencies also have made steady improvements in salaries and fringe benefits for Head Start's more than 145,000 staff members. Average salaries for teachers increased from $14,600 in 1992 to approximately $17,800 in 1997, the proportion of Head Start grantees providing retirement benefits increased by 24 percent, and virtually all agencies are now providing comprehensive health insurance. These investments may have contributed to Head Start's annual staff turnover rate of less than 8 percent, which is much lower than the estimated 33 percent annual turnover rate in child care centers. This low turnover rate is important given the increasing body of research on early childhood and child care programs which shows that success for children depends on stable, well-trained teams of staff members in classrooms.

Expanding Head Start Services

Over the past five years, steady increased investment in Head Start has allowed a total of nearly 175,000 more children to receive Head Start's comprehensive health, nutrition, and high quality early childhood education services while their parents also participate, volunteer and learn. At the same time, Head Start agencies are also working to provide more high quality services, to meet the needs of parents moving from welfare to work, and to help children be ready for and make a successful transition to school. This successful expansion has put us on track to achieve the President's goal, supported by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, of serving 1 million children by 2002.

In addition to enrolling more preschool children, Head Start has expanded to serve infants and toddlers. Prompted by compelling new research on brain development in very young children, the 1994 reauthorization created the Early Head Start program, extending the benefits of Head Start's comprehensive quality services to this younger age group. We successfully launched this nationwide initiative through a series of open national competitions that funded Early Head Start programs in 173 communities in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to serve 22,000 children birth to age three. This year we will be making awards to establish approximately 200 additional programs to extend Early Head Start services to up to 39,000 children in total. This initiative also includes a state-of-the-art research strategy to learn in a systematic way about the long-term outcomes of this program and to assess what types of program strategies are most effective.

Forging New Partnerships

Since its inception in 1965, Head Start has drawn on community resources and contributions. Last year over 1.3 million volunteers worked in Head Start, and local citizens, health professionals, businesses, and voluntary organizations donated everything from eyeglasses to computers to space for classrooms in support of local programs. However, in recent years, Head

Start has stepped up to new levels of collaboration with both public and private sector partners.

One rapidly growing area of partnerships is between Head Start and state-funded early childhood programs. In part based on the example and success of Head Start, more than 32 states are now investing to expand and improve child care, prekindergarten and other preventive initiatives. For instance, Ohio has increased funding to expand Head Start services from less than $20 million in 1992 to more than $83 million this year, and Minnesota has boosted its support from $6.5 million to $37.5 million in the same period.

We have worked closely with these and other states to create full-fledged cooperative approaches to joint funding, program monitoring, staff training and technical assistance. Similarly, sparked by the example of Early Head Start, states such as Kansas and Oklahoma are adding state funds to expand services to very young children, using our Performance Standards as guidelines for their state funding.

To enhance our partnerships with states, we have created a network of 52 Head Start-State Collaboration Offices to connect local Head Start programs with state initiatives in areas such as child care, health, family literacy, welfare reform and public education. In Washington State, the Collaboration Office and the Administration for Children and Families Regional Office have brokered a creative partnership with the Costco and Washington Works Corporations to help Head Start parents who are looking for a job. Head Start parents in Costco's Wholesale Retail Internship Program participate in a comprehensive, 10-month program of paid work experience, employment training and community college courses which lead to 45 academic credits and a certificate that qualifies them for further job opportunities at Costco and other companies. Head Start agencies help families with child care, transportation and other needs.

In an important Head Start-private sector partnership, Johnson and Johnson, Inc. for the past seven years has co-sponsored an advanced management training program for Head Start Directors through the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles. An exciting new five-year, $16 million joint venture with the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation will provide special training to Head Start staff in working with infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families.

In another significant partnership, Head Start has made a commitment to encourage linkages with local child care agencies to help meet growing needs of low-income families for quality child care. The majority of Head Start programs provide part-day classroom services, but report that many Head Start families are employed or moving into welfare-to-work initiatives. In last year's competition for expanding Head Start enrollment, we encouraged Head Start agencies to join forces with local child care providers to provide high quality, full-day services. The outcome was a dramatic shift in the pattern of new services -- more than 30,000 new children will be served in full-day forms of Head Start and more than 400 Head Start agencies will be partnering with other community child care and early childhood agencies and resources. We believe that partnerships between Head Start and child care will help young children prepare for school as well as support parents as they move into employment.

We have continued to strengthen Head Start research, launching several new long-term studies in collaboration with other federal partners. The Department of Education's Early Childhood Longitudinal Study will follow a nationally representative sample of 25,000 kindergarten children, including a substantial subsample of children who attended Head Start. Head Start is also contributing to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's (NICHD) seven-year longitudinal Study of Early Child Care which will track the cognitive, health, and social development of over 1,200 infants in a variety of child care and Head Start centers and informal care arrangements. Other new research partnerships include projects with the National Institute of Mental Health on mental health needs and services for Head Start families, and, with NICHD, a special study of how fathers in Early Head Start are involved with their children.

THE AGENDA AHEAD

What I hope to have portrayed today through these vivid examples is that, as a result of the solid base provided by the 1994 reauthorization, Head Start today is bigger, better, more accountable, more diverse and effective in its forms and functions, and better connected to significant state and local partners than at any time in its history. We've created a base of stronger local agencies, updated management systems and significant new forms of service to our nation's most needy children, families, and communities.

However, Head Start also faces a number of significant challenges in the years ahead. First, we must continue to strive to meet the President's goal of serving one million children by 2002, including 80,000 infants and toddlers, while also maintaining our commitment to a high quality program. Second, we must work to address the growing needs of families for full-day, full-year care for their children through innovative Head Start/child care partnerships. Third, Head Start must fulfill its historic role as the national laboratory for America's child care, early childhood, and parent support system through research, development, and outreach efforts. To accomplish this task, Head Start must continue to encourage promising partnerships with other early childhood agencies to create more quality child care services by combining the best of Head Start's model of comprehensive services and well-trained classroom staff with the best of child care's heritage of supporting working families with full-day, full-year and other forms of flexible service.

We can address these challenges by working toward another bipartisan reauthorization that maintains and builds on the strong foundation set down in 1994. Specifically, we urge your committees to extend the authorization for the Head Start program for another four years through 2002, with only a few limited modifications. It is essential to maintain the important existing provisions that support program improvement and accountability, including challenging and comprehensive performance standards and outcome measures; a strong system for monitoring and enforcement; and sustained, targeted investment in a variety of quality improvement activities and technical assistance.

The one key change which must be made in the Head Start statute is to build on the innovative Early Head Start program established in 1994 by gradually increasing the authorized set aside to 10 percent by 2002, meeting the President's goal to double the number of children in Early Head Start. Continued expansion of Early Head Start is a vital investment for three reasons. First, we are learning from this research how early experiences with parents and caregivers shape brain development, language acquisition, and a host of related physical, cognitive, and social capacities in infants and toddlers. Second, we are translating this knowledge into a solid program strategy that meets the needs of, and makes a difference for, both children and their families. Third, as more parents with infants and toddlers are working to support their families, Early Head Start is becoming a vital catalyst to inspire other public and private investment for very young children and a crucial model of quality services that will guide program development and front-line staff practice in a wide range of other agencies and programs.

In addition to this one fundamental change, we would recommend an increase in the amount of funds the Secretary may reserve for the highly successful Head Start Fellowship program. This program enables local Head Start staff and others in the field of child development to expand their knowledge and experience while making significant contributions to the Head Start program. We think it would be extremely beneficial to the Head Start program to offer this opportunity to a greater number of Head Start staff and other child development specialists across the nation.

Also, we understand the importance of undertaking research in order to better guide future decisions and to ensure that program dollars are invested wisely. To this end, we plan to undertake a study of the program's quality investment set-aside so that we can learn more about the types of investments we are making and the types of investments that best improve program quality and help to improve outcomes for children. Finally, we would suggest a few technical adjustments to eliminate or correct now-outdated provisions of the Act.

We believe this straightforward approach to reauthorization will reaffirm the bipartisan consensus of support for Head Start as our nation's flagship early childhood program and provide the right framework for continued expansion and improvement efforts. These recommendations will allow Head Start to continue expanding enrollment with a more diverse mix of care options for infants, toddlers and pre-school children, strengthen our efforts to improve programs with a new set of tools, and help Head Start in moving into even more substantial working partnerships with states and communities as they manage and fund other child care, early childhood, welfare, health, and public education services.

CONCLUSION

I appreciate this opportunity to speak with you and look forward to working with the Congress as we take Head Start into the 21st century. My staff and I are available to work with your committees on this important reauthorization and to provide any

assistance needed to ensure that Head Start continues to make a difference for America's children and families.

I would be happy to respond to your questions.