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VIII. THE MEANING OF THE EARLY HEAD START PROGRAMS' EARLY IMPACTS FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

A. KEY FINDINGS FROM THE INTERIM ANALYSIS OF EARLY HEAD START IMPACTS

The interim analysis of Early Head Start impacts provides a rich picture of the short-term impacts of the programs on children and families. The analysis shows that:

• A year or more after enrollment in Early Head Start, 2-year-old children performed significantly better than their randomly assigned control group peers on a wide range of cognitive, language, and social-emotional development indicators. Their parents demonstrated more supportive and stimulating parenting behaviors, possessed greater knowledge of infant-toddler developmental milestones, and provided more-supportive home environments. Early Head Start parents were more likely than control parents to participate in education and job training and to have lower levels of parenting stress and family conflict.

• Although these effects are modest in size, the consistent pattern of statistically significant favorable impacts across a wide range of outcomes is promising at this early stage. The findings are "early" because the 17 research programs are among the first ones funded, the follow-up period does not yet include the full period of families' program participation, and the children are only 2 years old. (Data collection is continuing and program impacts will also be assessed when children are 3 years old.)

• Given the voluntary nature of the Early Head Start program, the overall average participation rates were very high during the first 16 months after enrollment. Furthermore, a high percentage of families received intensive services, a reflection of the substantial efforts of program staff to engage families in ongoing services. This accomplishment is particularly notable given the new demands welfare reform made on many program families during the evaluation period.

• Although other services were available in the Early Head Start communities and many control group families received some services, Early Head Start families were significantly more likely to receive a wide variety of services, were much more likely to receive intensive services, and were much more likely to receive intensive services that focused on child development and parenting during the first 16 months of program enrollment.

• Overall impacts varied by the timing of programs' achievement of "full implementation," as measured in the implementation study. Programs that implemented the Head Start Program Performance Standards early on had larger impacts on families' use of services, children's development, parenting, and family development than programs that fully implemented the performance standards later or never implemented them completely.

• With respect to the services families received, subgroup analysis showed that:

  • Impacts on service receipt were broad-based and large in nearly all of the program subgroups we examined, but home-based programs had the greatest impacts on receipt of home visits, case management, and parent-child group activities; center-based programs had the greatest impacts on the receipt of center-based child care and the amount of child care received; mixed-approach programs had impacts that were between those of home-based and center-based programs, but tended to be closest in magnitude to the impacts of home-based programs.

• With respect to impacts on children and families, subgroup analysis showed that:

  • While all center-based, home-based, and mixed-approach programs produced positive impacts on children, they did so differently, with the center-based programs enhancing cognitive development, the home-based improving language development, and the mixed-approach programs enhancing children's language and social-emotional development. With some exceptions, Early Head Start impacts on parenting and the home environment were concentrated in the home-based and mixed-approach programs, as were the impacts on parent participation in education or job-training.

  • Early Head Start programs had some significant impacts on all types of families with diverse circumstances, although patterns of impacts varied. Nevertheless, programs were generally more effective with families in which the primary caregiver has greater need for the social and other program supports, and families with moderate risks rather than low or high risks. Programs also had consistent impacts on child well-being among families headed by a teen parent and families who were receiving welfare cash assistance when they enrolled, two groups for whom concerns about children are paramount.

B. CENTRAL MESSAGES EMERGING FROM THE FINDINGS

From these early findings of the Early Head Start evaluation, several key messages and lessons are already emerging:

• Early Head Start appears to be beginning to make a difference for low-income families, particularly in the lives of 2-year-old children and their parents. The analysis shows that programs can stimulate better outcomes along a broad array of dimensions (with children, parents, and home environments).

• The overall pattern of findings suggests that Early Head Start programs may be tilting the balance of risk and protective factors in the lives of the low-income families they serve, possibly creating or enhancing protective factors for children in their early years. The programs significantly reduced the proportion of children with low scores on the measure of cognitive development, suggesting that fewer children may be at risk for developmental delay or need special services later on.

• All program approaches for delivering services can be successful, but their benefits manifest themselves in different ways when programs choose their service approach based on local family needs.

• Programs that offered both home-based and center-based options in response to local families' needs (the mixed-approach programs) had more flexibility in serving individual families and had a stronger pattern of impacts on children and families.

• Implementing key elements of the performance standards clearly appears to be an important key to success, as evidenced by the larger impacts in programs that implemented the performance standards early. The larger impacts among early implementers than among later implementers suggest that early exposure to programs achieving the standards is especially important for improving child and family outcomes. The smaller impacts among later implementers suggest that families and children do not catch up when the standards are achieved later in their tenure with the program.

C. IMPLICATIONS FOR PROGRAMS, POLICY, AND RESEARCH

When the impact findings are taken together with findings from the comprehensive study of program implementation (see Pathways to Quality), several implications emerge.

Programs can now see the value of adhering to the performance standards, attending to operationalizing the standards soon after funding, maintaining staff, and focusing on quality. In addition, however, programs should note that these interim findings suggest:

• If they offer only center-based services, they must find ways to place greater emphasis on supporting parenting, parent-child relationships, and family support.

• If they adopt a center-based approach, programs should increase efforts to support language development and do even more than they are already doing to foster cognitive development, as the impacts so far are relatively small.

• If programs are home-based or mixed, they should strive for greater intensity of services, including more frequent home visits and group socializations, while also attending to children's cognitive development during the home visits and group socializations.

• Programs should be more vigilant about parental safety practices to ensure safe environments for infants and toddlers. Although many families appear to be able to access health services in their communities even without Early Head Start, programs should still work with families to ensure that their specific health needs are being met.

• Although programs appear to be reducing the proportion of infants and toddlers who are "at-risk," all programs should ensure that the children who need disability services receive the appropriate diagnosis and referral for Part C services.

• To achieve more significant impacts on child and family outcomes in the highest- risk families, programs may need to find different or more intensive ways of serving them. To have the greatest impact, it is desirable to enroll families with firstborn children and to enroll families while the woman is still pregnant, but it is possible to have important impacts on children and families who enroll later.

Policymakers in the Head Start Bureau, who have believed in the value of maintaining the Head Start Program Performance Standards, can be more confident in those beliefs. These findings support the value of updating the standards periodically (as happened near the beginning of Early Head Start), monitoring programs regularly, providing the infrastructure of training and technical assistance, and enforcing compliance with the standards.

Researchers can derive many lessons from the study so far. Among the most important are:

• Recognizing the benefits that derive from devoting significant resources to conceptualizing, documenting, and analyzing the implementation process and understanding as fully as possible the approaches (strategies and activities) programs take in delivering services.

• Using multiple methods for measuring outcomes, so that findings are not dependent on parent reports only, child assessments only, or any single methodology.

• Identifying subgroups of programs and policy-relevant populations so that analyses can begin to address questions about what works for whom. Having an adequate number of programs and adequate sample sizes within sites are necessary to make program-control comparisons of outcomes for particular subgroups of sites or subgroups of families. Then, research can provide important insights into program impacts under particular conditions and for particular groups of families.

• Incorporating local perspectives in national evaluation studies so that the voices of programs and local research perspectives can augment the cross-site analyses.

D. NEXT STEPS

While these findings are generally positive, we emphasize that they are interim. More analyses will be completed and reported in the coming year:

• In the final report, due in spring 2002, we will add data from the cognitive and language assessments of 3-year-olds, along with interviews with their parents and analysis of videotaped parent-child interactions at that age. We will incorporate data on education, employment, child care, and other services used through 26 months or more of program participation, as well as summary data obtained when families exit the program (typically sometime between the child's third birthday nd entry into a prekindergarten program).

• With longitudinal data across multiple timepoints along the age and program enrollment dimensions, we will report findings from more-complex multivariate analyses, including analyses of mediators of program impacts and growth-curve analysis.

• In the coming year, two special policy reports will provide additional findings related to children's health and disabilities and child care.

 

 

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