ACF OPRE: Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHSRE)

Executive Summary

Introduction

Programs are dynamic, and like children and families, they grow and change. By fall 1997, after slightly more than a year of operation as new Early Head Start programs, the 17 programs participating in the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project had faced many challenges and had achieved important early successes. They were leading the way for the hundreds of new Early Head Start programs that are following in their footsteps and sharing the lessons learned through partnership with researchers that will enhance the value of the evaluation research for continuous program improvement.

This is the first major report on the implementation of the 17 programs participating in the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project. It focuses on the early implementation experiences that program staff reported in fall 1997 and tells the story of programs that helped launch the first nationwide program for low-income families with infants and toddlers. The second report examines program implementation in fall 1999, when the programs were more mature, and focuses on pathways to achieving high-quality services.

This first report is organized in three volumes. Volume I provides a cross-site perspective on the characteristics and early implementation experiences of the 17 research programs. It examines similarities and differences across programs in the characteristics of the families they serve, their goals and expected outcomes, and the services they offered, and it summarizes the early challenges and successes the programs experienced. Volume II includes an in-depth profile of each of the 17 programs. Volume III analyzes the levels of implementation and child care quality achieved in the early stages of the programs' evolution in terms of the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards.

Early Head Start

Early Head Start, a new Head Start initiative to serve pregnant women and low-income families with infants and toddlers, began in 1995. The Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) designed the Early Head Start program in response to (1) the growing awareness of a "quiet crisis" facing families of infants and toddlers in the United States, as identified in the timely Starting Points report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York; (2) recomendations of the Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion; (3) growing community needs for services for infants and toddlers; and (4) the 1994 Head Start reauthorization, which established a special initiative setting aside 3 percent of 1995 Head Start funding, 4 percent of 1996 and 1997 funding, and 5 percent of 1998 funding for services to families with infants and toddlers. Following the 1994 Head Start reauthorization, Secretary Shalala's Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers set forth a vision and blueprint for Early Head Start programs. The 1998 Coats Human Services Reauthorization Act increased Early Head Start funding to 7.5 percent for fiscal year 1999, 8 percent for fiscal year 2000, 9 percent for 2001, and 10 percent for 2002 and 2003. Today more than 600 programs across the nation are serving infants and toddlers and their families. More programs will be funded in 2000 and beyond as the Head Start Bureau increases the proportion of funds set aside for services for families with infants and toddlers.

Early Head Start is a child development program consisting of comprehensive, two-generation services that may begin before the child is born and focus on enhancing the child's development and supporting the family as primary educators of their children during the critical first three years of the child's life. Early Head Start programs are designed to produce outcomes in four domains:

Child development (including health, resiliency, and social, cognitive, and language development)
Family development (including parenting and relationships with children, the home environment and family functioning, family health, parent involvement, and economic self-sufficiency)
Staff development (including professional development and relationships with parents)

Community development (including enhanced child care quality, community collaboration, and integration of services to support families with young children)

The Wave I Early Head Start programs were funded in fall 1995. The early years of their grants were characterized by significant changes and many events. Some of these events required some of the young Early Head Start programs to make adjustments and, in a few cases, to redesign their service approach. Figure 1 presents a timeline displaying the key events surrounding the implementation of Early Head Start.(1) Most notably, welfare reform legislation was enacted and ACYF was still putting the support infrastructure into place during the early years.

FIGURE 1
KEY EVENTS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF EARLY HEAD START

Jan. 1994			Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion recommends serving families with children under 3
			Carnegie Starting Points report released
			Head Start reauthorized with mandate to serve infants and toddlers
			Advisory Committee on set forth vision and named Early Head Start (EHS)

Jan. 1995			First EHS program announcement
			Federal Fatherhood Initiative formed
			Wave I: 68 new Early Head Start programs funded

Jan. 1996			First Early Head Start programs began serving families
			Welfare reform legislation enacted
			Wave II: 75 new EHS programs funded
			First round of research site visits conducted
			Revised Head Start Program Performance Standards enacted

Jan. 1997			White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning
			Wave III: 32 new EHS programs funded
			*Second round of research site visits conducted*

Jan. 1998			Revised Head Start Program Performance Standards took effect
			Monitoring visits to Wave I programs conducted
			Wave IV: 127 new EHS programs funded
			Youngest child in research sample born
			Wave V: 148 new EHS programs funded
			Head Start reauthorized

Jan. 1999


			*Third round of research implementation visits conducted*
Jan. 2000			Wave VI: 97 new programs funded

ACYF created an infrastructure for supporting the new Early Head Start programs in achieving high program quality. This includes (1) training and technical assistance, (2) Revised Head Start Performance Standards, and (3) program monitoring to ensure compliance with the standards. Training and technical assistance have been provided by the Early Head Start National Resource Center, administered by Zero to Three, and by the Head Start Training and Technical Assistance Network, which includes regional training centers that provide general program training and specific training for supporting program services for children with disabilities.

Early Head Start programs follow and are monitored according to the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards. At the time of the site visits in fall 1997, the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards had been published and would take effect in January 1998, and the programs were still seeking clarification of some of the new regulations. Head Start Bureau staff conduct monitoring visits every three years to determine whether programs are in compliance with program guidelines and performance standards and to identify requirements and recommendations for program improvement. Wave I Early Head Start programs were first monitored in spring 1998.

Early Head Start National Research and Evaluation Project

In 1996 and 1997, ACYF selected 17 programs from around the country to participate in the Early Head Start National Research and Evaluation Project. They constitute a balanced group--including Head Start agencies, former Comprehensive Child Development Programs, former Parent Child Centers, school districts, and community-based organizations; programs from all 10 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regions; urban and rural areas; and with variation in racial/ethnic makeups. The research programs broadly resemble the full group of programs that received Early Head Start funding in the first two waves in terms of enrollment and family demographics, based on comparisons with Program Information Report (PIR) data. Thus, lessons learned from the research programs are likely to be applicable to other Early Head Start programs.

The Early Head Start National Research and Evaluation Project is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and Columbia University in collaboration with 15 local research teams and is being coordinated by the Early Head Start Research Consortium. The research includes five major components: (1) an implementation study; (2) an impact evaluation, using an experimental design; (3) local research studies to learn about pathways to desired outcomes; (4) policy studies to respond to information needs in areas of emerging policy-relevant issues; and (5) continuous program improvement.

This report, in three volumes, is the first of two reports on program implementation; it focuses on implementation during the first two years of program funding, which includes approximately one year of planning and one year of serving families. The report is based on information gathered in two site visits to each program (late summer 1996 and fall 1997), information from program documents, and data from Head Start Family Information System application and enrollment forms filled out when research families enrolled. In this summary and in the three volumes of the report, we discuss the programs' expected outcomes in the context of their theories of change; describe the families and children served; present program implementation information related to key program areas; discuss preliminary information on the quality of center-based child care settings in which Early Head Start children received care; and present our view of the challenges and successes that the programs experienced during their first two program years.

The Policy Context for Early Head Start Implementation

The early phases of the Early Head Start initiative were implemented during a time of fundamental changes in this country's social services systems. Some of these changes have had a dramatic effect on the approaches programs take, the ways in which families respond, and the ways in which programs interact with others in their communities. In particular, five broad social changes and contextual factors, some of which occurred after Early Head Start began, have been and are likely to continue influencing the Early Head Start initiative:

Increasing recognition of the importance of early development, which has led to greater demand and support for services that start when women are pregnant and focus directly on child development
Welfare reform in the context of a strong economy, which has increased parents' child care needs and can increase levels of family stress and make it more difficult for parents to participate in some program services
New child care and state-supported early childhood initiatives, which can make it easier for families to obtain financial assistance, increase the need for Early Head Start staff members to collaborate with state child care administrators and local child care programs, and may make it more difficult for Early Head Start programs to hire and retain staff members
Growing attention to the roles of fathers in young children's lives, which can lead programs to devote more resources than originally planned to strengthening fathers' relationships with their children and enhancing fathers' parenting skills
Recent evaluation findings that identify challenges in improving outcomes for children and families, which suggest that programs that provide intensive, purposeful, high-quality child-focused services are more likely than those that provide primarily parent-focused services to promote significant change in children's cognitive, social, and emotional development

Program Approaches

Early Head Start programs strive to achieve their goals by designing program options based on family and community needs. Programs may offer one or more options to families, including: (1) a home-based option, (2) a center-based option, (3) a combination option in which families receive a prescribed number of home visits and center-based experiences, and (4) locally designed options, which in some communities include family child care. Because a single program may offer multiple options to families, we have characterized programs for purposes of the research according to the options they offer to families as follows:

Center-based programs, which provide all services to families through the center-based option (center-based child care plus other activities)
Home-based programs, which provide all services to families through the home-based option (home visits plus other activities)
Mixed-approach programs, which provide services to some families through the center-based option and some families through the home-based option, or provide services to families through the combination option or the locally-designed option

When the research programs were initially funded, five were center-based, five were home-based, and seven were mixed-approach (they served some families through the center-based option and other families through the home-based option). By fall 1997, eight programs were home-based, four were center-based, and five were mixed-approach. These changes in approach resulted from subsequent funding decisions, shifts in families' needs, and recommendations of technical assistance providers. In some programs, changes are continuing to take place in response to changing family needs for child care and clarification of ACYF expectations that home-based Early Head Start programs are responsible for ensuring that Early Head Start children who need child care receive high-quality care.

Key Characteristics of the Parents and Children

The Early Head Start program guidelines specify that programs may serve pregnant women and families with at least one child under age 3 who meet the Head Start income criteria.(2) The families who enrolled in the Early Head Start research programs had diverse characteristics and needs:

Most families enrolled in the research programs before their child reached the age of 6 months. More than one-fourth of the primary caregivers enrolled while they were still pregnant.
Indicators based on children's low birthweight and reports by primary caregivers that someone had a concern about their children's development suggest that approximately 20 percent of the children who enrolled after birth might have had or were at risk for a developmental disability.(3)
Many families included two resident parents--about 40 percent overall--but the extent to which the research programs served two-parent families varied widely.
About one-third of the children's primary caregivers were teenage parents, but this also varied substantially--for example, in two programs, more than half of all families were headed by a teenage parent.
On average, about one-third of the families were African American, one-fourth were Hispanic, slightly more than one-third were white, and a small proportion belonged to other groups. In 11 programs, enrolled families belonged predominantly to one group, while in six programs, the racial/ethnic composition of enrolled families was diverse and not dominated by one group.
On average, 20 percent of primary caregivers did not speak English as their main language. Some of these caregivers also spoke English well, but some did not. Overall, 11 percent of the primary caregivers did not speak English well.
Overall, slightly more than half the primary caregivers had a high school diploma.
On average, 23 percent of applicants were employed and another 22 percent were in school or training (usually school) as their main occupation at the time they enrolled.
Some of the families had basic needs that were not being met when they enrolled in the research programs. Overall, the percentages reporting that they did not have adequate food, housing, medical care, or personal support ranged from 5 to 13 percent.
Child care was a significant need of the families. Overall, 34 percent of the families did not have adequate child care arrangements when they enrolled. The percentage of families without adequate child care arrangements ranged from 8 to 66 percent across the research programs.
Most of the families who enrolled in the research programs were receiving some kind of public assistance. Overall, 79 percent had Medicaid coverage, and 88 percent were receiving WIC benefits. Almost half the families were receiving food stamps, and slightly more than one-third were receiving AFDC or TANF cash assistance (some pregnant women were not eligible for cash assistance because they were not yet parents). A small proportion (seven percent) were receiving SSI benefits.

Theories of Change

To better describe and understand the diversity of program approaches, local and national researchers worked closely with program staff to identify their intended outcomes across all program areas. This "theory of change" approach identified variations across Early Head Start research programs in their specific goals and expected outcomes. This process benefits the evaluation by enabling us to obtain the most program- and policy-relevant findings, benefits programs by encouraging staff to reflect on their priorities, and supports continuous program improvement.

Through our discussions with program staff, we found that most programs viewed enhancing parent-child relationships and parenting as central to their mission. Almost all emphasized enhancing parents' knowledge of child development, and a substantial percentage focused on supporting parent-child attachment. All programs expected to achieve child development outcomes across multiple dimensions that are likely to benefit the children as they transition into preschool and school programs. Programs emphasized social-emotional development; physical development, health, and safety; cognitive and language development; and approaches toward learning. Some programs expected to affect child development directly, while others expected to achieve these goals indirectly by improving the parent-child relationship. With respect to expected family development outcomes, most programs indicated a strong focus on enhancing aspects of the home environment, increasing parental self-sufficiency, and improving parental mental health and healthy family functioning; some programs placed an emphasis on physical health and safety and parental literacy and education.

Programs saw staff as integral to achieving outcomes in all other areas, since the knowledge, skills, and stability desired for their staff would ultimately benefit child development, family development, and the community. Programs were clearly aware of the complexity of their community-building objectives. Several programs focused on systems change for improving child care quality.

1Events below the dotted line on Figure 1 occurred after the site visits that provided data for the current report. These events are included in the timeline to demonstrate the dynamic nature of Early Head Start program development. (back)
2To be eligible for Head Start or Early Head Start, families must have incomes at or below the poverty line or be eligible for public assistance, but regulations permit up to 10 percent of children to be from families who do not meet these criteria. In addition, programs must make a minimum of 10 percent of enrollment opportunities available to children with disabilities. (back)
3Four percent of children who enrolled after birth had been born at low birthweight and concerns about their development were reported on the application form. Nine percent of the children had not been born at low birthweight, but their primary caregivers reported that someone had a concern about their development. Seven percent had been born at low birthweight, but their primary caregivers did not report that someone had a concern about their development. (back)

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