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INTRODUCTION
Early Head Start has blossomed from a fledgling program with 68 grantees in 1995 into today’s national initiative, with more than 500 grantees around the country, an increasing proportion of the Head Start budget (from 3 percent in 1995 to 10 percent in 2002), strong bipartisan support, and support from the administration.1 Seventeen of these programs are participating in national and local research and evaluation studies that are documenting the implementation process and assessing program impacts and outcomes. The Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) envisions these research programs as leading the way by providing information that will promote improvements and inform further expansion of Early Head Start nationally. As part of the first group of Early Head Start programs funded, the 17 research sites are in the forefront in designing and implementing programs that meet the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1996). As participants in the Early Head Start National Research and Evaluation Project, they are demonstrating what Early Head Start programs can accomplish. They are also sharing the lessons they have learned in creating Early Head Start programs and in developing high-quality services for infants and toddlers and their families.
The Early Head Start programs are dynamic, and they operate in a changing world. This report describes the programs as they existed in fall 1997. Many programs were making changes at that time and are continuing to make changes.2 Since fall 1997, the revised Head Start Program 2 Performance Standards have become official and the programs have received monitoring visits. The second implementation study report, to be completed in early 2000, will assess the process of program change and development over the first four years of Early Head Start program funding.
In this introductory chapter, we review the beginnings of Early Head Start, describe the current policy context in which the programs are being implemented, and summarize the plans for the evaluation. The following chapters provide an overview of the 17 Early Head Start research programs in fall 1997, relate what we have learned about the programs’ theories of change (concentrating on their goals, priorities, and expected outcomes), provide detailed documentation of the services offered by the programs within the first two years of funding, and analyze the key challenges that Early Head Start programs faced and the successes they achieved in the early stages of implementation.
A. THE EARLY HEAD START PROGRAM AND ITS POLICY CONTEXT
New initiatives and programs are shaped by the trends and events that lead to their creation and by the policy context in which they are developed. In the case of Early Head Start, several important events led to the development of a program for low-income families with infants and toddlers. During the program’s early phase, important changes occurred both in social policy and in our understanding of program effectiveness, which may dramatically influence the program’s development and future direction. The rest of this section examines key influences on the initial conception and early implementation of Early Head Start. Figure I.1 illustrates the timing of the key events discussed next.
1. The Beginnings of Early Head Start
Early Head Start began at a time of increasing awareness of the “quiet crisis” facing families with infants and toddlers in the United States, as identified in a report entitled “Starting Points:
KEY EVENTS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF EARLY HEAD START
PROGRAMS AND RESEARCH
| Jan. 1994 |  |
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Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion recommended serving families with children under 3 | |
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Carnegie Starting Points report released | |||
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Head Start reauthorized with mandate to serve infants and toddlers | |||
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Advisory Committee sets forth vision and names Early Head Start | |||
| Jan. 1995 | ||||
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First EHS program announcement |
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Federal Fatherhood Initiative formed | |||
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Wave I: 68 new EHS programs funded | |||
| Jan. 1996 | ||||
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First EHS programs began serving families | |||
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Welfare reform legislation enacted | |||
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Wave II: 75 new EHS programs funded; 16th research program selected | |||
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First round of research site visits conducted | |||
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Revised Head Start Program Performance Standards enacted | |||
| Jan. 1997 | |
White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning | ||
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Wave III: 32 new EHS programs funded | |||
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Second round of research site visits conducted | |||
| Jan. 1998 | |
Revised Head Start Program Performance Standards took effect | ||
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Monitoring visits to Wave I programs conducted | |||
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Wave IV: 127 new EHS programs funded | |||
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Wave V: 148 new EHS programs funded | |||
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Head Start reauthorized | |||
| Jan. 1999 | |
Wave VI: 97 new programs funded | ||
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Third round of research implementation visits conducted | |||
| Jan. 2000 |
Events below the dotted line occurred after the site visits that provided data for this report. These events are included in the timeline to demonstrate the dynamic nature of Early Head Start program development.
Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children” by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (1994). As the report showed, large numbers of infants and toddlers are starting life in poor environments, without adequate stimulation, and without sufficient interactions with caring, responsive adults. The release of “Starting Points” followed closely on a comprehensive self-examination of Head Start services conducted by the Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion. This committee called for Head Start programs to improve their quality, address the fragmentation of services by forging new partnerships, and expand services in a number of ways, including serving more families with infants and toddlers (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1993). Subsequently, the Head Start Authorization Act of 1994 mandated new Head Start services for families with infants and toddlers, authorizing 3 percent of the total Head Start budget in 1995, 4 percent in 1996 and 1997, and 5 percent in 1998 for these services (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1994a). The Coats Human Services Reauthorization Act of 1998 further expanded the program, setting aside 7.5 percent of Head Start funds in 1999, 8 percent in 2000, and 10 percent in 2001 and 2002 for Early Head Start programs (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1998).
In 1994, Donna Shalala, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, created the Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers, which provided the guidelines for the new Early Head Start program (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1995). The report of the Advisory Committee set forth a vision and blueprint for Early Head Start programs and established principles and cornerstones for the new program (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1994b).
Early Head Start programs are comprehensive. The Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infant and Toddlers envisioned a two-generation program that included intensive services that begin before the child is born and concentrates on enhancing the child’s development and supporting the family during the critical first three years of the child’s life. The Advisory Committee recommended that programs be designed to produce outcomes in four domains:
- Children’s development (including health, resiliency, social competence, and 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 program guidelines specify that grantees may design programs that achieve these outcomes by conducting home visits, providing center-based child development services, combining these approaches, or implementing other locally designed options.
Early Head Start is designed for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers. The program guidelines specify that programs may serve pregnant women and families that contain at least one child under age 3 and that meet the Head Start income criteria. Although most families must have incomes at or below the federal poverty level or be eligible for public assistance, programs may serve up to 10 percent of children from families that do not meet these income criteria. Programs are also required to make at least 10 percent of the spaces available to children with disabilities.
The first wave of grantees--68 local programs--were funded in September 1995. Another 75 programs were funded in September 1996, and more were funded in subsequent years, so that today more than 500 programs are serving infants and toddlers and their families.
ACYF created an infrastructure for supporting the new programs, including (1) training and technical assistance, (2) revised Head Start Program Performance Standards, and (3) monitoring of programs to ensure compliance with the standards. The Early Head Start National Resource Center is providing ongoing support, training, and technical assistance to all waves of Early Head Start programs under a contract with Zero to Three. The center has provided training known as “intensives” in infant-toddler care; week-long training for key program staff; annual institutes in Washington, DC, for key program staff; and identification and preparation of a cadre of nationally known infant-toddler consultants who work intensively with programs on a one-to-one basis. The Early Head Start National Resource Center has worked closely with regional training grantees--the Head Start Quality Improvement Centers (HSQICs) and the Head Start Disabilities Services Quality Improvement Centers (DSQICs)--and with their infant-toddler specialists, as well as the 10 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Regional Offices and Indian and Migrant branches that assumed responsibility for administrating Early Head Start grants in fiscal year 1998.
Early Head Start programs follow and are monitored according to the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards. The revised Head Start Program Performance Standards were developed in an extensive process that took several years and included commentary by thousands of experts in early education, health, and related areas; Head Start parents and staff members; and members of the general public. 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 monitoring teams visit programs every three years to determine whether they are in compliance with program guidelines and the revised Head Start Program Performance Standards. Initially, the national office of the Head Start Bureau was responsible for awarding program grants and overseeing program operations. In fall 1997, however, this responsibility was transferred to the 10 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Regional Offices, except for a limited number of programs involving special circumstances. Wave I Early Head Start programs were first monitored in spring 1998
2. The Policy Context for Early Head Start Implementation
The implementation of any large-scale initiative cannot be understood without examination of the context in which it operates. The Early Head Start initiative is being implemented during a time of fundamental changes in this country’s social services systems. Some of these changes may have 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, may influence the Early Head Start initiative: (1) increasing recognition of the importance of early development, (2) welfare reform in the context of a strong economy, (3) new child care and pre-kindergarten initiatives, (4) growing attention to the roles of fathers in young children’s lives, and (5) recent evaluation findings that identify challenges in improving outcomes for children and families.
Early Development. Recent research has shown that human development prior to birth and during the first year of life is rapid and extensive and vulnerable to environmental influences. Moreover, early development has a long-lasting effect on children’s cognitive, behavioral, and physical development (Carnegie Corporation of New York 1994). National attention focused on early brain development in spring 1997, when the White House convened the Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning and special editions of national news magazines featured articles on infant brain development. The increasing focus on the importance of early development may lead program staff to adopt strategies and plan activities that are more child-focused, and increasing awareness among policymakers, program sponsors, and community members may lead to greater demand and support for services that start when women are pregnant and focus directly on child development.
Welfare Reform. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which became effective just as Early Head Start began serving families, reformed federal welfare policy and gave states more autonomy and responsibility for setting and administering welfare policy. It also established clear expectations for families receiving welfare. Cash assistance is now provided through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and is no longer an entitlement. Adults may receive cash assistance for a maximum of 60 months over their lifetime. After two years (or less time, at state option), many families will have to work in order to continue receiving cash assistance. Some states exempt parents of infants from the work requirements for a short time (typically less than a year), but many do not.
For delivery of program services, PRWORA created a climate different from the one that had existed when the first wave of Early Head Start grantees wrote their proposals. The new work requirements and time limits on cash assistance may increase demands on parents’ time, increase their child care needs, increase levels of family stress, and make it more difficult for parents to participate in some program services. The new requirements may also make parents more receptive to employment-related and child care services and motivate them to find jobs and become selfsufficient. Thus, in the context of the strong U.S. economy, they may improve families’ economic well-being. The increasing need for good infant/toddler child care may put extra pressure on Early Head Start programs to provide full-day, full-year child care or to help develop and support it in their communities.
New Child Care and Pre-Kindergarten Initiatives. PRWORA also consolidated federal funding for child care into a new Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which provides increased funding for child care for low-income families and allows states to design comprehensive, integrated child care delivery systems. These changes may make it easier for families who need child care to obtain financial assistance and make it easier for Early Head Start staff members to help families obtain child care subsidies. The increased employment of low-income families under PRWORA may also increase the need for Early Head Start staff members to collaborate with state child care administrators and local providers to help meet families’ child care needs and may challenge staff members to blend funds and find ways to work with the child care system within their states and communities.
In addition to child care subsidies for low-income families, 37 states now provide funds for a pre-kindergarten program or have a school funding mechanism for 4-year-olds (Mitchell, Ripple, and Chanana 1998). Shifting resources and increased support for the care of preschool children in many areas may offer Head Start and other preschool programs more opportunities for blending funding sources and may free up resources for serving more families with infants and toddlers. Where early childhood labor markets are tight, these initiatives may also make it more difficult for Early Head Start programs to hire and retain trained staff members.
The Role of Fathers. Policymakers, researchers, and educators are assuming a new, more explicit focus on fathers. Fathers are key partners in contributing economic and emotional support for the development of their children. As a consequence, to promote the positive involvement of fathers in the lives of their children, federal agencies are developing and enhancing fatherhood policies. This shift is related to recent social trends and the federal Fatherhood Initiative.3
The growing attention to the roles of fathers may lead programs to devote more program resources than originally planned to strengthening fathers’ relationships with their children and enhancing their parenting skills. Changing patterns of father involvement also challenge programs to develop creative strategies for father involvement that are not limited by traditional conceptions of family structure.
Recent Program Evaluation Findings. The Early Head Start programs began just as new findings from evaluations of programs that served families with infants and toddlers during the 1980s and early 1990s were being released. In particular, the longer-term findings of the evaluation of ACYF’s Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) were released soon after the first Early Head Start programs were funded. The CCDP, which offered case management services to low-income families with infants and toddlers, had few impacts on child and family outcomes (except in a few sites). In addition, recent research suggests that home-visiting programs often may not be effective and that careful attention needs to be paid to their implementation (Olds et al. 1998; and Gomby, Culross, and Behrman 1999).
The recent research findings highlight the difficulty of improving the lives of low-income children and families, but they also provide lessons to build on. The recent CCDP findings, along with previous research results, suggest that programs that provide intensive, purposeful, high-quality, child-focused services are more likely than those that provide primarily adult-focused services to promote significant changes in children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development. Accordingly, ACYF is directing Early Head Start programs to emphasize child development services--direct services to children in child development centers or home visits--and to pay careful attention to the quality of children’s child care arrangements, in addition to supporting parents as their children’s primary educators. ACYF strongly supports continuous program improvement in Early Head Start by providing intensive training and technical assistance, drawing on early research findings in its training and technical assistance activities, and supporting program partnerships with local researchers.
B. OVERVIEW OF THE EARLY HEAD START EVALUATION
The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project includes a national evaluation being conducted in tandem with local research and evaluation studies to address a broad range of issues. The project is assessing program impacts on an extensive set of child and family outcomes. In addition, it is investigating the role of program and contextual variations, studying the pathways to program quality, examining the pathways to desired child and family outcomes, and creating the foundation for a series of longitudinal research studies.
To achieve its aims, the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project encompasses five major components:
- An implementation study to examine service needs and use for low-income families with infants and toddlers, assess program implementation, understand programs’ theories of change, illuminate pathways to achieving quality, examine program contributions to community change, and identify and explore variations across sites
- An impact evaluation, using an experimental design to analyze the effects of Early Head Start programs on children, parents, and families; descriptive analyses will assess outcomes for program staff and communities. Early Head Start programs that are participating in the national evaluation recruited 150 to 200 families with pregnant women or children under age 1 to participate in the impact evaluation research (half were randomly selected to participate in the program, and half were randomly assigned to the control group).
- Local research studies to learn more about the pathways to desired outcomes for infants and toddlers, parents and families, staff, and communities
- Policy studies to respond to information needs in areas of emerging policy-relevant issues, including welfare reform, fatherhood, child care, and children with disabilities
- Continuous program improvement activities to guide all Early Head Start programs in formative evaluation
Figure I.2 presents a timeline that describes the key evaluation events and milestones.
KEY EVENTS IN THE EARLY HEAD START EVALUATION
| Jan. 1994 | |
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| Jan. 1995 | |||
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Evaluation contract awarded to MPR/Columbia team | ||
| Jan. 1996 | |||
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15 research programs selected, local research grants awarded | ||
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First family enrolled in research sample | ||
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16th research program selected | ||
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First round of research site visits conducted | ||
| Jan. 1997 | |||
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17th research program selected | ||
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Second round of research site visits conducted | ||
| Jan. 1998 | |||
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Last family enrolled in research sample | ||
| Jan. 1999 | |||
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Third round of research implementation visits conducted | ||
| Leading the Way reports released | |||
| Jan. 2000 | |||
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Pathways to Quality report due to be released | ||
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Data collection with research families completed | ||
| Jan. 2001 | |||
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Interim report on impacts due to Congress | ||
| Jan. 2002 | |||
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Final report on impacts due to Congress | ||
In 1996 and early 1997, ACYF selected 17 programs to participate in the national research and evaluation project. All Early Head Start programs funded in the first and second waves had agreed to participate in a random assignment evaluation. In January 1996, ACYF invited Wave I programs to select research partners and subsequently to apply to be a research site. To be eligible, they had to guarantee that they could recruit 150 families for EHS research (twice their program capacity). For easier identification of research partners, the Society for Research in Child Development made directories of its membership available to each new Early Head Start program, and ACYF issued a request for proposals, including the addresses and contact persons for the 68 Wave I programs, to notify researchers of the research opportunity. Forty-one program-researcher partnerships submitted proposals to be research sites (many of the other programs could not meet the sample size requirement). In all, ACYF selected 15 partnerships, basing its choices on both the quality of the proposed local research and an effort to achieve a balance of rural and urban locations, racial/ethnic composition, and program approaches. Subsequently, ACYF added two sites, one from the Wave II programs, to provide the desired balance of approaches. Chapter II provides an overview of the selected programs.
C. THIS REPORT IN THREE VOLUMES
This is the first of two reports that will detail findings from the implementation study. The first report consists of three volumes and describes the programs as of fall 1997. It discusses the main features of the research programs and identifies the key challenges and successes they experienced during their first year of serving families (Volume I), presents detailed profiles of each of the 17 programs (Volume II), and analyzes program implementation in each domain (Volume III). The second implementation report will present an analysis of implementation and quality after a round of site visits in late summer 1999 and discuss the pathways to higher quality followed by the research programs.
The data for this report come from many sources, including two rounds of site visits to the research programs, program documents, self-administered staff surveys, Head Start Family Information System application and enrollment forms, and other documents and databases. The site visits were conducted by researchers from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and Columbia University’s Center for Young Children and Families. The first round of site visits was conducted in summer and early fall 1996, around the time most programs began serving families. The second round of site visits was conducted in fall 1997, approximately two years after the programs were funded and one year after they began serving families.
The information gathered from various sources was synthesized using established qualitative analysis methods and systematic procedures established in advance. Site visitors used notes they took during their visits to prepare a narrative profile of each program and to complete tables displaying key information about each program in a consistent format. These profiles and tables were verified by program directors. Analysts then created cross-site data displays showing related information for each site. These cross-site data displays facilitated the tabulation and interpretation of the data. We verified our conclusions through discussions with site visitors and ACYF staff members.
Descriptive statistical methods, including calculating means and frequencies, were used to analyze quantitative data. Data on families’ characteristics from the Head Start Family Information System application and enrollment forms and data from the self-administered staff surveys were analyzed using these methods.
The following chapters present a comprehensive description of the Early Head Start research programs in fall 1997. Chapter II describes the Early Head Start research programs and the families they served, examines how representative they are of all Wave I and II Early Head Start programs, and discusses the programs’ goals, priorities, and expected outcomes. Chapter III describes program recruitment and enrollment, the services provided by the programs, and program management. Chapter IV summarizes the key challenges the research programs faced in their first year of serving families and highlights their early strengths and successes.
1 At the October 23, 1997, White House Conference on Child Care, President Clinton announced his proposal to double Early Head Start funding. (back)
2 Where programs were making changes or experiencing changed circumstances at the time of the site visits, the profiles in Volume II describe the changes that were under way. (back)
3 The federal Fatherhood Initiative was galvanized by President Clinton's request for federal agencies to assume greater leadership in promoting the involvement of fathers and focusing on their contributions to their children's well-being. The activities of this initiative have involved the White House, several key federal statistical agencies, the Family and Child Well-Being Research Network (a consortium of seven scholars funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development--NICHD) and the National Center on Fathers and Families. Together, these activities have created a national momentum for reconceptualizing the way fathers are incorporated into policies. They also have set forward a research agenda that will improve federal data on fathers and will support the development of policies that recognize the emotional, psychological, and economic contributions that fathers can make to the development of their children. (back)
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