A year in Head Start: Children, families and programs

Head Start is a national program that aims to promote school readiness by enhancing the social and cognitive development of children through the provision of educational, health, nutritional, social, and other services to enrolled children and families. The Head Start program provides grants to local public and private non-profit and for-profit agencies to provide comprehensive child development services to economically disadvantaged children and families; the Office of Head Start emphasizes a special focus on helping preschoolers develop the reading and mathematics skills they need to be successful in school. The program also seeks to engage parents in their children’s learning and to promote their progress toward their own educational, literacy, and employment goals (Administration for Children and Families [ACF] 2009).

The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) was first launched in 1997 as a periodic longitudinal study of program performance. Successive nationally representative samples of Head Start children, their families, classrooms, and programs provide descriptive information on the population served; staff qualifications, credentials, beliefs and opinions; classroom practices and quality measures; and child and family outcomes. FACES includes a battery of direct child assessments across multiple domains. It also comprises interviews with the child’s parents, teachers and program managers, as well as direct observations of classroom quality. (For background information on FACES 2006, see West et al. 2007, Tarullo et al. 2008 and West et al. 2008.)

FACES is a tool for measuring Head Start program performance at the national level. This recurring data collection provides the means to assess how the program is performing currently and over time. Figure 1 offers the conceptual framework for the FACES study. The child is located at the center, surrounded by parents and family, and located within the context of a given Head Start classroom and program. The model posits that it is through the provision of high quality, comprehensive educational services (in interaction with their home and classroom contexts) that children make progress towards the goal of physical wellbeing and cognitive and social-emotional school readiness.

This brief profiles the 3- and 4-year-old Head Start children and families who were newly enrolled in the program in fall 2006 (see Tarullo et al. 2008) and are still attending in spring 2007. The first section of the report provides background on the study methodology and sample. The next offers information on the children’s characteristics, family demographics, and home life, including language background, educational environment of the home, family routines, and socioeconomic risk status. It includes information on parent involvement in Head Start and level of satisfaction with their own and their children’s Head Start experiences. The following section chronicles children’s developmental progress over the Head Start year, considering whether these outcomes vary by age, gender, race/ethnicity, or risk status. Changes in children’s skills and development during the program year reflect a range of influences, including maturation, program and family influences, and other influences in children’s lives. Presented next are the characteristics of their teachers and classrooms, including measures of observed quality. Finally, the last section examines the relationships among child, family, and classroom factors and children’s outcomes. (author abstract)