Early Childhood Policy Research

Since its inception more than four decades ago, Head Start has served as the nation's premier federally funded early childhood intervention. Focusing on children in the years before formal schooling, often from families with multiple risks, it has served as a laboratory for a range of basic prevention, early intervention, and program evaluation research. The Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), launched in 1997 as a longitudinal study of program performance, remains Head Start's ongoing flagship research initiative. Mathematica's five-year FACES 2006 study is tracking a cohort of 3,500 3- and 4-year-old children enrolled in 60 Head Start programs around the country. To assess quality of the Head Start National Reporting System, a major initiative to examine the development of all Head Start children during the year before kindergarten entry, we visited over 140 programs. We also developed a set of Head Start design options to help identify promising quality enhancement strategies for programs. In addition, we are conducting a quality assurance study of the Head Start training and technical assistance system to document and assess national, regional, and local program activities.

In one of our largest and most complex studies, we evaluated the Early Head Start program, which extends the Head Start concept to pregnant women and low-income families with infants and toddlers. Our staff worked with a consortium of local researchers and program directors on a random assignment impact study in 17 sites. We also conducted a comprehensive implementation study. Our assessments focused on family functioning and children's development at 14, 24, and 36 months. With our consortium partners, we interviewed parents at 6, 15, and 26 months after they joined the program to assess families' service needs and use as well as their health and employment outcomes. In collaboration with the Early Head Start Research Consortium, we conducted followup interviews with these children and their families during the year before kindergarten and are now conducting the Early Head Start fifth-grade followup.

Our current survey of Early Head Start programs continues this work, building on findings about the importance of program implementation and service approaches.

The closing keynote presentation at Head Start's 2006 national research conference provided perspectives on some of the enduring themes in Head Start Research and challenges for the future.

What is the role of low-income fathers in the lives of their children and families? Working with the Early Head Start research consortium, we have studied this issue. To understand how programs involve fathers and respond to the needs of children and families, we worked with our consortium partners to interview fathers and videotape father-child interactions when the children were 2 and 3 years old. We also followed a group of fathers and families beginning at their child's birth to gain insight into how families interact with each other and with programs. As part of the process, we distilled lessons for creating paths to father involvement.

States and communities are increasingly investing in preschool education. Assessing the readiness of children from those and other prekindergarten programs to succeed in school has become an increasingly important concern. Yet it is not an easy task because of the many home, community, preschool, and school influences that contribute to a child's development. We have reviewed the concept of readiness and its essential ingredients, considered the dilemmas inherent in assessing the dimensions of readiness, and discussed a framework for measuring and interpreting readiness outcomes. Our Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research project is studying the impacts of several important preschool curricula on a range of indicators of children's school readiness. In the Ready To Learn evaluation, we examined whether educational television programming and outreach help prepare children for school. We are helping to evaluate the impacts of the Early Reading First program on reading readiness and other measures of development.

Affordable and accessible child care is a key factor in allowing many parents to obtain jobs. The quality of child care can also have strong implications for children's development. In 1990, we published the groundbreaking national survey of child care settings. For our Early Head Start evaluation, we developed the Child-Caregiver Observation System, which enables researchers to document interactions between caregivers and children. The system also documents the nature and intensity of these interactions, as well as the quality of a child's interactions with peers in the child care setting. We used this measure, along with many others, in a special policy study commissioned by ACF to examine the role of Early Head Start programs in addressing the child care experiences of children and families. Because low-income families tend to rely heavily on care provided by family, friends, and neighbors—"kith and kin caregivers"—we are evaluating the Early Head Start Enhanced Home Visiting pilot project, an initiative to improve the quality of care provided by kith and kin caregivers of Early Head Start children.