Sally J. Styfco

Pioneering Steps (and Fumbles) in Developing a Federal Preschool Intervention

Unlike the planners of the federal Head Start program, those who design interventions today have a wealth of knowledge available about meeting the needs of young at-risk children. Experience has shown that goals must be clear and realistic, the program must be comprehensive and involve each childs family, and services must be of high quality and last long enough to be beneficial. Efforts must be expended on research and evaluation both to fill the need for accountability and to inform service improvements. Basic and applied research each have valuable contributions to make to the intervention field and to the construction of effective social policies.

The interrelationship between self-image disparity and social competence, defensive style, and adjustment status.

Groups of 40 psychiatric and 40 nonpsychiatric male patients were subdivided into equal groups of high and low social competence. Each patient completed a task battery which included three measures of self-image disparity and the Byrne repression-sensitization scale. High competence patients of both types were found to have higher self-image disparities than low competence patients. Psychiatric patients were found to have higher disparity scores than nonpsychiatric patients, although some evidence indicated that this was true only for the low competence groups. Higher scores on the Byrne scale (indicating sensitization) were found for high as compared to low competence patients, and for the psychiatric as compared to nonpsychiatric groups. Defensive style correlated significantly with each of the self-image measures. The results were discussed in the context of both developmental and Rogerian formulations. It was concluded that an individuals maturational level influences both self-image and defensive style, even when the individual is judged psychologically maladjusted.

Moving Head Start to the States: One Experiment Too Many

Head Start is not the same program it was when the doors opened nearly 40 years ago. It is better in nearly every way. The reason is that Head Start is not just an intervention program but an evolving concept. When the first author joined the planning committee back in 1964, little was known about how to prepare children from low-income families for their entry to school. Today, there is a large, empirically derived knowledge base, much of it emanating from or inspired by the Head Start experiment. This is why we endorse the Bush Administration and Congress taking a fresh look at Head Start to think through ways the program can be improved. As the literature becomes more refined, and as the needs of the population change, Head Start must adjust to provide better, more relevant services. Its flexibility is one of its greatest strengths and the reason why it has continued to improve over the years. The original Head Start planning committee not only had little empirical evidence to draw from, but they also had little time to design the ideal school-readiness program. Implementation was also hurried. Just 4 months after their recommendations were submitted, well over one-half million poor preschoolers arrived in Head Start classrooms. Zigler was able to act on his desire (certainly shared by the other planners) to have more time to do this right when he became the federal official responsible for the program in 1970. As the first director of the Office of Child Development (now the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families), he instituted a national laboratory approach within the Head Start framework. He envisioned Head Start as a place to design, rehearse, and assess new ways to meet the needs of children and their families. Those efforts that showed promise would be further developed and expanded, whereas those that did not meet expectations would be overhauled or abandoned. Over the years, the Head Start laboratory has implemented and evaluated many innovative demonstration programs. One example is Healthy Start, a summer health program of sorts that failed and was ended long ago. Another was Home Start, a way to deliver Head Start services to children in their homes. Today, it is an option employed by several hundred grantees, mostly in rural areas. The Child and Family Resource Program, which enabled families of children ages 0 to 8 to choose the services they wanted, was the first general family support model. Thousands of such programs now operate throughout the nation. Versions of Education for Parenthood, the first large-scale parenting preparation course, are now part of the curriculum in many high schools. Another seed planted in the Head Start lab is the Child Development Associate. This entry-level credential indicating knowledge of child development and competence to care for young children is today recognized by all 50 states. Finally, since its early days, Head Start has worked on the concept of serving children before the preschool age. The most recent test, Early Head Start, has finally rolled out nationwide. Although still small, findings of a rigorous evaluation are quite positive and advise that this program should be expanded. Note that none of these demonstration programs threatened the integrity of the primary Head Start program serving 3and 4-year-old children and their families. Each was a trial aimed at seeking better, community-sensitive ways to serve them, while keeping the fundamental federally centralized nature of the program intact. In a drastic departure from this approach, recently both the Bush Administration and Congress (School Readiness Act of 2003, introduced by Representative Michael Castle) have proposed new experiments for Head Start that would radically alter its foundation. They would allow states to administer Head Start, merging it with other preschool efforts and rewriting its goals and quality standards. To be fair, the bill passed by the full House would permit only 8 states to become part of a “demonstration” phase, but the intent is clearly to devolve Head Start. Both proposals give the same rationale for this drastic change from a

What is the Goal of Head Start? Four Decades of Confusion and Debate

ABSTRACT This article provides a brief history of interpretations of Head Starts objectives over the last 4 decades. We begin with the founding goal of helping children prepare for school and the later misguided adaptation of increases in IQ scores as an indicator of childrens readiness. We then discuss Head Starts more contemporary objectives, social competence and school readiness, and discuss the relation between these two constructs. Only by defining at the outset what Head Start is striving for will we be able to judge objectively if the program has succeeded and create social policies that facilitate its effectiveness.

A “Head Start” in What Pursuit? IQ Versus Social Competence as the Objective of Early Intervention

“Project Head Start, which began as an experiment, is now battle tested and it has been proven worthy.” So spoke President Lyndon Johnson in August 1965, when he announced that Head Start would become a year-round program after its inaugural summer session.1; “Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed,” wrote educational psychology professor Arthur Jensen just 4 years later.2 By the time Head Start celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday, it was lauded as “the nation’s pride”3 and “the one program everyone wants to help.”4 Soon, however, the public was reading about “The Head Start Scam” and Herrnstein and Murray’s blunt opinion on “the disappointment of Head Start” in The Bell Curve. 6