Head Start

Project Head Start is the largest federal early childhood program in the United States, annually enrolling almost a million children (0–5 years) and funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Administered by the Head Start Bureau within the Administration for Children and Families office, the federal grants are given directly to public agencies, private not-for-profit organizations, faith-based organizations, and school systems to run local Head Start programs, thereby bypassing state agencies. Originally conceptualized as a summer program, Head Start has evolved into a vast network of comprehensive services for economically disadvantaged children and their families, and has served as a defining influence on the field of early childhood education in the United States. Head Start, as an important social and educational experiment, is the longest lasting social program from the 1960s, and represents an ongoing debate in educational reform around the constant concern for the intellectual preparation of American schoolchildren.

As part of the War on Poverty programs, Head Start was advanced in the Kennedy–Johnson era based on the view that education was a means to eradicate poverty. It had developed in response to specific political and economic pressures that emerged from a sense of distress over the reports of the below-average physical and intellectual states of children living in poverty in the United States. The purpose of the program was to enable preschool children of low-income families to grow to their full potential in all areas of development, while being prepared for the demands of early elementary grades. The issue of nurture versus nature was being debated in education, and at about this time research was highlighting the effect of the environment on human development, contradicting the prevailing view of the previous decade, which had promoted the role of heredity on children's development. Further research was likening the development of the intellect during the early years to the laying of the foundations of a building. The provision of an appropriately stimulating and supportive environment could have a powerful influence on shaping the intellect of young children, and this construction of a solid foundation for learning in the preschool years would work effectively toward more young children growing up to be productive citizens, thus breaking the cycle of poverty in American society. This approach was certainly problematic since it was based on several stereotypes: low-income mothers were incapable of offering their children appropriate affection and guidance; low-income families provided their young children environments that were either overstimu-lating or understimulating; low-income families did not provide children with environments that were rich in sophisticated verbal and print language; and children growing up in poverty were culturally deprived. Although later research provided evidence that many of these assumptions were wrong, the central tenet of Head Start continued to persist in the belief that a quality preschool program could dramatically improve the competence of children from economically disadvantaged families, thus giving them a head start in their later education. The goal of Head Start has been to reach as many children living in poverty as possible; enrollment has grown from about 550,000 children enrolled in Head Start in 1965 to almost a million today.

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