Early Childhood Education Programns

H T ead Start is a preschool program for disadvantaged children which aims to improve their skills so that they can begin schooling on an equal footing with their more advantaged peers. Begun in 1965 as part of PresidentJohnson's "War on Poverty," Head Start now serves over 800,000 children in predominantly part-day programs, almost 50 percent of eligible three and four year-old poor children (Children's Defense Fund, 2000). Over time, federal funding has increased from $96 million in 1965 to $4.7 billion in 1999. There have been dozens of studies of Head Start and closely related preschool and early school enrichment programs. Some studies involve small-scale model programs, others evaluate large-scale public programs which are generally of somewhat lower quality than the model programs. This paper discusses what is known about these early childhood education programs: what they try to do; the extent to which they work; what can be said about their optimal timing, targeting, and content; and the circumstances in which the benefits of providing these programs-ranging from gains to the children to the value of child care provided to the parents-are likely to outweigh the costs. This review of the evidence concludes that these programs have significant shortand medium-term benefits, and that the effects are often greater for more disadvantaged children. Some of the model programs have produced exciting results in terms of improving educational attainment and earnings and reducing welfare dependency and crime. The jury is still out on Head Start, but a simple cost-benefit analysis suggests that Head Start would pay for itself in terms of