I am curious about this part. Why would outcomes be better for both non-depressive 3-year-olds and depressive 4-year-olds?:
There is evidence that for some outcomes, Head Start had a differential impact for some subgroups of children over others. At the end of 3rd grade for the 3-year-old cohort, the most striking sustained subgroup findings were found in the cognitive domain for children from high risk households as well as for children of parents who reported no depressive symptoms. Among the 4-year-olds, sustained benefits were experienced by children of parents who reported mild depressive symptoms, severe depressive symptoms, and Black children.
I was super surprised that the "key findings" section of the executive summary in the actual report give a very different feeling of the contents of the report than the summary provided by the Heritage Foundation researchers:
From the actual report:
Key Findings
Looking across the full study period, from the beginning of Head Start through 3rd grade, the evidence is clear that access to Head Start improved children’s preschool outcomes across developmental domains, but had few impacts on children in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Providing access to Head Start was found to have a positive impact on the types and quality of preschool programs that children attended, with the study finding statistically significant differences between the Head Start group and the control group on every measure of children’s preschool experiences in the first year of the study. In contrast, there was little rd evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3 grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group.
In terms of children’s well-being, there is also clear evidence that access to Head Start had an impact on children’s language and literacy development while children were in Head Start. These effects, albeit modest in magnitude, were found for both age cohorts during their first year of admission to the Head Start program. However, these early effects rapidly dissipated in elementary school, with only a single impact remaining at the end of 3rd grade for children in each age cohort.
With regard to children’s social-emotional development, the results differed by age cohort and by the person describing the child’s behavior. For children in the 4-year-old cohort, there were no observed impacts through the end of kindergarten but favorable impacts reported by parents and unfavorable impacts reported by teachers emerged at the end of 1st and 3rd grades. One unfavorable impact on the children’s self-report emerged at the end of 3rd grade. In contrast to the 4-year-old cohort, for the 3-year-old cohort there were favorable impacts on parent- reported social emotional outcomes in the early years of the study that continued into early elementary school. However, there were no impacts on teacher-reported measures of social- emotional development for the 3-year-old cohort at any data collection point or on the children’s self-reports in 3rd grade.
Head Start has long been known to be more positive for the parents than the children. The real problem is Head Start is too late to find some of the biggest problems. A physical problem that affects learning can be caught and corrected earlier. Instruments such as the Denver Screening, ELAP, or LAP will catch stuff in the 6 week to 3 year range. HS has a program in this range (Early Head Start) which evolved from earlier efforts (e.g. CCDP), but it is not common. 0-3 programs are better for kids long term, 3-5 year programs benefit parents more.
Disclaimer - I have 5 years of data on a study program under my belt in this area (0-3).
Advice - if you have a kid in the 0-3 range, get them screened often and get any problems corrected. It will save you grief and taxpayers money later.
I am most familiar with the three I mentioned, but check with your state government. Hearing is critical and seemed to be the most common and costly if not caught. When I get into the office I will see if I can find some of my old files. Search "Denver Developmental Screening" and "Early Learning Accomplishment Profile" to get a flavor of what I mean.
After the weekend weather, I got to work and cannot get any of the old files (about 10yrs old now). So, I will go from memory.
We used the "Denver Developmental Screening" as an initial test. You probably will remember it (or something very like it) by the use of a small bell rung near the infant to get a reaction. It covers a number of little things to check for problems.
Early Learning Accomplishment Profile or ELAP or E-LAP was use thereafter for 0-3 (LAP taking over from there). It is based on "Domains" and Skills. The domains are Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Cognitive, Language, Self-Help, and Social Emotional. Each Domain has a number of Skills (not the same number for each Domain) number from 1 to N where 1 is the "simplest" and N is the "most complex". An example skill would be "picks up spoon" in Fine Motor. As a child develops s/he should be able to work their way through all the Skills in the Domain.
Testing consisted of going through the skills until the child couldn't do a certain number of skills (I think it was 3 of 5, but I cannot remember). At which point a lesson plan was written (really, it was generated by a Visual Basic program we wrote). The lesson plan was keyed to practicing skills that the child couldn't do.
If the child fell behind what was age appropriate progress, a team looked at what might be wrong or if some physical problem was preventing progress. The amount of money that could be saved by taxpayers if just basic hearing problems were dealt with is mindblowing.
This is not news. The whole purpose of Head Start is to recruit low IQ children and keep them down. (It is illegal for Head Start programs to teach reading, in order to skim off the few resources available and fritter them away on meaningless feel-good activities.)
'"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is."'
- Charles Dickens
There is evidence that for some outcomes, Head Start had a differential impact for some subgroups of children over others. At the end of 3rd grade for the 3-year-old cohort, the most striking sustained subgroup findings were found in the cognitive domain for children from high risk households as well as for children of parents who reported no depressive symptoms. Among the 4-year-olds, sustained benefits were experienced by children of parents who reported mild depressive symptoms, severe depressive symptoms, and Black children.