Early Head Start Program

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Head Start and Early Head Start are federal programs that promote “school readiness of children from birth to age five from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social, and emotional development.” The Head Start program was developed in the 1960s by President Lyndon B. Johnson as an outgrowth of the Economic Opportunity Act, and Early Head Start was started in 1994 to address the needs of low-income children under the age of three. Under Head Start and Early Head Start, children from financially challenged families are provided with opportunities and experiences normally only enjoyed by their wealthier counterparts. In 2006, the federal government put $6.8 billion into the program and distributed grants to nearly 1,400 community …show more content…

and Columbia University found that three-year-old Early Head Start children performed “significantly better on a range of measures of cognitive, language, and social-emotional development.” The study also goes on to say that “Early Head Start programs produced statistically significant, positive impacts on standardized measures of children’s cognitive and language development.” Three-year-old children in the program scored 91.4 on the Bayley Mental Development index and 83.3 on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. It has also been shown that children in low-income homes who participate in Head Start programs are more ready for school than peers from the same socioeconomic background who did not participate in Head Start. Additionally, The Head Start Impact Study found that children who participated in Head Start programs scored better than a control group of children “in all measured domains of cognitive and social-emotional development at the end of their Head Start experience.”
Another program designed to close the achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income peers is No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 developed out of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as well as the recommendations made by the National Commission on Education Excellence during the 1980s. Through its focus on standards, accountability, and parental options, it seeks “to provide a quality …show more content…

When comparing schools, we would have to choose one that educates mostly higher-income students and one that educates primarily lower-income students. They should be relatively close together- in the same or neighboring districts. Schools should also have the same age range of students, for example, we could compare two elementary schools, but it wouldn’t be correct to compare one elementary school and one middle school. To measure school proficiency, we could periodically average together test scores for each grade in both schools and then compare. We could also compare individual classrooms to see which students are learning the best from which