J. S. Fuerst of Chicago’s Loyola University School of Social Work studied the lives of 684 children who attended six special, publicly funded schools in Chicago between 1967 and 1977. Most had not only two years of preschool but also from two to seven additional years in an intensive elementary-school program that Fuerst describes as “Head Start to the fourth power.” The six child-parent centers set up in the city’s worst neighborhoods encouraged parents to help out at school and gave kids a heavy dose of academics, with an emphasis on language development.
All of the children were black, and a majority were raised in single-parent families. Sixty percent were on welfare. Classes had no more than 20 students and in many cases children had the same team of teachers and aides for a number of years. Students spent all of their school hours-half days for preschoolers, full days for primary pupils-at the centers. There were different instructional programs, but all were academically oriented. After they finished the program, most went on to regular public schools; others transferred to parochial schools.
In 1974, when he first looked at reading-and math-test scores of center graduates, Fuerst found that they outranked their neighborhood peers and even exceeded national norms. Most of the kids he studied were then 13 or under. Their high scores were especially remarkable because Chicago had a rapidly deteriorating public-school system that former education secretary William Bennett later classified as America’s worst. A decade later, when Fuerst and his wife, Dorothy, began gathering data for a much larger study tracking center kids through their high-school years, he found that many of those early gains had been lost. Only 62 percent graduated from high school. That was better than the 49 percent graduation rate among a control group of 676 non-Center kids from the same backgrounds, but well under the national average of about 80 percent for 19-year-olds. Even more alarming, there were stark differences between boys and girls. A total of 74 percent of the girls finished school, but only 49 percent of the boys got diplomas. It was a dramatic reversal of his 1974 finding that boys’ and girls’ test scores were almost identical when they left the centers.
At first glance, these seem like extremely discouraging results. But Fuerst says that when he studied the numbers more closely, he found some hope. At one of the six centers, children received an extraordinary amount of special instruction: seven to nine years. In that group the gains in high-school graduation were dramatic: 70 percent of the boys and 85 percent of the girls finished. Fuerst thinks his study shows that girls should get four to six years of extra help, while boys-who appear to be much more susceptible to peer pressures-need seven to nine years of intensive academics. “Nobody wants to knock the one ray of light warming a sea of darkness,” says Fuerst. “But overestimating Head Start isn’t fair to these kids.”
Fuerst’s study adds considerable weight to a growing sentiment among early-childhood educators that inner-city kids need much more than a year or two of preschool. “The best program in the world for a very short time at age 4 is not going to help children survive the onslaught” of neighborhoods devastated by crime and drugs, says Barbara Willer, public-affairs director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “If you view it as an inoculation, you’re in for a surprise.”
Head Start’s long-term effectiveness was just a theory at its conception in 1965. Initially, Head Start’s creators envisioned it as a six-to eight-week summer program. “We thought that very minimal intervention would give us very big payoffs,” says Edward Zigler, a psychology professor at Yale who helped develop Head Start and was one of its first directors. Zigler says the founders soon realized that kids needed at least a year or two of Head Start. Early studies of Head Start and similar programs confirmed that this preparation did indeed help kids in their first years of grammar school.
In the public mind, however, Head Start’s benefits got a tremendous boost in the past decade from a widely publicized study of the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Mich. That research indicated that early intervention could lower delinquency, joblessness and teen-pregnancy rates. Some early-childhood experts say these results have been misinterpreted: the Ypsilanti project was not a Head Start program and was more rigorous than typical Head Start classes.
In the last few years, educators have been looking for effective ways to sustain Head Start’s gains. The search has become more urgent, with so many children in single-parent homes. They are the most likely to grow up in poverty and have problems in school. Zigler says he favors a three-year “transition” project in the early elementary grades that would emphasize parental involvement. At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Robert Slavin and his colleagues at the Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students have developed the “Success for All” program for preschool through third grade. It emphasizes extra help in reading, family support and teacher training. So far, the results are encouraging: most third graders are reading at grade level, and many are over.
Wade Horn, the federal Head Start administrator, says Washington is also looking for new approaches. Getting parents involved in school is generally recognized as a key ingredient, and Horn says that part of the Head Start budget is going toward what he calls a “two-generation model.” By the end of this year, he says, there will be adult-literacy programs in every Head Start center, and there are ongoing efforts to include job-training and substance-abuse projects. Head Start has also given out $20 million in research grants to experimental transition-to-school programs.
The Chicago programs Fuerst studied have survived in greatly modified form. Now they’re mostly for preschoolers; many of the auxiliary staffers, such as social workers and full-time nurses, have been laid off. But Claretta Edwards still has fond memories of the Cole Child Parent Center. In 1967 she was one of the first 4-year-olds in the program. “We were pushed to do our best,” she says. After high school Edwards earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing, and she now works in a hospital emergency room. Her 4-year-old daughter, Kiah, attends preschool at Cole, where some of the same teachers who inspired Edwards now help her daughter. Those teachers also get a lot of support on the home front. For Christmas, Edwards gave her daughter a gift with clear long-term benefits: 30 books.
Photo: First lessons: A class at the Cole Child Parent Center in Chicago
Photos: Clear benefits: Edwards, left, with daughter, Kiah, and Fuerst, above (STEVE LEONARD-BLACK STAR)
Nursery Tales About one third of the nation’s 3- and 4-year-olds go to preschool classes. Twice as many students attend private preschools as public. The odds against failing in school, researchers say, rest on a litany of factors. Poor children are the most at risk. Their chances get worse if they have a single parent who didn’t finish school or has limited English skills. In this academic year, Washington doled out $2.2 billion for Head Start programs in all 50 states, guaranteeing up to two years of pre-school for 600,000 3- to 5-year-olds. SOURCES: NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATIONAL STATISTICS; HEADSTART
