New Findings on Impact Variation From the Head Start Impact Study - Informing the Scale-Up of Early Childhood Programs

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Cipher

This article synthesizes reanalysis results from the Head Start Impact Study, centering on impact variation. It tests whether program effects on children’s access to center-based and high-quality care and school readiness skills differ by child characteristics, geography, and control-group experiences. Using multiple analyses with innovative statistical methods, findings indicate average Head Start effects conceal substantial effectiveness differences, driven partly by counterfactual experiences and Head Start site contexts, plus child factors such as dual language learner status. Implications address future Head Start research and scaling early childhood programs and practices.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

Overview

Impact variation focus

Research design and methods

Reanalysis of Head Start Impact Study data

Innovative statistical approaches

Findings

Average impacts mask variation

Sources of variation

Implications

Future program scale-up and research

AERA Open April-June 2018, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 1–16 DOI: 10. 1177/2332858418769287 © The Author(s) 2018. [http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) New Findings on Impact Variation From the Head Start Impact Study: Informing the Scale-Up of Early Childhood Programs Pamela A. Morris New York University Maia Connors Ounce of Prevention Fund Allison Friedman-Krauss Rutgers University Dana Charles McCoy Harvard University Christina Weiland University of Michigan Avi Feller UC Berkeley Lindsay Page University of Pittsburgh Howard Bloom MDRC Hirokazu Yoshikawa New York University This article synthesizes findings from a reanalysis of data from the Head Start Impact Study with a focus on impact variation. This study addressed whether the size of Head Start’s impacts on children’s access to center-based and high-quality care and their school readiness skills varied by child characteristics, geographic location, and the experiences of children in the control group. Across multiple sets of analyses based on new, innovative statistical methods, findings suggest that the topline Head Start Impact Study results of Head Start’s average impacts mask substantial variation in its effectiveness and that one key source of that variation was in the counterfactual experiences and the context of Head Start sites (as well as the more typically examined child characteristics; e.g., children’s dual language learner status). Implications are discussed for the future of Head Start and further research, as well as the scale-up of other early childhood programs, policies, and practices. Keywords: Head Start, impact variation, early childhood There is a strong evidence base that preschool programs for low-income children have the potential to improve their short-and longer-run outcomes and address income-related development gaps (Barnett, 1995, 2011; Dodge, Bai, Ladd,& Muschkin, 2016; Gormley, Phillips, & Gayer, 2008; Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2013; Yoshikawa et al., 2013) . In addition, a number of studies highlighted the returns to society of such early investments (Barnett & Masse, 2007; Belfield, Nores, Barnett, & Schweinhart, 2006; Campbell et al., 2012; Elango, Garcia, Heckman, & Hojman, 2016; Garcia, Heckman, Lead, & Prados, 2016; Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2002; Schweinhart et al., 2005) . But whether those longer-run positive impacts can emerge in programs delivered at scale is still an open question. That is, our ability to extrapolate directly from smaller-scale efficacy studies—of either the value of preschool itself or enhancements to preschool quality among children already attending preschool—is complicated by the fact that testing programs under tightly controlled conditions may offer little guidance regarding the challenges of implementation within “real Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ([https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)). Morris et al. world” city-, state-, or national-level contexts, characterized by more varied samples (Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Pianta, Barnett, Burchinal, & Thornburg, 2009) . Such a perspective highlights the value of research on larger “scaled up” preschool programs (see Durlak & Dupre, 2008; Granger, 2010; Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002) . Head Start is perhaps the oldest example of such a program, given its national scale, serving nearly 1 million children annually at a cost >$7 billion (Office of Head Start, 2015) . Head Start has been re

FAQs

What does the article reanalyze and what is its main focus?

It reanalyzes data from the Head Start Impact Study with a focus on how impacts vary rather than only average effects.

Which factors does the study examine for differences in Head Start impacts?

It evaluates variation by child characteristics, geographic location, and the experiences of children in the control group.

What do the findings suggest about average results from Head Start?

Topline average impacts can mask substantial differences in effectiveness, and one key source is counterfactual experiences and the context of Head Start sites.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Cipher