Figure 1 shows the effect of Head Start on completed years of schooling for children relative to their age when their local Head Start launched. Our results show that children age-eligible for Head Start went on to achieve substantially higher levels of education – even though the programme was underfunded compared to model preschool programmes. To isolate the causal effect of the Head Start programme itself, our analysis compares children who were age-eligible for Head Start (ages 3-5) to children born in the same county who were age 6, and therefore too old to participate before first grade when the program began. Harnessing large-scale, restricted data on children’s long-run educational and employment outcomes from the 2000 Census and the 2001-2018 American Community Surveys and Social Security records, we examine how access to Head Start shaped children’s lives. Similar to more recent proposals to expand universal preschool, Head Start’s effectiveness has long been contested, fuelled in large part by experiments that found the programme improved test scores in the short run but that they “faded out” in subsequent years (Puma et al. In its early years, Head Start cost about 25% of the amount per child as model Perry Preschool and Abecederian projects but achieved widespread coverage, operating in communities where over 80% of US children lived by 1980. Begun in 1965, Head Start is a large-scale preschool programme that serves roughly 1 million children annually in the US. Our research adds evidence to this debate drawing on the early years of Head Start (Bailey et al. 2010, Currie 2001, Duncan and Magnuson 2013), large-scale public programmes spend less per child and may do correspondingly less to close the gap in preschool access than model programs. Although small-scale, high-quality model preschools have delivered impressive results (Barnett and Massie 2007, Anderson 2008, Heckman et al. Whether universal, public preschool will help close these gaps is a matter of debate. This inequality in preschool attendance means that children of less educated and less affluent parents start kindergarten and first grade already behind in terms of social and academic skills. The 4-year-old children of mothers with college degrees are 35% more likely to attend preschool than the children of high-school dropouts. This means that the children of more affluent and educated parents are more likely to attend. Unlike the near-universal public programmes in many OECD countries, preschool attendance in the US is largely funded by parents. Access to preschool is unequal in the United States.
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