Evaluative research takes a critical approach to all types of early childhood programs, seeking to identify all their costs and benefits, strengths and weaknesses. Head Start, public school pre-K programs, and preschool child care programs define the landscape of early childhood programs in the United States today. Understanding what these three programs have in common and how they differ from each other will help develop an accurate overview of early childhood programs. Currently, in the United States, early childhood programs follow one of three staffing patterns: Head Start, public school, or child care. These three patterns depend to a large extent on the corresponding source of financing and regulation. The Head Start staff pattern is a multidisciplinary team of teachers, family service workers, and various coordinators. Teachers are underpaid and are required to have a competency-based Child Development Associate credential. In recent years, Head Start has been engaged in an ongoing effort to improve quality, including requiring teachers to have an associate’s degree and increasing teacher salaries. However, the Head Start staffing pattern places teachers alongside family service workers and one rung below several coordinators. It places the classroom as a component along with parenting support, health and mental health services, and social services referrals. The public school staffing pattern places teachers in charge, overseen by a main building. There are no family service workers or coordinators of other services, except occasionally school nurses. Relative to Head Start or child care, teachers are better paid and better educated, usually with a teaching certificate based on a bachelor’s degree. Because of this staffing, the classroom teacher predominates and there is less emphasis on separate positions providing parent support, health and mental health services, and social service referrals. Unlike child care programs, both Head Start and public school pre-kindergarten programs generally have half-day classes for children and are therefore able to serve twice as many children by having double sessions, serving one class group in the morning and the other in the afternoon. However, the apparent efficiencies severely limit the time available for activities outside of the classroom, such as teacher planning and home visits, which can be critical to program effectiveness. Both Head Start and public school staffing patterns are designed to help children develop and prepare for school. While the public school pattern focuses primarily on education, the Head Start pattern provides multiple services with intermediate goals, such as parental financial self-sufficiency, that can become ends in themselves. In fact, some Head Start professionals consider Head Start to be primarily a program for parents. The child care staff pattern resembles the director and teaching staff part of the Head Start pattern. Unlike Head Start, there are no family service workers or coordinators of other services.
The staff is set up for the teachers to watch the children. Teachers are surely engaged in some educational activity and may well aspire to do more, but they are not afforded the status and compensation that public school teachers receive. While Head Start and public school programs are fully supported by public tax dollars, child care programs are primarily paid for by families; government subsidies are partial or non-existent. Childcare hours are longer, in response to the needs of the family. The relatively low cost of child care staffing is done in the interest of greater affordability and responsiveness for families. Each of these staffing patterns involves tradeoffs relative to the other two. Public schools use tax dollars to give teachers more responsibility and compensation than Head Start or child care teachers. Head Start uses tax dollars to give children and families access to other support services, as well as education. Child care programs, with little or no tax support, strive to care for children at a quality level that families can afford. Head Start, public school pre-K programs, and preschool child care programs all have the goal of contributing to children’s development, and all value and support parental involvement in the service of contributing to children’s development. But each definitely offers their own variations on these themes. Head Start also has the goal of encouraging and supporting the self-sufficiency of families through referrals to necessary social, health, and mental health services, as well as support for adult literacy, employment, and freedom from drug abuse. Head Start’s adult goals generally support children’s development, but they can sometimes compete with, or even replace, this goal. Public school pre-kindergarten programs focus exclusively on contributing to children’s development, but may limit this goal to focus only on children’s academic readiness for school. Preschool-age child care programs really have the primary goal of caring for preschool-age children while parents are busy. Contributing to the development of children is an enhancement of this primary objective, which is left to the discretion of the caregivers involved, their supervisors, and the parents who support these programs. Quality practices are structural or process. Structural practices are established features of the program, such as class size, staff-to-child ratio, and teacher qualifications. Process practices are the behaviors that adults and children adopt during the program. Structural practices are more easily established through rules and regulations, but process practices directly affect children’s behavior and development, so they mediate the effects of structural practices on children’s development.
Head Start has family self-sufficiency as a secondary goal, so Head Start program quality is defined as those practices that contribute to child development or family self-sufficiency. Public school pre-kindergarten programs place special emphasis on children’s school readiness as the defining construct of their contribution to early childhood development, so the quality of these programs emphasizes those practices that help prepare the children for school. Preschool child care programs value practices that care for children while parents are otherwise busy. These programs can be evaluated against the common core of criteria for all three: structural and process practices that contribute to children’s development. In addition, Head Start programs can examine practices that contribute to family self-sufficiency; public school pre-kindergarten programs can focus on practices that contribute to children’s readiness for school; and preschool child care programs can examine practices that allow parents to keep busy when they need to. Of course, it would be possible to apply these idiosyncratic criteria to the other types of programs as well. We could examine how well public school pre-K programs and preschool child care programs contributed to families’ self-sufficiency, a yardstick particularly apt for programs serving families living in poverty. We could examine how well any of these programs contributed to children’s readiness for school, a measure that is beginning to break boundaries anyway because of our national interest in it. We could examine how well Head Start and the public school pre-K program meet the child care needs of families. Such ideas go to the heart of the question of whether differentiating between types of early childhood programs is a good idea or not. Should publicly funded programs be expected to meet the child care needs of families, or should we continue our national policy of partial or no subsidy for such programs? Should early childhood programs address the self-sufficiency needs of families not living in poverty? However, until these questions are answered, we can stick to the universal definition of early childhood program success: structural and process practices that contribute to children’s development. However, it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to compare the effectiveness of Head Start, public school pre-K, and preschool child care programs for the simple reason that they serve different populations. The main entry criteria for Head Start is that families have poverty level income. Low family income may be a factor in admissions criteria for public school pre-kindergarten programs, but it is only one factor among others; and low family income may not play a role in entry criteria for preschool-age childcare. The criteria for enrollment in preschool child care is that the family needs child care to allow the parents to have other employment, a criterion that tends to increase family income and also makes the idea of randomly assigning children in need of care impossible. child to an unattended location. control group On the other hand, it is possible to compare the quality of different types of early childhood programs. The question is not which funding source is the best, but what levels of funding per child and patterns of governance and staffing lead to programs of the best structural and process quality. Such comparisons lead to thorny dilemmas that must be faced. Funding levels and policies interact in complex ways, making the results difficult to interpret. It would be quite reasonable to conduct an evaluative investigation of all types of early childhood programs together. But it will only happen if those who fund evaluative research rise above their employment positions for one or the other of these programs. Federal and state legislators are well positioned to ask questions about all of these programs, but they need to find ways to transcend the program’s positioning at funding agencies. All of us who care about young children must find ways to place their education and well-being above the status of the programs they are in.