Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start

By David J. Deming. 2009

744 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides new evidence on the long-term benefits of Head Start using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I compare siblings who differ in their participation in the program, controlling for a variety of pre-treatment covariates. I estimate that Head Start participants gain 0.23 standard deviations on a summary index of young adult outcomes. This closes one-third of the gap between children with median and bottom quartile family income, and is about 80 percent as large as model programs such as Perry Preschool. The long-term impact for disadvantaged children is large despite "fadeout" of test score gains. (JEL H52, J13, I28, I38)

Subfields: Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f99718ab2d754b40ad0eb4bf9477cd1fc43d313f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Quantifying Variation in Head Start Effects on Young Children's Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Skills Using Data from the National Head Start Impact Study. (2015, background): “Existing direct evidence about variation in Head Start effects focuses mainly on differences in effects across child subgroups defined by such factors as race/ethnicity, gender, special needs, and home language (e.g., Currie and Thomas, 1995; Deming, 2009; Puma et al., 2010a; Yoshikawa et al., 2013)”
Socioeconomic Gaps in Early Childhood Experiences (2016, background): “A large body of experimental and nonexperimental evidence demonstrates that high-quality preschool experiences can meaningfully affect children’s short- and long-term learning trajectories (Campbell et al., 2012; Cunha & Heckman, 2010; Deming, 2009; Yoshikawa et al., 2013).”
Selection into Identification in Fixed Effects Models, with Application to Head Start (2019, positive): “…Thomas, and Currie (2002) report the number of identifying observations used to identify Head Start for the entire sample (not for subsamples), and Deming (2009) reports the aggregate number of identifying observations used to identify the preschool, Head Start, and no-formal-care coefficients,…”
Seeing the Destination AND the Path: Using Identity‐Based Motivation to Understand and Reduce Racial Disparities in Academic Achievement (2017, background): “As would be expected if the program is stigmatized, Head Start teachers earn less (about half of what public school teachers do) and the program is often criticized as unsuccessful despite successes, including increased likelihood of high school completion by early twenties (Deming, 2009; Garces, Th”
Long Term Impacts of Compensatory Preschool on Health and Behavior: Evidence from Head Start (2012, background): “[31] Deming, David, 2009, ”Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol.”
Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition (2013, background): “Its implementation differs greatly across sites, making it difficult to evaluate its overall effectiveness (Deming, 2009). Parental participation was not mandatory, and there is some evidence that many do not participate.(83) There have been no long-term evaluations of Head Start based on randomized”