My colleague Jaclyn Zubrzycki has a must-read post over at Inside School Research about a new paper that concludes that federal Head Start programs have a positive impact on parents’ involvement in the development of their children.
Here’s Jackie’s synthesis of the paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who used data from the 2010 Head Start Impact Study:
The researchers find that while being enrolled in Head Start increases the number of hours a child spends in childcare away from parents, parents of these students actually spend more hours investing more deeply in their children and continue to do so after leaving Head Start. The parent-child activities that increased most are those that the researchers deem “most likely to impact child human capital directly,” such as reading, math, and tracking their child’s development. Interestingly, the study notes that children enrolled in higher-performing Head Start programs experience a greater increase in parent involvement.