The jury is decidedly out on the academic track record of Head Start, the education-oriented pre-school program for low-income families invented in the 1960s and federally proliferated in the early 1980s. Critics will point to large impact studies that show early academic gains fade by third grade. Proponents will say that those gains would stick if the students ended up in better public schools.
But Youth Services Insider had never seen Head Start mentioned as a possible preventer of foster care, until a recent study authored by Sacha Klein, Lauren Fries and Mary Emmons. (Click here for the synopsis; the whole study requires subscriber access.)
The study did not get much attention in the media; just a few stories out of Lansing, Mich., home to study author Klein of Michigan State University. Those stories honed in on the finding that among a sample of youth whose parents had previous contact with the child welfare system, those participating in Head Start were 93 percent less likely to be placed in foster care than kids who received no early childhood education program.
[For more on this story by John Kelly, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...prevention-tbd/28557]
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