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Title: Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Deming, David
Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start
Presented: Boston, MA, The Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) Annual Meetings, May 2009
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher: National Opinion Research Center - NORC
Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Children, Preschool; Grade Retention/Repeat Grade; Head Start; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mothers, Education; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Test Scores/Test theory/IRT; Variables, Independent - Covariate; Wages, Adult; Wages, Youth

This paper provides new evidence on the long-term benefits of Head Start for a recent birth cohort of children. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Mother-Child Supplement (CNLSY) to track children from before birth to early adulthood. The impact of Head Start is identified by comparing siblings in the same family who differ in their participation in the program. While this comparison is imperfect, I assess its validity directly by controlling for a wide variety of pretreatment covariates. I estimate that enrollment in Head Start leads to a long-term impact of about 0.23 standard deviations on a summary index of young adult outcomes. This gain is about one third of the size of the long-term outcome gap between children with family incomes in the bottom quartile and median permanent income in the sample, and is about 80 percent as large as the impact of "model" programs such as Perry Preschool and Abecedarian. For children whose mothers have low levels of cognitive skill, the long-term impact of the program is very large despite zero measured impact on test scores. This strongly suggests that Head Start generates skill gains that are not full captured by school-age test scores.
Bibliography Citation
Deming, David. "Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start." Presented: Boston, MA, The Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) Annual Meetings, May 2009.