Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since its inception in 1965, Head Start has pursued a two-pronged mission to improve the lives of economically disadvantaged children: offering high quality early childhood education (ECE) services for children and providing direct services for parents, with the goal of improving outcomes for both generations. Yet, over the past 50 years, most Head Start policy and programs have focused on the quality of children’s ECE experiences, with less attention devoted to programs for parents. This is problematic given that only 12 percent of Head Start parents have the education needed to enter the skilled workforce and often struggle to meet the workforce demands of the 21^st century. Supporting parents’ human capital development may promote parent wellbeing while also providing a way to boost program impacts on children, given the strong associations between parents’ own education and income and children’s educational success (e.g., Magnuson, 2007).

The current study tests the effects on parents and children of CareerAdvance^®, a two-generation intervention that pairs a sector-based work training program for parents with Head Start services for children, compared to standard Head Start services. CareerAdvance^® was developed and launched by the Community Action Project of Tulsa County (CAP Tulsa), an anti-poverty agency and the Head Start delegate for Tulsa County, Oklahoma. CAP Tulsa’s Head Start programs are of unusually high quality and the positive effects of CAP Tulsa’s Head Start on children’s school readiness and elementary school achievement have been well-documented (e.g., Gormley et al., 2008). The present study examines the added effect of families’ participation in CareerAdvance^® combined with CAP Tula’s Head Start compared to participation in Head Start alone.

Before the intervention began, the study selected a comparison group of parents who had similar observable characteristics to the CareerAdvance^® participants. Our final sample includes 287 parents (150 in the CareerAdvance^® and 137 in the matched comparison group) and 246 children. We employ inverse propensity score matching to estimate average treatment effects after two years of program participation on: (1) parents’ education, employment, income, and psychological wellbeing; (2) parenting practices and family routines; and (3) children’s academic, language, and executive functioning skills.

Our previous work found that after one year, CareerAdvance^® parents had significantly higher rates of certification and employment in the health care sector, and they reported significantly higher levels of commitment to work and career and self-efficacy than did matched-comparison parents. CareerAdvance^® parents’ earnings were lower over the course of the year, but there were no differences in reports of material hardship or stress between the two groups. We hypothesize that gains in parents’ human capital will persist two years after baseline. We posit that these human capital gains could in turn relate to improvements in family functioning and child wellbeing, with the caveat that we are unclear if we will see benefits to children above and beyond CAP Tulsa’s Head Start effects given the positive effects of Head Start alone. Future analyses for the presentation will test the effects on parents and children two years after the intervention began.