Research Proposal
BSHS/382

Research Proposal
Head Start and their Success Rates

Head Start is a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development. (Administration for Children and Families, na) The Head Start program was started in 1965 by Jule Sugarman who was its creator and director. It was first thought of as a catch up Summer program for low income children who were not ready to start Kindergarten. The program would teach the children what they needed to catch up to start Kindergarten the following year. (Wikipedia, Feb, 2011)
The Head Start Program has been under fire in recent years because recent studies are showing the program is not having the desired effect as it did 40 years ago. The success rates of Head Start are staggering. The Head Start Impact Study shows that the effects of the program are minimal and the overall effects of the program had vanished in children by the first grade. (Klein, J, 2011)
Our proposal will illustrate the program and the overall success rates of Head Start. We will demonstrate ways to improve the overall success rate of the Head Start Program and why the program needs improvements as well as why the rates of success are falling.
Elements of Study
Children enrolled in the Head Start program are presented with the opportunity to receive educational benefits such as learning vocabulary, letter-word recognition, spelling, color identification and letter naming. It is important that we research how effective the program for children’s school readiness and successful achievement in cognitive learning. A large-scale randomized control study of nearly 5,000 children release by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 show that although children benefited from the program initially,