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Head Start: Curriculum Use and Individual Child Assessment in Cognitive and Language Development

GAO-03-1049 Published: Sep 12, 2003. Publicly Released: Sep 12, 2003.
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Highlights

To enhance Head Start's contribution to the school readiness of children from low-income families, the 1998 amendments to the Head Start Act provided for updating the Head Start performance standards to ensure that when children leave the program, they have the basic skills needed to start school. Head Start's performance standards for education and early childhood development require that the programs' curricula support each child's cognitive and language development, including emergent literacy skills. In preschool children, cognitive and language development refers to the fundamental abilities needed to reason and to speak a language. Skills in emergent literacy are the precursors to reading, such as learning the letters of the alphabet. The curriculum Head Start programs use must meet the definition for a written curriculum in Head Start's performance standards. Programs have the option of developing their own curriculum, using a curriculum developed locally or by the state education agency, and adopting or adapting a model developed by an educational publisher. Programs also may use teacher mentoring and individual child assessment to help implement the curriculum. As reauthorization of Head Start approached, Congress asked us to answer questions about Head Start programs' efforts to prepare children for school: (1) to what extent have Head Start programs made progress in meeting performance standards for cognitive and language development since they took effect in January 1998? (2) to what extent has local Head Start programs' use of curricula changed since the performance standards for children's cognitive and language development were issued? (3) to what extent have local Head Start programs used teacher mentoring and individual child assessments to support curriculum planning?

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Topics

Aid for educationChildrenDisadvantaged personsEducation program evaluationEducational standardsMentoringPerformance measuresPreschool educationChild developmentHead Start programs