Following Through to Make Schools Better : Education: A blueprint for extending Head Start curriculum to higher grades exists; it works and can be done at low cost.

The shock of the Los Angeles riots has reopened a debate over urban opportunity that has been virtually absent from our politics for more than a decade. The failure of many thousands of Latino and African-American youths in Los Angeles to find decent employment has focused attention again on the need to make inner-city schools work better. The reforms of the last decade, mandating more courses and more testing, have had little impact.

The federal government has offered only one serious policy initiative designed to extend equal educational opportunity to students in inner-city schools: expansion of Head Start, a program that was introduced almost 30 years ago. While participation in Head Start stimulates significant intellectual development, much of the effect fades rapidly. To preserve the benefits of early intervention, we need to improve the services provided to older children.

Recent studies confirm that extending the Head Start curriculum to the elementary grades has dramatic impact. Participants score higher on reading tests, are more likely to graduate high school and are less likely to be held back a grade. A serious effort to reduce poverty would aim to reproduce these effects on a large scale.

The blueprints for such an effort exist today. The Follow Through program has, for the last 25 years, designed and tested educational models for precisely this purpose. Follow Through’s education experts have long argued that one or two years of Head Start cannot compensate for the effects of an entire childhood spent in poverty. To be effective, education for the disadvantaged must be both comprehensive and continuous.

Follow Through encourages educators, including academics and researchers, to engage in “applied research” to solve educational problems in disadvantaged communities. As a result, Follow Through has developed diverse and creative educational models that can be adapted to the specific needs of individual communities.

Follow Through extends preschool compensatory education into the elementary grades and provides a transition from Head Start to the public education system. And Follow Through is effective. Research directed by Eugene Ramp of the University of Kansas and Margaret Wang of Temple University found that Follow Through participants performed significantly better than controls on standardized measures of academic performance.

The research findings also suggest that participation in Follow Through leads to lasting improvements in social and emotional development. These improvements include lower school dropout rates, improved rates of grade completion and lower special education placements.

These results confirm Follow Through’s potential to improve the life chances of the disadvantaged. Yet the program is funded at levels permitting it to serve only a tiny fraction of disadvantaged children.

National implementation of Follow Through need not be expensive. Follow Through’s expertise could be used to optimize the use of existing resources. Chapter 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides compensatory education to a significant percentage of low-income children. Two experts on compensatory education, Robert Slavin and Edward Zigler, have recently argued that “Chapter 1 should be reorganized as a program that specifically extends the benefits of Head Start through elementary school and should focus on prevention rather than tutoring.” Slavin and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins have studied the potential benefits of such a reorganization in the “Success for All” program. Follow Through curricula are designed to achieve just such a reorganization.

Follow Through should play an important role in the current debate over the futures of Head Start and Chapter 1. In order to realize Follow Through’s potential, the following steps are necessary:

-- Institute a formal communication mechanism between the Head Start and Follow Through programs.

-- Increase Follow Through’s annual appropriations to approximately 1/10 of Head Start’s funding level, and link the two appropriations on a percentage basis.

-- Institute a formal connection between Follow Through, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Even Start and other educational programs serving at-risk elementary students.

In an era of straitened governmental resources, Follow Through is inexpensive. Follow Through’s approach has been carefully developed over a period of 25 years, and it works.