3/15/2024 0 Comments Project head startHead Start’s constant innovation is driven by the need to disrupt poverty through more effective whole-child, whole-family interventions. Throughout Head Start’s 53-year history, Head Start has innovated not just for the sake of innovation but to ensure that its critical goals are met. Just as Head Start’s standards, first developed in the 1970’s, spurred states to develop licensing standards for nursery schools and child care, the awareness of early brain development raised by the enactment and funding of Early Head Start, caused nationwide interest and attention to the development of babies and toddlers, even resulting in a White House conference on the subject. When developments in neuroscience concluded that learning started at birth, Early Head Start was launched as a hot innovation to expand Head Start’s reach to infants, toddlers, and pregnant women. In the years since, Head Start’s innovation has continued as research into early childhood education and best practices have provided new insights. In addition, to help new parents learn effective child-rearing skills, Head Start implemented home visits as a core part of the whole-family approach. Furthermore, to make sure children that children were vaccinated and healthy, community health centers were started the following year. Head Start sought to spur more learning in children’s homes by funding a new TV phenomenon called Sesame Street. Head Start’s innovation extended beyond the centers’ doors. Inspiring the Early Childhood Education Field Furthermore, the family must be engaged in all educational decisions regarding the child and the program, and supported in raising children in the context of their community and their culture, or even the best classroom offerings would not bring positive, long term results. Most importantly, they all recognized that the family must be involved in the child’s education every day. They postulated, correctly again, that a child who was hungry would not have the bandwidth to be curious about the interesting classroom activities, so nutrition became another integral element of the Head Start model. The founding team of experts reasoned that a child who is physically or mentally unwell would not be able to learn, and the health component became an important part of the Head Start model. In some parts of the country, such as the deep South, Head Start was a critical part of the struggle for civil rights and social justice. Much more than just childcare or even preschool, Head Start was a dramatic intervention that was designed intentionally by a cross-disciplinary team of scientists and experts to end poverty by sparking curiosity and a lifelong love of learning among the country’s most vulnerable children and their families. In its earliest days, Head Start was not just an early childhood innovation, it was an invention, and a radical one at that.
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