Volume 35, Number 4 (Fall) 2000
Currie, Janet, and Duncan Thomas. 2000. "School Quality and the Longer-Term Effects of Head Start." Journal of Human Resources 35(4):755-774.
Research on Head Start suggests that effects on test scores "fade out" more quickly for black children than for white children. We use data from the 1998 wave of the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to show that Head Start black children go on to attend schools or worse quality than other black children. We do not see any similar pattern among whites. Moreover, when we stratify by an indicator of school quality, gaps in test scores between Head Start and other children are very similar for blacks and whites. Hence, the effects of Head Start may fade out more rapidly among black students, at least is part because black Head Start children are more likely to subsequently attend inferior schools.
Janet Currie is a Professor of Economics at UCLA. Duncan Thomas is a Senior Economist at RAND and professor of Economics at UCLA. The authors thank Larry Katz, Steve Rivkin, Seth Sanders and participants in the NBER's Program on Children for helpful comments. Support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation grant SBR-9512670 and the National Institute of Child health and Human Development grant R01-HD3101A2 is gratefully acknowledged. The authors are solely responsible for the views expressed. The data used in this article may be obtained from Janet Currie (currie@simba.sscnet.ucla.edu) beginning December 200 through December 2003.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X