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Topics: Families and Gender

Maximum Feasible Parent Participation

This chapter from Head Start: The Inside Story of America's Most Successful Education Experiment by Edward Zigler and Susan Muenchow chronicles the history of the Head Start program's parent involvement policy. "Maximum feasible parent participation" suggests the role of the parent as a full partner with the paid professionals in the program, but is a role that stops short of exclusive control by the parents. Case study plus.

Case Study Plus: Maximum Feasible Parent Participation

Chapter 5 of Head Start: The Inside Story of America's Most Successful Education Experiment

By Edward Zigler and Susan Muenchow

Once the issue of Head Starts's immediate survival had been resolved, my major challenge was to develop the program's parent involvement policy. The Head Start Planning Committee and the program's early administrators had launched the trend toward parent involvement in education and social services, and Head Start parents had emerged as the program's most effective defenders. Nevertheless, when I became director of the Office of Child Development in 1970, there was still considerable controversy concerning what form parent involvement in Head Start should take: Were parents to run the program or merely be participants in its parent education services?

Origins of the Controversy

The roots of the controversy concerning the role of parents in Head Start really date back to the program's formation in 1966. The Planning Committee's recommendation for parent involvement represented a revolutionary step at the time. Previous architects of programs for children tended either to place parents and children in separate groups or to ignore the parents entirely. By contrast, the Planning Committee took the stance that children would benefit from their parents' direct involvement in the program, and that the best way for parents to learn about child development was through actual participation with their children in the daily activities of the program. The planning document recommended that Head Start offer parent education activities to "help parents deal with general and specific problems of child-rearing and home-making." Parents were also to "fill many of the non-professional, sub-professional, and semi-professional roles" in the program as maintenance staff, cooks, and teacher aides.

But the Planning Committee stopped considerably short of recommending parent control of Head Start. Rather than advocating a directive role for parents, the committee recommended that parents only "assist in planning the program of the center, its hours, location, program, etc." [1]The majority of the Planning Committee thus viewed parent involvement as a kind of "hands on" approach to parent education.

Some members of the Planning Committee were uneasy even with this limited conception of parent involvement. [2] James Hymes, Jr., a committee member who was then a professor of early childhood education at the University of Maryland, wanted a much more professional early childhood program, taught exclusively by staff with degrees in early childhood education. At the other extreme, Mamie Clark, one of the black scholars on the committee, initially opposed the whole idea of parent education in Head Start because she feared it might disparage black culture attenuate its strength. Clark was reacting against the "deficit model," which was popular in the sixties and which equated poverty with "cultural deprivation."

The tension about the deficit approach added up to the following dilemma: On one side, if Head Start parents, whether black or white, had no educational or parenting skill deficits, and no problems but lack of money, why were we doing the program? Why not just issue each family a check? On the other, there would be no meaningful parent participation in any program that did not demonstrate full respect for parents.

It was Urie Bronfenbrenner who offered an approach to parent involvement that was not tied to overcoming some alleged cultural deficit. Bronfenbrenner was already beginning to formulate his ecological approach to child development-the idea that you can't help the child without helping the family and building a social policy hospitable to families. This ecological approach applied to all programs designed to help young children, whether their families were rich or poor. The basic insight was this: No one- or two-year program is likely to make lasting improvements in any child's development unless the program helps parents become the agents of change, reinforcing positive changes in the child long after the formal program's conclusion. Nevertheless, Bronfenbrenner's view of parent involvement was focused primarily on improving the relationship between parents and their children. His main goal was to empower parents to be better parents, rather than to organize them for social action.

"My original conception of parent involvement in Head Start was quite different from what it turned out to be, " Brofenbrenner recently explained. [3] To him parent involvement did not necessarily mean participation on committees or organizing for political action but rather having parents become "captivated" by their own children, supportive of their education, and irrationally committed to the idea that their children mattered.

Bronfenbrenner recalled paying a visit in 1965 to a Head Start center in western Appalachia that came close to this ideal. There was no way to reach the program by public transportation, and no street address. When he finally found the program, he asked the director, a minister in his late eighties, about the level of parent involvement in the center. "See for yourself, " the director advised.

As he entered the center, there were 200 children, sitting in straight rows on old benches, drawing pictures with crayons. "Pacing about the room, " according to Bronfenbrenner, "were three women and a man, each armed with a flyswatter, and all actively involved in swatting any flies that dared to alight on any strikeable surface, including the more level facets of children's anatomy. " [4] The parents were determined that nothing should interfere with their children's opportunity for education.

Leaders of the Community Action Program (CAP) that served as the "host" agency for Head Start placed a different emphasis on parent involvement. The primary goal of CAP, of course, was to overcome poverty. The CAP philosophy tended to see the root cause of poverty as disenfranchisement from established social structures, and factors such as racism and classism, not a deficit in education or parenting skills. [5] Therefore, CAP leaders viewed parent involvement primarily as a way for parents to develop an alternative Dower structure to challenge the established institutions, such as schools, that had so far excluded them from any position of authority.

Polly Greenberg, a former OEO staff person who helped introduce Head Start in seven southeastern states, illustrates this view of parent involvement eloquently in her history of the Head Start program run by the Child Development Group of Mississippi: the CDGM goal for Head Start, according to Greenberg, was to build the iron egos needed by children growing up to be future leaders of social change in a semifeudal state." [6] The Head Start centers would serve as the nucleus of an "experimental" private school system for black children that would be run by their parents and volunteers. Only if the children saw their parents in positions of authority in Head Start, as teachers rather than teacher aides" who were little more than glorified maids, would they respect their parents. In short, in Greenberg's view, the only meaningful parent involvement in Head Start would be parent control and ownership of the program. And she adds that the CAP leaders were "nervous" about Head Start's service delivery" orientation, which they feared might limit the power of poor parents to "plan, decide, and advocate (agitate) for the children before the powers that be-the mayors, et al.-[would] declare that Head Start people were, quote, 'too political.'" [7]

The first major clash, and in Greenberg's view the decisive conflict, on the role of parents in Head Start erupted when OEO temporarily cut off the funding for CDGM after its first year of operation and gave the grant to another group that was perceived as less threatening to whites in Mississippi. The superficial reason was CDGM's bookkeeping; however, the real issue was that Mississippi Senator John Stennis had the power to stop the whole War on Poverty if he could prove that any local program had misused money. Sargent Shriver was convinced that Stennis planned to use the CDGM case to do exactly that.

The dispute over CDGM is the subject of Greenberg's 825-page book, and it is far too complicated to discuss in detail here. But given the controversy concerning parent involvement during the early days of Head Start it is little wonder that no clear policy on the role of parents developed at the federal level during the first year of the program's implementation.

Bessie Draper's Vision

Much of the practical wisdom of the federal policy that eventually developed on parent involvement in Head Start can be traced to Bessie Draper, who joined the national Head Start staff in 1966 as its first parent program specialist. Draper had what might be considered an unorthodox background for developing parent involvement policy. Her training was not in child and family development or social work, but rather in labor and industrial relations. She had worked for the Urban League and then became Equal Employment Opportunity officer for the Missouri State Employment Service. It was precisely Draper's training and experience in helping adults that allowed her to come up with a workable approach to parent involvement, a synthesis of the various strategies of educating parents, enfranchising them, and helping them secure employment.

At the time Draper joined the Head Start national staff, parent involvement had not really been defined in federal rule or policy. She recalls a conversation with Jule Sugarman shortly after she joined the staff, when she asked him for direction:

"If we knew what parent involvement should be," Sugarman told her, "we wouldn't need you." [8]

Draper turned for direction to the law that provided the auspices for Head Start. "I looked back at the Economic Opportunity Act and found a phrase to hang my hat on-'maximum feasible participation of the poor,'" she said. Draper interpreted that phrase to mean that parents should be full partners in the design and delivery of services.

Draper had three children of her own, and in the 1950s and early 1960s, the attitude of educators was "Bring us your children and you go away while we educate them." Particularly as a black parent, Draper had problems dealing with the educational establishment. With two university degrees, she certainly considered herself better equipped to deal with the schools than black parents who were themselves undereducated. "Yet," she said, "I still found it a challenge."

Draper decided that she wanted parent involvement to mean that parents would be "equal partners" with the professional staff. The biggest obstacle to this vision was that parent participation and parent involvement were not initially seen as a separate component of Head Start, but rather as a division of social services. For example, Draper said she was initially expected to work under the supervision of the social services staff. Ironically, one of the problems she had with social workers was that they did not stress involving parents in the lives of their children. "The philosophy I found in social workers working with a low-income population," she said, "was almost patronizing, not one of encouraging self-determination."

Aware that she was charting new territory, Draper hired a group of consultants from a broad array of disciplines-sociologists, psychologists, social workers, educators, and persons from all ethnic backgrounds, including an Apache chief-to help give some shape to the parent involvement component. These consultants had to agree to commit two days a month of their time. Unlike many consultants, they did not just "meet." Rather, they spent most of their time visiting Head Start programs and evaluating the extent to which parents were participating in the program, and determining what factors seemed to promote or discourage that involvement.

When Harold Hines's first child was enrolled in Head Start in Miami in 1966, he never went to the center or even met his son's teacher.
Then one day when his younger son was in Head Start, the boy came home wearing different clothes than he had put on that morning. "I asked him why, and he told me he'd messed his pants, and that the teacher had bathed him and changed his clothes, " said Hines. "At the time I knew that I would have beaten the hell out of my son for such behavior. "

Hines waited to hear what punishment the teacher had applied, but the boy said that didn't happen. "I thought about somebody showing that kind of love to my child, and the next morning I went to the school to meet the teacher," said Hines. "She handed me my son's clothes from the previous day, all washed and ready to wear the next day. "

Moved by the kindness, and frankly determined not to let the teacher's love for his child outshine his own, Hines attended the Head Start center meeting that evening. It was not only his first Head Start meeting, but also his first meeting of any kind as an adult. The center was having an election of officers. "They thought a male image would be good for the program, " said Hines, "and I happened to be the only father there, so I became president. "

At the time, there was no structure for parent involvement, no real council. Hines started organizing parents and eventually began attending regional meetings on Head Start. A short time later he was offered the position of parent involvement coordinator for the entire Head Start program serving Dade County.

Draper developed a parent involvement section of the Head Start policy manual in 1967, which spelled out four basic functions for parents: (1) participating in the decision-making process about the nature and operation of the programs; (2) participating in the classroom as paid employees, volunteers, and observers; (3) receiving home visits from Head Start staff; and (4) participating in educational activities. This policy manual gave parents on the Policy Advisory Group the right to participate in the selection of the Head Start program director and to help establish the criteria for the selection of other staff. But it did not give them the power to approve or disapprove those selections. The manual also mandated that "parents are one of the categories of persons who must receive preference for employment as non-professionals" in Head Start. [9]

The next important landmark in the development of parent involvement policy in Head Start was the publication of a manual in early 1969 entitled Parent Involvement lOA-A Workbook of Training Tips Head for Head Start Staff. [10] This was developed by Draper and the consultants with the help of Helen Alexander, a volunteer in the national office who gave an entire year of her time to the project.

As a series of "training tips," the 10A workbook did not carry the force of a policy mandate, but it did help explain the various structures intended to facilitate parent involvement. These structures included the Parent Advisory Committee at the center level, the Policy Advisory Committee at the delegate agency level, and the Policy Advisory Council at the grantee level. Fifty percent of the members of each of these groups were to be parents of Head Start children, with the other 60 percent being community representatives from various public and private neighborhood, professional, civic, and social organizations that had a concern for children. The workbook also suggested duties for each of these advisory committees, including participation in the development of procedures for recruiting, screening, hiring, and terminating Head Start employees and approving the appointment of the center director.

While the 10A workbook suggested structures for parent involvement, it placed equal emphasis on giving practical suggestions for how parents could be involved. One section suggested possible jobs for Head Start parents in the program, such as teacher aides, shopping aides, and group leaders in activities for Head Start parents. Another section suggested topics for parent meetings-how to buy a used car, dos and don'ts of buying on credit, workshops to make inexpensive toys, and how to evaluate a prospective Head Start employee.

"Most of the parents had always been on the other side of the job interviewing table," said Draper. [11] When confronted with a job applicant, therefore, she thought their tendency was to base the decision to hire simply on the fact that the applicant needed a job. Thus, the 10A workbook was designed to teach parents that they had the right to evaluate an applicant based on one key question: "Will this be a good person to work with my child?" While many Head Start parents tended to be too accepting in hiring Head Start staff, according to Draper, other parents got swept up in the power trip of hiring and firing. "They would say 'hire and fire' as if it were all one word," she said. "I would say, but wait a minute, there is something that goes on in between."

Draper also fought many bruising battles to persuade Head Start officials to hire specific staff to facilitate parent involvement. Various members of the national staff would decide that parent involvement stretched through the whole Head Start program, and that, therefore, no specific staff for parent involvement were necessary. But Draper felt that if parent involvement were everybody's job, it would be nobody's job. Thus, she considered it a great victory when the 10A workbook spelled out the suggested staff positions for parent involvement: one Parent Program Assistant for every 60 children to develop plans with parents and staff for parent activities; one Parent Program Developer to supervise every 10 Parent Program Assistants; and one Parent Program Coordinator per grantee. All of these positions were independent of and equal to the social service staff at their level. Finally, she won the battle to have a parent involvement specialist in each regional office.

In addition to defining parent involvement and giving it a structure in federal policy, Draper, guided by the Parent Program Planning Consultants, developed some insights that are central to Head Start. While some people wanted to make it a requirement that parents participate a certain number of hours in Head Start, Draper said, "You can't require; you have to entice."

She also fought hard for Head Start to set aside funds for recreational or social activities for parents, and for parents to have the power to decide how these funds would be spent. Fifty cents per child of the program budget was set aside for parent activities. However, when a group of Head Start parents in New York decided they wanted to go to Patricia Murphy's Restaurant for a candlelight dinner, a local staff member said, "They can't do that." But Draper approved it. "I really thought I was going to lose my job over that," she said, adding that the parents probably learned more from raising part of the money for the dinner and arranging for the bus to transport them there than they did from most of the Head Start staff-initiated parent education activities.

Under Draper's guidance, the policy of parent involvement in Head Start was evolving toward a self-help approach. In part, the policy was designed to assist parents in gaining the organizational skills necessary to be full partners with professional staff in running the program. The policy was also designed to allow parents to decide what kind of parent education they did want. Many of the original Head Start parent education activities consisted of lectures on child development. Parents did want some information about children, but they redirected educational efforts to matters of more immediate interest. Parents began to share their own skills in everything from meal preparation to hair cutting. In short, Bessie Draper helped put a practical face on the concept of "maximum feasible parent participation." "Maximum feasible" was defined as a full partnership role for parents with paid professionals, but a role that stopped short of exclusive control by parents.

New Policy on Parent Participation

Despite the progress in defining and building the parent involvement component of Head Start, when I became director of the Office of Child Development in 1970 there was still considerabale confusion about the role of parents, particularly in the areas of program direction and community activism. There were struggles for control among Head Start parents, staff, and administrators, and, in turn, between all segments of the Head Start program and the Community Action Program.

In the area of program direction, we received complaints from some Head Start programs that CAP was forcing Head Start to hire unqualified staff. In New Orleans, for example, Head Start complained that they were having to turn away qualified applicants in order to hire the people designated by the CAP agency.

There was a lot of misunderstanding according to Bessie Draper. "Parents were supposed to start out as aides in the Head Start program. But in order to progress to higher positions, they were supposed to go on to get a credential. I wouldn't want a Head Start parent to be a Head Start director just because he or she was a Head Start parent." [12]

Furthermore, not all the Head Start "parents" on the various advisory committees and boards really had children in the program. According to Draper, some were activists just using the program as a platform. For example, she recalled one man who presented himself as a poor parent but was a college graduate. "He wasn't poor," she said. "He was just broke." And Draper later found out that the child he was supposed to be representing "wasn't his child at all."

Part of the problem stemmed from the tendency of white people to think all black people were poor. White Head Start staff used to ask Draper if she had been a Head Start parent. At the time, her husband, who had been a professor of law and later a judge, was deputy director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

By the time I arrived in Washington, D.C., social activism in Head Start was becoming a two-edged sword: it was helping to keep the program alive, but it was also alienating some key members of Congress. Making courtesy calls to key senators shortly after my arrival on the job, I learned that my scheduled appointment with Senator Russell Long, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had been shifted to the Senate Steam Room. While I stood dripping in a suit, Senator Long, wrapped only in a towel, lectured me that he didn't want any more Head Start funds going for Community Action activities.

"Why should I pay poor people to stir up trouble," Senator Long asked, "when I can't find anyone to iron my shirts?"

Nor was the congressional criticism of activism in Head Start confined to white southerners. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of politics by confrontation; marches and sit-ins were common forms of persuasion in attempts to increase society's responsiveness to the poor. It is hardly surprising that when the status quo was attacked, established members of society retaliated. Mayors and governors lost little time informing Congress that Community Action funds, including Head Start's, were financing militants. This reactionary wave reached its peak about the time I arrived at OCD in 1970-the same year I learned of the three-year plan to phase out Head Start.

Coming on the heels of the recent release of the Westinghouse/ Ohio report raising skepticism about Head Start's effectiveness, any notion in Congress that Head Start money was being spent on inappropriate forms of activism was simply a perception the program could not afford. As OCD director, I felt I was having to defend Head Start from all sides. I could have handled either the Westinghouse report or the concerns about publicly financed activism, but it was difficult to tackle both at once.

The whole issue of parent as opposed to other forms of social activism came to a head for me in a meeting in my office in 1970. A number of local Community Action Program leaders had come to present me with some "non-negotiable demands." "We're going to tape everything you say," they said, a tactic not particularly conducive to an open, honest discussion. We were sitting around the table in my office. I had decided that Head Start was to have a single goal-improving the social competence of children and their families. In short, I wanted to concentrate on the development of high-quality programs. I was aware that if you change society, you can also make life better for children, but I didn't think we should attempt broad-scale social change with Head Start's $400 million budget. These CAP leaders didn't like the fact that I had decided to cut off use of parent activity and training funds for some forms of activism, such as protests and sit-ins.

Finally, one man got frustrated. Standing up at one end of the table for emphasis, he said, Dr. Zigler, you don't understand. We are interested in systemic change. We are willing to give up a whole generation of our children In order to get it." I stood up at the other end of the table, and said that he might be willing to give up a generation of children, but that I was not, and that was not my mission in OCD. His children had a right to be all they could be, I said, and that was what Head Start was about.

It was at this point that I made a critical decision: while rejecting use of Head Start funds for some forms of community activism I decided that federal policy should give parents clear authority to determine the nature of local programs. And I asked Bessie Draper to develop a policy that would allow us to enforce the decision making role of parents in Head Start. Up until this point, the guidelines on the parents' right to participate in the hiring and firing of Head Start employees had been just that-guidelines. But in 1970 we issued a new section on parents for the Head Start policy manual. This policy, known as 70.2, for the first time spelled out the specific responsibilities of the Head Start policy committees at the center, delegate agency, and grantee agency level. To eliminate any possible confusion about the division of responsibilities, a chart in the new section outlined the respective roles of the delegate and grantee agency boards, policy committees, and Head Start directors. The chart indicated areas where parents had to be consulted, where they had operating responsibility, and where they had the power to approve or disapprove. At the same time, the name of the policy-setting groups, half of whose members were required to be parents of Head Start children, was officially changed from Policy Advisory Council to Policy Council. The Policy Council was specifically given the power to approve or disapprove the hiring and/or firing of the Head Start director at the delegate agency and the grantee agency level, and to approve or disapprove the program budget.

Strengthening the power of parents in Head Start decision making, particularly in the area of personnel administration, was not universally welcomed. No sooner had the policy been announced than I got a call from some school superintendents representing grantee agencies who complained that schools never share power with other groups on the hiring and firing of school employees. We had to de-fund Head Start programs in Kansas City and Omaha because they refused to comply with the new policy on parent involvement, and we threatened to de-fund several others. [13]

Even some of my own OCD staff disapproved of the policy giving parents clear decision-making power. I remember one meeting where a Head Start parent literally came to blows with one of my OCD staff members. "There was blood on the floor," Bessie Draper recalls. In retaliation, my staff member wanted me to punish all Head Start parents by removing their power to make decisions in the program.

Given the political climate and the internal opposition, why did OCD stick by the new parent participation policy? I expected parents to make mistakes and learn from them, just as we at the national office were doing. As a member of the original Head Start Planning Committee, I also believed that parents are their children's best advocates and that parental participation in decision making would most effectively guarantee Head Start's quality.

Beyond these basic principles, I was convinced by Bessie Draper. Her common-sense approach to the policy impressed me. While committed to the goal of making parents equal partners with Head Start staff, she did not romanticize their poverty. "The law [the Economic Opportunity Act] didn't say that poor people were supposed to run the program by themselves," said Draper. "If they already had that kind of skill, they probably wouldn't be poor. The word in the law is participation, not control." [14] Draper was not blaming the victim. Coming from a background as an employment counselor, Draper's approach was to empower people by encouraging them to develop necessary skills.

In addition to the section on the parental role in decision making, the new parent involvement policy also spelled out the Head Start policy on home visits: Head Start staff were to visit parents of enrolled children at least three times a year, if the parents consented. This was the forerunner of all of the home-visitation projects today, such as Parents as Teachers, and David Olds's home visitation project in Elmira, New York. Finally, the new policy clarified Head Start's stance on community activism. Parent activity funds could be used to work on community problems and "common concerns, such as health, education, welfare, and housing." However, in order to prevent use of such funds for sit-ins and other clearly disruptive tactics, Head Start program proposals henceforth had to contain a specific request for parent activity funds, and a general explanation of the types of activities for which the funds would be used.

In summary, the 70.2 policy for the first time spelled out the duties and powers of parents in Head Start in such a fashion that the policy could be enforced. The policy struck a balance between parent involvement as a vehicle to empower parents as decision makers, and as a tool to educate and counsel them. Perhaps the best tribute to this policy is that, as of this writing, it remains unchanged as part of the Head Start Performance Standards.

Effects of Parent Involvement

Given the central place of parent involvement in Head Start policy, there has been surprisingly little research on its impact on children, parents, or communities. There are strong suggestions, however, that parent involvement-in a variety of forms-improves the long-term outcome for the children. The MIDCO report noted a direct relationship between the children's progress and the degree to which their parents participated as decision makers and learners in Head Start, although it was not clear whether parent participation caused the children's progress or merely correlated with it. Edmund Gordon, Head Start's first research director, has suggested that the development of leadership potential among the poor might be an important factor in optimizing the growth of children. Gordon pointed out a finding in the Coleman Report that had gone relatively unnoticed-namely, that with the exception of family background, the variable most related to school performance was the child's sense of control of the world he or she inhabits. How does a child's sense of control develop? Based on modeling theory, children will believe that they can influence their own destinies if they have the opportunity to interact with adults who themselves have that world view.

The importance of parent involvement, in the sense of home visits to parents, has also been suggested by High/Scope Foundation's research. In a followup study of disadvantaged children participating in the Perry Preschool Program, children who received biweekly home visits plus preschool fared better as young adults than did those who had only had the benefit of the preschool program.

Even the highly critical Westinghouse/Ohio report was positive on one score: parents liked the Head Start program; more than 80 percent of parents covered in the Westinghouse study thought their children had improved as a result of Head Start. Positive parental attitudes toward Head Start's effect on children take on more significance when one considers the tendency for poor parents, especially poor urban parents, to lose hope for their children. Thus, any program that can raise parental aspirations will help to shape children's accomplishments. [15]

"What difference has Head Start made to your family?" I remember asking a Head Start mother who approached me some years ago after a speech.

"Well, it's simple," she said. "When my daughter used to give me pictures she had drawn, I'd think to myself, that's the ugliest picture I've ever seen, and wad it up and toss it in the wastebasket. After she was in Head Start, I'd take the picture, ask her to tell me about it, and post it proudly on the bulletin board."

As my Yale colleague Victoria Seitz and others have suggested, there may well be a snowball effect operating here. The parent's more positive attitude toward the child increases the child's self-esteem, which furthers the child's accomplishments, which in turn enhances the parent's satisfaction with the child.

There is considerable anecdotal evidence about the impact of Head Start on the lives of parents themselves: in Head Start Success Stories, 79 parents relate the impact Head Start has had on their lives. [16] One story after another reports the experiences of parents who started who started out without even a high school diploma, became involved as parent volunteers in Head Start, then took on leadership roles on the Policy Committee, and ended up getting college degrees. Ernestine Carrasco, for example, started out as a parent volunteer in the Carlsbad, New Mexico, Head Start in 1966. The program helped her obtain her Graduate Equivalency Diploma (GED), and go on to get a bachelor's degree and finally a master's degree in education. Carrasco became a public school teacher, created the district's first bilingual kindergarten, and in 1979 was promoted to elementary school principal.

"When I talk with some of these women who are Head Start's success stories," said Rossie Drummond Kelley, Head Start's public information director, "they often tell me how 'those Head Start ladies' stayed on their backs until they got involved. What happened to their kids happened because the parents changed." [17]

Frankie Brundage King cried when her mother told her she was going to have another baby. According to custom in their rural Alabama county, this meant that King, the oldest daughter, would have to drop out of school to care for the infant. Married herself at the age of 16, King had six children by the time she was 26. She got a job as a maid and thought that was the end of her education and her opportunities.

But then King started attending meetings of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, the organization that sponsored Head Start in Lee County, Alabama. They encouraged her to go back to school and gave her the confidence that she could learn. King also began working for Head Start. "She started out as a secretary who could not type, " said Nancy Spears, Lee County Head Start director. Due to a speech impediment, King was at first even afraid to answer the phone.

With the support of Spears and Head Start parents in similar circumstances, however, King acquired secretarial skills and obtained a Graduate Equivalency Diploma. "I went to school half a day, and worked eight hours in the afternoon and at night for Head Start as a clerk-typist, " said King. "It was the first job I ever had that did not include pushing a mop or dusting a table." [18]

Empowered by a new sense of pride, and the sense that she could make a better life for herself and children, King enrolled in college part-time. By the age of 37, the same year her oldest son graduated from college, King obtained her bachelor's degree. All six of her children completed college as well, and King is now the human services coordinator for the Alabama Council.

Despite numerous success stories, studies are just beginning to attempt to quantify the impact of Head Start parent involvement on families. One such study examined the effects of parent involvement on Head Start parents' psychological well-being. Mothers who participated reported fewer psychological symptoms, greater feelings of mastery, and greater life satisfaction at the end of the program. [19] Another study, the Head Start Family Impact Project, found that parent involvement in a Minnesota Head Start program increased the sense of family cohesion and adaptability, and the researchers speculate this will eventually improve the children's performance in school. [20]

But what is needed is research on how participation in Head Start affects the whole fabric of parents' lives-their employment, housing, and overall socioeconomic status. At the same time, we need a realistic yardstick by which to measure the effectiveness of Head Start's parent involvement policy. Even if only l percent of the over 10 million parents associated with Head Start over the last 26 years represent "success stories," a hundred thousand families in this nation are as a result now leading much better lives.

More data are also needed on the extent of parent involvement in Head Start. Although Head Start Statistical Fact Sheets maintain that over 443,000 parents volunteered in the program in l989, or nearly one parent for every child enrolled that year, there is little indication of the extent of their involvement. That is, did the parents attend one parent meeting a year, or did they volunteer several hours a week in the classroom? The Family Impact Study found that Head Start parent involvement ranged from 0 to 164 hours over a six-month period, averaging to less than one hour per week.[21] And Head Start directors report informally that parent involvement has declined over the years.

Another missing piece of information concerns the effects on the children enrolled of Head Start's policy of encouraging parent employment in the program. We know that, nationwide, over one third of Head Start staff are parents of children who are past or present participants in the program. But do children fare better in those Head Start programs that employ large numbers of Head Start parents as teachers, even when that means that few of the teachers have college degrees in early childhood education? Or do children do better in those programs that place a higher premium on employing early childhood professionals, at the expense of not hiring as many Head Start parents? In short, while few would now challenge the importance of involving parents as employees and volunteers in Head Start, what balance between paraprofessionals and professionals works best for the children?

Head Start's parent involvement has clearly had a positive effect in terms of encouraging parents to obtain training in child development. Under the Head Start Supplementary Training Program, by 1973 more than 12,000 Head Start staff, many of them parents of children enrolled, had received college training for credit and 1,000 had received either AA. or B.A. degrees.[22] Through the Child Development Associate (CDA) program, which was initiated under my direction in 1972, over 30,000 Head Start teachers and home visitors have obtained this competency-based credential. [23]

At first, Ophelia Brown's employment with Head Start did not seem to represent much progress. Despite the fact that she already had 30 college credit hours, more training than many of the white teachers in Head Start in Miami at that time, Brown was hired at the lowest level of teacher assistant. She was treated like the center's domestic; she alone swept the floor, took the children to the bathroom, and gave them baths.

Far from being discouraged by this experience, however, Brown was all the more determined to get enough training so she could not be held back. Through Head Start Supplementary Training, she got her associate's and then her bachelor's and master's degrees in early childhood education at the University of Miami. During this time, Brown was raising a family and working full-time for Head Start during the day, while attending school evenings and weekends.

"I started as a teacher aide 1, moved up to teacher aide 2, then teacher, then center director, then field operations supervisor, then region director, then Head Start director, and now director of a new combined Head Start, Youth, and Family Development division of the Community Action Agency, " said Brown.

Over the years, the Dade County Head Start program had gone through many nationwide searches for directors. "They would hire Ph.D.'s from New York to Oregon, " said Brown, "and then have me fill in when they left. " Finally, Head Start parents petitioned Brown to take the position, and she was hired as the Head Start program's 19th director.

Head Start has thus provided leadership training and career development opportunities for thousands of Head Start parents. To date, however, Head Starts employment and training efforts have probably been overly focused on careers in early childhood. The goal was not to have Head Start parents become permanent Head Start employees, according to Bessie Draper, but to "move them up and out" of both Head Start and poverty. Washington and Oyemade fault Head Start's parent involvement policy for not placing more emphasis on economic self-sufficiency. "In the final analysis," they write, the solution to poverty is jobs and a decent income."[24] And they argue that Head Start should place greater emphasis on programs to help parents improve their employability.

Recent welfare reform legislation, the Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988, requires parents on AFDC with children over age three to be employed or in a training program. Given the fact that nearly 60 percent of Head Start parent are on AFDC when their children enter the program, this legislation seems to demand that Head Start improve its linkages with employment and training programs beyond those geared simply to providing training in early childhood education.

Nevertheless, at its best, I think Head Start already comes closer to embodying the kind of two-generational approach that seems most likely to help families overcome poverty.[25] And Head Start's economic empowerment strategy may depend on preserving its voluntary nature. It would be interesting to compare the effectiveness of Head Start's parent employment and training activities with those of the Jobs Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program mandated through FSA. While it is likely that a higher percentage of JOBS participants secure training and employment, it may well be that the people who secure jobs through Head Start find more lasting employment.

Bessie Draper tells the story of a New York City Head Start program that was having difficulty getting the fathers involved. So they set up a social night for the men on Tuesday evenings.

The leader of the group was a janitor, employed at Queens College. The men got some lumber and built themselves a Ping-Pong table. Then they repaired some of the furniture for the program. Then they started talking about jobs. In New York, there's an examination you have to take to become an "engineer, " or the equivalent of a janitor, in a large building or institution. So the men decided to have a study group to prepare for the entry-level position for this occupation. As a result, several men secured jobs and moved their families to a better place.

"The key to this success was that it was self-motivated, " Draper says. "If we had mandated that the men take courses one night a week, it would have been a total flop. " But when the motivation comes from within, people are more apt to develop a commitment to the jobs they secure.

It is Head Starts two-generational strategy that separates it from so many other job-training and early intervention programs. Too often job-training programs have focused on the parents, while placing the children in poor-quality child care arrangements that do little more than prepare them to be the next generation of welfare recipients. At the same time, many early intervention programs, particularly those based in the public schools, have focused on the children, with little interaction with their parents. Newer programs, such as Even Start, established by the Department of Education in 1988 and operating in 119 sites across the nation, offer adult basic education, early childhood education, and parent-child activities. But it is Head Start that set the trend.

New Outlet for Parent Activism

Head Start's parent involvement component has had an interesting side effect: the emergence of the National Head Start Association. In 1973 Head Start directors formed a national association, and the following year parents and staff were admitted to the organization. By 1976 the National Head Start Association (NHSA) was composed of four groups-parents, directors, staff, and "friends" of Head Start, with parents representing the largest component. Arvern Moore, a former Head Start parent from Holy Springs, Mississippi, is the current president of the organization.

The National Head Start Association has played a central role in many of the program's battles with Congress over the years. Relying on telephone networks and mailgrams, and, at least in the early years, less than an $8,000 national budget provided by private donations and dues, the NHSA has helped win numerous appropriation increases for Head Start as well as a major congressional victory to keep the program out of the Department of Education.

Earlier sit-ins and marches by Head Start parents and staff, where the goal was broad social change and the target was the "establishment," understandably alienated some members of Congress. Even the HEW sit-in during my first year as OCD director, while it helped achieve the short-term specific goal of protecting that year's budget, could not have survived very long as an effective lobbying tactic.

The organization of the National Head Start Association, however, lifted parent participation into a whole new realm of political education. Developing increasingly sophisticated lobbying-techniques, such as an elaborate state-by-state contact list, which could reach all the congressional committees charged with supervision of Head Start, made the NHSA a force with which Congress-and presidents-must reckon.

The National Head Start Association embodies both the parent education and parent empowerment components of "maximum feasible parent participation," and it does so in a manner that is even palatable to conservatives. By serving as spokespeople for Head Start's family-centered approach, Head Start parents won over New Right leaders of the 1980s, such as Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama.

"The best part of Head Start volunteerism is that the majority are parents of children who are now, or who have been, enrolled in Head Start," wrote the erudite Senator Hatch in support of Head Start's reauthorization bill in 1984. [26] "This involvement appropriately highlights the role of parents as the prime educators of preschool children."

"What I like is Head Start's family centered nature," Senator Denton told Nancy Spears, a fellow Alabaman and chair of NHSA's Education Information Committee that year. Responding to the self-help message in Head Start parent Frankie King's testimony before his committee, Senator Denton told Spears that he "never could have made it if he had to face as many obstacles as she had."[27]

With new friends like Hatch and Denton, Head Start's parent involvement policy came full circle. Once the most controversial aspect of Head Start, parent involvement became the policy that made the program most politically viable.

End Notes

1. Panel of Experts chaired by Dr. Robert Cooke, UImproving the Opportunities and Achievements of the Children of the Poor, February 19, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Child Devlopment, now available from the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C.).

2. Midco Educational Associates, Denver, Colo., Perspectives on Parent Participation in Project Head Start, Document no. HEW-OS-72-45 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, or fice of Child Development, 1972).

3. Urie Bronfenbrenner, interview with Susan Muenchow, December 17, 1991.

4. Urie Bronfenbrenner, "Head Start, A Retrospective View: The Founders," in Project Head Start: A Legacy of the War on Poverty, ed. Edward Zigler and Jeanette Valentine (New York The Free Press, 1979).

5. Valora Washington and Ura Jean Oyemade, Project Head Start: Past, Present and Future Trends in the Conteat of Family Needs (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. 75.

6. Polly Greenberg, The Devil Has Slippery Shoes: A Biased Biography of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (Washington, D.C.: Youth Policy Institute, 1990),
p. 3.

7. Ibid., p. 780.

8. Bessie Draper, interview with Susan Muenchow, October 1990.

9. Office of Economic Opportunity, Head Start Child Development Program: A Manual of Policies and Instructions (Manual 6108), September 1967.

10. Office of Child Development, Project Head Start: Parent Involvement 10A-A Workbook of Training Tips for Head Start Staff (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1969).

11. Draper, interview with Muenchow.

12. Ibid.

13. Kenton Williams, telephone interview with Susan Muenchow, January 30, 1991.