Poverty and Parenting: Transforming Early Education's Legacy in the 1960s

Abstract

Head Start, the federal program that provides preschool education, health, and social services for children from poor families, is one of the United States' most popular government programs. Created in 1965, it has endured as a symbol of commitment to children, serving just fewer than one million children a year in neighborhood sites across the country. Most accounts of Head Start's history do not start much before 1964 when Sargent Shriver, charged with directing Lyndon Johnson's antipoverty campaign, decided to focus funds on young children. Neither Shriver nor most of those he consulted in planning the new program were particularly conscious of earlier efforts to combat poverty by educating young children. Nevertheless, the program they designed carried forward important aspects of turn-of-the-twentieth-century free kindergartens and day nurseries, as well as the nursery schools sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s.