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The Effects of a Two-Generation Human Capital Program on Children’s Chronic Absence in Head Start

Thu, March 21, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 329

Integrative Statement

Early childhood education has become a central policy lever to expand opportunity in the United States (Barnett, 2001; Heckman, 2006). Yet children must be present if they are to reap the benefits of early childhood education. Recent evidence suggests that attendance is a concern for most early childhood education program serving low-income families. Moreover, chronic absence (e.g., missing more than 15% of school days offered) is a major problem for many Head Start programs. For instance, the proportion of children who are chronically absent is 26% in Baltimore, 36% in Chicago, and 49% in New York City (Balfanz and Byrnes, 2013; Connolly and Olson, 2012; Ehrlich et al., 2014).

Improving children’s attendance is a high priority for Head Start and other early childhood education programs. An area of increasing concern is the subgroup of children who miss many attendance days, i.e., chronically absent children who are not regularly exposed to Head Start’s programming. From a developmental perspective, when children are absent, they miss the gains afforded by the developmental, social, and academic services of Head Start (Ready, 2010; Reynolds, et al., 2014). From a policy perspective, high rates of chronic absenteeism have the added effect of reducing average center attendance rates, a key federal program performance measure.

New strategies are needed to help Head Start and other early childhood education programs ensure that the most at-risk children attend school regularly. Efforts to reduce Head Start absenteeism typically focus on influencing interactions and communication among parents and teachers. A wholly different approach is to improve parents’ human capital as a pathway to children’s regular school attendance. Two-generation human capital programs intentionally and strategically coordinate workforce training and employment services for parents with early childhood education programming for children.

The current study examines the effects of CareerAdvance®, a two-generation intervention that recruits parents with children in Head Start for a career training program in the healthcare sector. Before the intervention began, the study selected a comparison group of parents who had similar characteristics to the CareerAdvance® participants based on observable characteristics. Our sample includes 231 children (108 whose parents were in the CareerAdvance® and 123 whose parents were in the matched comparison group). We employ inverse propensity score matching to estimate average treatment effects on children’s attendance and chronic absence one semester after baseline.

In sum, parent CareerAdvance® participation was not associated with improvements in children’s average daily Head Start attendance. However, CareerAdvance® participation was associated with significant reductions in children’s chronic absence. The proportion of children who were chronically absent among the CareerAdvance® group was 14% compared to 34% among the matched comparison group, a 20 percentage point difference (Figure 1). Moreover, parent CareerAdvance® participation was particularly effective in reducing chronic absence among children from the most vulnerable families, including parents with the lowest level of income and optimism and the highest levels of psychological distress (Table 1). Findings are discussed in terms of the promise of two-generation programs for reducing chronic absence in Head Start, and thus improving children’s development.

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