THE HEAD START
MANAGEMENT INITIATIVE

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services May, 2004

INTRODUCTION

Head Start's mission is to help low-income children start school ready to learn by providing early childhood education, child development, comprehensive health, and social services. Since 1965, local Head Start programs across the country have served nearly 20 million children. With more than 39 years of experience serving the nation’s poorest children and their families, Head Start continues in its role as a national laboratory and leader for the entire field of early childhood education. In this role, Head Start has assumed the twin challenges of improving the quality of educational experiences provided young children and increasing accountability for the public expenditures and trust that have been placed in it. The initial focus of the Bush Administration was on improving the educational component of Head Start by advancing the Early Childhood Literacy Initiative. While continuing our efforts to improve early literacy and language development, the Administration is now focusing on increasing accountability to ensure that resources entrusted to the federal government are well managed and used wisely.

To that end, the Department of Health and Human Services (the Department) has established and is implementing the Head Start Management Initiative. This initiative is a comprehensive reform effort, which will produce significant management improvements in the Head Start program. It also recognizes a fundamental truth: that we cannot fulfill our mission to ensure school readiness for young children from low-income families without strong fiscal and programmatic accountability. This effort is designed to improve Head Start grantee performance to better serve children and families. Accordingly, the Head Start Management Initiative concentrates on two main goals.

These goals are:

1. Improving the monitoring system to address underenrollment, executive and administrative personnel compensation, erroneous payments, child outcomes, and grantee compliance with regulations; and
   
   
2. Improving the training and technical assistance system.
   
   

ISSUE

Underenrollment

In early 2002, the Department began to evaluate the issue of underenrollment and soon thereafter developed a strategy to address it. The December 2003 General Accounting Office (GAO) report entitled “Head Start: Better Data and Processes Needed to Monitor Underenrollment,” affirmed the Bureau’s evaluation in noting that “the extent to which Head Start programs have enrolled fewer children than they are funded to serve is unknown.” The reason it is unknown, the reported mentioned, is because the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) does not collect accurate national data and does not monitor underenrollment in a uniform and timely manner. The report showed that using the regulatory definition for underenrollment (less than 100 percent enrollment), as many as 50 percent of all Head Start grantees could be underenrolled. In addition, ACF’s regional offices have different perceptions of what constitutes an unacceptable level of underenrollment, resulting in grantees with similar levels of underenrollment being treated differently. The report also mentioned that ACF’s guidance lacked clear criteria for prioritizing grantees for corrective actions.

INITIATIVE

Underenrollment

To address the issue of underenrollment, in April 2003, the Department issued policy guidance to ACF regional offices instructing them to take specific actions related to particular causes of underenrollment. This includes having regional on-site monitoring visits to grantees to fully assess the reasons for underenrollment, having a grantee document in writing when it will return to full enrollment, and having the assigned regional program specialist conduct periodic follow-up to reevaluate grantee status if remaining at less than full enrollment for more than several months. Underenrolled grantees must be identified as being in violation of the Head Start regulations and need to develop a plan indicating how they plan to achieve full enrollment within the period prescribed by ACF.

In addition, all grantees are expected to fully implement expansion within the period proposed in their application for funding. As a general protocol, all grantees must have expansion children enrolled in their program within one year of receiving their expansion grant. Regional Offices will track grantee’s implementation of expansion. When there are delays, Regional Offices will contact programs and discuss the reasons for delay. The Regional Office will make a judgment as to whether the grantee is making sufficient progress to warrant an extension of the schedule for enrolling expansion children. Any such extension will be for a limited time (no more than six months) and must include an implementation plan, with action steps, that will allow the Regional Office to monitor progress.

The Department will also implement the recommendations included in GAO’s underenrollment report. To ensure the accuracy of national enrollment data, the Department will use a combination of systematic periodic discussions with grantees to identify underenrollment and make clear that annual grantee audits are to include information on grantee enrollments. The Department will also develop an online management information system that tracks enrollment and other fiscal and programmatic matters; it is expected to be operational in fiscal year 2005.

The Department will use existing statutory and regulatory authority to issue a national underenrollment policy to ACF regional offices and grantees no later than May 28, 2004. The policy will bring to an end the granting of routine extensions of the period for achieving full enrollment. It will also establish criteria to identify grantees whose underenrollment merits close attention and will take into consideration the different levels of service provided by full-day and part-day programs. Finally, the policy will call for deobligation of funds previously awarded which have not been used because of underenrollment and the reduction of prospective awards based upon a grantees’ inability to achieve full enrollment despite being provided opportunities to correct this violation as provided under the Head Start Act and ACF regulations.

The GAO also reported that other factors for underenrollment identified by ACF Regional officials and Head Start grantees were the increase in demand for full day care, a decrease in the number of eligible children, facility-related problems, and more parents seeking other providers of early education and care. Better coordination among early education and care programs could help address underenrollment.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Underenrollment: This effort addresses financial accountability in order to serve more eligible children.

ISSUE

Executive and Administrative Personnel Compensation

Congressional leaders have called for a nationwide review of the financial management of Head Start grantees, including the percentage of federal Head Start funds used for administrative expenses, the salaries and benefits of the 25 highest compensated executives using Head Start dollars and dollars spent on meetings and conference travel of the top 25 grantees. In response to this Congressional inquiry, and because these data have not been routinely collected, the Department launched a Head Start Salary and Other Compensation Survey in December 2003.

INITIATIVE

Executive and Administrative Personnel Compensation

Under the “Comparability of Wages” section of the Head Start Act, the Secretary is required to take action to ensure that persons employed by Head Start grantees do not receive compensation

“in excess of the average rate of compensation paid in the area where the program is carried out to a substantial number of persons providing substantially comparable services, or in excess of the average rate of compensation paid to a substantial number of the persons providing substantially comparable services in the area of the person’s immediately preceding employment, whichever is higher…”

INITIATIVE

Erroneous Payments

The Administration on Children and Families (ACF) has been working on a Head Start Income Eligibility Sampling Plan to establish erroneous payment rates for Head Start to meet the goal of Improved Financial Performance under the President’s Management Agenda. The objective of this Plan is to estimate both what proportion of children served by the approximately 2,000 Head Start programs are “over income” or “ineligible” and the total number of such children. To determine and verify the estimated proportion, samples will be randomly selected from fifty grantee/delegate files and assessments will be made as to the accuracy of the grantee’s determination of income eligibility for all sampled children. “Over income” is defined for this purpose as any Head Start enrollee whose family income exceeds the Federal poverty income guidelines. Head Start grantees are allowed to enroll over income children, only up to 10% of the total number of children served. Grantees are not allowed to be reimbursed for any proportion of over income enrollees in excess of this 10% threshold, except when either the exception in the Head Start Act for Indian tribes or very small communities applies.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Erroneous Payments: After establishing error rates, ACF would provide services to more eligible beneficiaries with any funding recouped. This effort is intended to improve financial performance and accountability.

ISSUE

Child Outcomes

The 2001 Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) found that while children are making significant progress in some areas such as vocabulary and pre-writing during the Head Start year, they are not improving in others such as letter identification and knowledge of print conventions which are strong predictors of later reading success.

In addition, many research studies indicate that achievement gaps continue to persist between children from low-income families and children from middle income families. Professionals and parents are concerned about these disparities in children’s achievement, which are evident as early as kindergarten. Therefore, interventions prior to kindergarten are needed for some children. Head Start performs a key role in closing the gap. Head Start programs can do more to support children’s cognitive development, especially to significantly boost language development and to help preschoolers acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that predict later success in reading, writing and mathematics.

INITIATIVE

Child Outcomes

In April 2002, President Bush launched the Early Childhood Initiative—Good Start, Grow Smart—that included strengthening Head Start by developing a new accountability system to ensure that every Head Start program assesses child outcomes. This new accountability system is referred to as the National Reporting System (NRS).

As of January 2004, 1,398 grantees were registered and 436,000 children were assessed. These four-and five-year olds, including children with disabilities and English Language learners, were assessed through the NRS in the fall of 2003 and again in the spring of 2004. In the future, these assessments will continue under the same schedule.

The NRS will provide comparable data about the progress that children are making in each Head Start program - not on an individual basis. NRS information will be reported to programs to supplement and enhance their local aggregation of child outcome data and continuous program self-assessment that each program undertakes. The NRS will help monitor grantee progress, and the Department will use the NRS information to guide training and technical assistance and to develop new ways of incorporating outcomes into future monitoring reviews.

Additionally, the Department has already undertaken a number of efforts aimed at bolstering the school-readiness of Head Start children. The Strategic Teacher Education Program, known as STEP, launched in 2002, was designed to ensure that every Head Start program and every classroom teacher has a fundamental knowledge of early development and literacy and of state-of-the-art early literacy teaching techniques. More than 3,300 local program teachers and supervisors have received this training and have served as “trainers” to the nearly 50,000 Head Start teachers across the country. Trainers have told the Head Start Bureau that the STEP training is making a difference in their classrooms.

The Department also introduced a Head Start Mentor-Coach Instructional Design to enhance skills of current coaches and to train additional and future literacy mentor coaches. A national Web-based resource, called STEP-Net, has been created to help early literacy specialists access resources and tools as well as to exchange information and promising practices. The Department is planning additional efforts to support programs and classroom teachers to foster effective early learning and literacy for Head Start children. These efforts include another initiative, Knowledge is Power (KIP), a strong parent-to-parent program to support children’s early language and literacy needs.

While the Department continues its efforts to bolster the school-readiness of Head Start children by increasing classroom teacher knowledge of early development and literacy through the use of state-of-the-art early literacy teaching techniques and by developing a new accountability system, Head Start regulations and related policies require that all Head Start programs provide comprehensive services. The nature and scope of these comprehensive services are defined in considerable detail. The Department’s focus on the need for early literacy is not intended to suggest that Head Start should be anything less than a comprehensive early childhood program.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Child Outcomes: The President’s Early Childhood Literacy Initiative takes an important step in closing the readiness gap and better prepares low-income children for school. It also helps target training and technical assistance resources to programs with the most need.

ISSUE

Grantee Compliance with Regulations

Section 641A of the Head Start Act requires that each Head Start grantee receive a full on-site review of all program, administrative, financial management, and other requirements at least once every three years. Approximately one-third of grantees are monitored each year. Additionally, new Head Start grantees are reviewed after completion of the first year of providing Head Start services. These reviews play a vital role in assuring that Head Start programs are providing high quality, comprehensive services to the children and families they serve.

In 1998, GAO released the “Head Start: Challenges in Monitoring Program Quality and Demonstrating Results” report, which raised concerns about ACF’s implementation of processes to ensure grantee compliance with regulations. The report observed that ACF’s on-site inspections may not be conducted consistently among regions and by reviewers. The report cited the subjectivity of the monitoring instrument, the lack of guidance for reviewers and variation in reviewer expertise as reasons for the inconsistency. This inconsistency, the report noted, could lead to uneven treatment of grantees.

INITIATIVE

Grantee Compliance with Regulations

To address concerns about the inconsistency in Head Start’s monitoring system raised in the aforementioned GAO report on monitoring, in FY 2000, the Department developed a new instrument and process known as the Program Review Instrument for Systems Monitoring (PRISM). The PRISM uses an integrated, comprehensive, and outcome-focused approach to ensure compliance with regulations. This approach minimized the effect of any variation in reviewer expertise. It also disallowed review teams from making recommendations or providing technical assistance.

Since 2002, in addition to making further refinements to PRISM, the Department implemented several changes to improve the consistency and the integrity of the monitoring process. This included prohibiting Regional staff from serving as Federal Team Leaders for reviews of the grantees to which they are assigned and ensuring that the composition of review teams are based on the needs identified by the regions.

To improve consistency and under its authority to conduct “other reviews,” the Department will supplement the current triennial on-site reviews with more frequent fact-finding reviews of grantees as needed by highly skilled experts from the Head Start Bureau’s existing pool of monitoring consultants, including those with targeted experience in certified public accounting, auditing, management and programmatic analysis, public administration and strategic planning. Such reviews will support the triennial monitoring review.

To ensure national uniformity regarding final monitoring determination reviews, the Department will conduct them from the Head Start Bureau in Washington, D.C., rather than from the ten ACF Regional offices. The ACF Regional offices, however, will continue to lead the triennial on-site monitoring review and provide day-to day oversight of grantees.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Grantee Compliance with Regulations: Improving the quality of reviews will strengthen public confidence in the quality of the monitoring reviews by making certain that common questions of fact are reviewed consistently and uniformly across the nation.

2. Improving the Training and Technical Assistance System.

ISSUE

Training and Technical Assistance

Prior to FY 2004, in order to ensure quality and to support the continuous improvement of all agencies and their delegates, Head Start employed the assistance of institutions and organizations to provide effective and responsive Training and Technical Assistance (T/TA) to support the work of the grantee and the delegate agencies. ACF operated its national Head Start T/TA system through 28 cooperative agreements.

The cooperative agreement approach weakened federal direction and decision-making for the T/TA system and provided the T/TA providers with an inordinate amount of flexibility without commensurate accountability. Insufficient accountability led to uneven performance across regions; while some T/TA providers were effective and responsive to grantee issues and to implementing Head Start’s priorities, others were not. Consequently, grantees in some regions’ received less than acceptable service. On the whole, the problems reflected a lack of a national strategy for, and federal oversight of, technical assistance.

INITIATIVE

In December 2003, the Department announced a new T/TA system to assist Head Start and Early Head Start grantees in identifying T/TA needs and accessing resources. This retooling of the T/TA system changed the structure and method of providing training and technical assistance to grantees to better assist them in complying with applicable law, regulations, and policies. Even the funding method, previously a cooperative agreement with 28 entities, changed and is now a system of 12 contracts managed at the Regional Office level.

Additional modifications include the way T/TA services are delivered. In previous systems the number, location, and qualifications of staff varied among the numerous providers. This former system, composed of institutions and organizations, supported Quality Improvement Centers. In addition, the Quality Improvement Centers had the opportunity to set up cluster/state sites, which could function as extensions of the Centers by having staff “outstationed.” Now the T/TA specialists are locally-based and include experts in the areas of disabilities, early literacy, management/administration and health, as well as a specialist that is assigned a case load of between 10-12 grantees to provide direct assistance.

Grantees will now be able to manage their own T/TA resources tailored to address their unique T/TA needs, including, as appropriate, the hiring of expert consultants. Another advantage to this system is the consistent protocols implemented by all regional contracts and by regional federal staff to ensure on-going accountability as well as on-going relationships with the assigned grantees.

To provide opportunity for continuous improvement, every grantee will now work with the assigned T/TA specialist to develop an annual T/TA plan, including the estimated costs of implementing this plan. This plan, reviewed by the grantee's Regional Office, allows the grantee to be responsible for implementing its approved T/TA plan using the special T/TA grant funds it receives and, when necessary, additional funds from its basic Head Start grant. To the extent grantees need to hire consultants, they will make the determination of which consultants to use and will be responsible for paying these consultants, a practice that is common now.

The system will:

• Provide on-going, on-site support to Head Start grantees that is flexible and designed to meet individual grantee needs.
  
• Assist grantees in achieving full compliance with the Head Start Program Performance Standards.
  
• Assist grantees in developing annual T/TA plans.
  
• Assist grantees with deficiencies in developing and implementing Quality Improvement Plans.
  
• Respond to the special needs of new grantees.
  
• Identify a wide variety of technical assistance resources, maintain an inventory of qualified consultants and organizations, and provide lists of qualified technical assistance providers to Head Start grantees.
  
• Develop and maintain management information technology systems to track grantee progress and performance.
  
• Support the efforts of the State Collaboration Offices to increase the availability of training and technical assistance services.
  
• Work with other early childhood providers to assure coordinated approaches to delivering high quality services.

Effective, results oriented management will help provide the American people with the accountability they expect from their government. The American people, and our children, deserve a government that is accountable for results, a government that is a wise steward of taxpayer dollars and a government that targets resources to key priority areas and needs and ensures the maximum impact for each and every federal dollar spent. Sound management rarely garners attention; however, we know that mismanagement or undermanagement can destroy program and policy effectiveness. Improving the monitoring and training and technical assistance systems will be a major milestone, but it is nonetheless not the end goal. The ultimate goal is to strengthen Head Start for the children and families of this great nation.

Last Modified: 05/14/2004

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