TY  - JOUR
AU  - Currie,Janet
AU  - Thomas,Duncan
TI  - School Quality and the Longer-Term Effects of Head Start
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6362
PY  - 1998
Y2  - January 1998
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6362
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6362.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Janet Currie
Princeton University
316 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609-258-7393
Fax: 609-258-5974
E-Mail: jcurrie@princeton.edu

Duncan Thomas
Department of Economics
Duke University
Box 90097
Durham, NC 27708
Tel: 919/660-1803
Fax: 919/684-8974
E-Mail: d.thomas@duke.edu
AB  - Recent research on Head Start, an enriched preschool program for poor children that effects on test scores  fade out' more quickly for black children than for white children.  This" paper uses data from the 1988 wave of the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to show that" black children who attended Head Start go on to attend schools of worse  quality' than other black" children, in the sense that they attend schools in which most children have worse test scores.  We" do not see any similar pattern among white children, indicating that on average children attend schools similar to those attended by other white children.  Moreover stratify by school type, we find that gaps in test scores between Head Start and other children are" very similar for blacks and whites.  These patterns suggest that the effects of Head Start may fade" out more rapidly among black students than among whites, at least in part because black Head Start" children are more likely to subsequently attend bad schools.
ER  -