The Follow Through program epitomizes many of the successes and failures of federally funded compensatory education. The program, designed to "follow through" in grades kindergarten through three on the documented gains of disadvantaged children graduating from Head Start, emerged as a planned variation experiment that systematically…

The four Follow Through projects in Illinois are described and evaluated. These projects involve approximately 1,450 children in K-3 in Mounds, East Saint Louis, Waukegan, and Chicago. The Chicago project is subdivided into three individual projects and is trying three experimental programs. Emphasis is given to the nature of the environmental…

Congress authorized Follow Through in 1967 under the Economic Opportunity Act to provide developmental and educational services for poor children in primary grades who had experienced Head Start or equivalent pre-school. A large scale service program was envisioned originally. Appropriations were not sufficient, however, so Follow Through was…

The discrepancies between the comprehensive design for Follow Through evaluation and the program management's needs of the seven models in Philadelphia are discussed. The national evaluation has focused on pupil performance and achievement data. The local evaluation, conducted since 1968, has focused on: (1) the assessment of the correspondence…

The evaluation by Abt Associates, Inc., of the Follow Through program, an extension of Head Start designed to improve primary education for disadvantaged children, created a controversy about the program and its assessment, which is discussed in this article. The authors see serious flaws in the evaluation design and interpretation. (MF)

The "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (PL 107-110) established the Reading First (RF) Program (Title I, Part B, Subpart 1), a major Federal initiative designed to help ensure that all children can read at or above grade level by the end of third-grade. The legislation (Section 1205 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) requires…

Evaluation activities should always be considered in terms of the effect that they have on the persons or programs being evaluated. This is a particularly critical concept when young children are being evaluated. Evaluation should be of some value to the persons or programs being evaluated. For example, when a Follow Through program is being…

The Bienvenido Bilingual Education Project was funded under Title VII of the Elementary Secondary Education Act and implemented in kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms of two elementary schools in Clark County, Nevada. The project aimed to provide for the bilingual educational needs of Spanish speaking students which had not been met by…

This research bulletin reports an evaluation study of the program of the Dale Avenue Early Childhood Education Center, funded under Title III of the 1965 Elementary Secondary Education Act. A pre- and post-test experimental and control design using standardized and locally developed instruments was used to evaluate the academic performance of the…

To complement the information gathered on middle school and high school literacy initiatives as reported in "Middle and High School Literacy across the Curriculum" (Task 1.2 Fast Response Project), the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast (REL-SE) staff conducted a scan of the six southeast states to gather the following information…

The Sault Ste. Marie (Michigan) Area Public Schools' Compensatory Education Division undertook a 2-year process evaluation of the effectiveness of an early intervention strategy for low reading readiness kindergarten children enrolled in Title I programs. The first year of the evaluation sought to determine whether children exposed to this…

Educators from Holland and member countries of the Council of Europe attended a symposium on innovation in primary education in the Netherlands. Much of the discussion was based on the evaluation report, "Lessons from Practice: the Primary Education Act Reviewed." Participants evaluated initial, partial research results, and compared…

This is a report on government-funded kindergarten programs that were conducted in 1983-84 in more than 110 Chicago schools, most of them in poverty areas. Three funding sources and various instructional models are included in this assessment. The programs differed in format, including half day and all day programs, and in class size. Funds came…

This paper presents a discussion of issues raised in the evaluation of Project Follow Through reported by Abt Associates. The paper suggests that many of the problems inherent in the design of both the program and the evaluation stem from the underlying assumption that one educational model could be found which would best alleviate the educational…

"The ERIC Review" announces research results, publications, and new programs relevant to each issue's theme topic. This second issue contains three principal articles: "Issues in Adult Literacy Education," by JoAnn Crandall and Susan Imel; "Emergent Literacy: An Early Reading and Writing Concept," by Carl B. Smith;…