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Reports on the Comprehensive Child Development Program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Effort of the federal government to assist children from disadvantaged families; Commitment of the committee to provide quality services to grantees; Provision of case management and early childhood education to each family.

The article shows how several of the models of educational researchers T.D. Cook and C.L. Gruder, have been applied in the evaluation of Project Follow Through in the U.S. Project Follow Through is a large-scale federally funded experiment in education. The origins of Follow Through can be traced to an early evaluation of Head Start which asserted that Head Start increased children's school readiness. On the basis of this study, the President Lyndon Baines Johnson's administration proposed a Follow Through program that would continue service to disadvantaged children through the third grade. Funding problems forced a change in the emphasis of Follow Through from a full-scale service program to an experimental program in education in which a variety of educational specialists each implemented an educational model in several school districts. In 1969 the U.S. Office of Education contracted for a national evaluation of Follow Through which focused on comparing the relative impact of the various educational models implemented in Follow Through on the academic skills and affective levels of the children they served.

The article focuses on the effect of federal policy on services delivered through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the U.S. Title I has two main purposes. The first is to provide districts with support that will allow them to offer educational services to students who both need the services and who reside in low-income areas. The second is to provide services, which expand the Title I student's regular curriculum. These requirements are meant to insure that the services provided by Title I are related to the needs of the children to be served, and that they are carefully planned, implemented and evaluated. Although these requirements determine to some extent whether Title I does expand and improve services, four of the eight fund allocation provisions have a much greater effect. These are the comparability, supplement not supplant, excess costs, and equitably provided requirements. The comparability requirements are school-level requirements. Generally, they require that the level of services provided from state and local funds in every Title I school be comparable to the average level in non-Title I schools.

Until the past few years, our nation's approach to designing federal programs for preschool-age children lacked coherence and paid little attention to what had worked (and not worked) in the past. In this article, the authors propose that credible information useful for designing effective programs will require the ongoing, systematic development and evaluation of alternative approaches for the improvement of large-scale early childhood programs. The research should place greater reliance on experiments in which existing groups of individuals, such as intact classes or preschool agencies, are randomly assigned to implement competing early education programs or program components. Randomizing groups, rather than individual children, changes the research question from "What works?" to "What works better?" yielding more useful information than is currently available about which preschool approaches ought to be strongly embedded in our nation's social policy.