Abstract
Head Start likely will need to evolve in response to the dramatic growth of state-funded prekindergarten programs during the past two decades. A potential role for Head Start in the context of widespread public school involvement in prekindergarten would be to collaborate with state prekindergarten systems to provide the comprehensive services often missing from state early education models. Data from a nationally representative survey of lead teachers in a sample of 3898 randomly selected prekindergarten classrooms (81.0% response rate) are used to explore the strengths and challenges of implementation in Head Start, public school prekindergarten, and collaborative models. Although there exists considerable overlap in the quality of Head Start and public school prekindergarten classes, findings suggest that Head Start programs excel in providing comprehensive services and small class sizes and low student-teacher ratios; public school prekindergarten employs teachers with higher levels of education, and the collaborative model appears to represent most of the strengths and relatively few of the weaknesses of both models. Head Start and public school prekindergarten systems should explore creative ways to blend education and comprehensive services into a collaborative program greater than the sum of their respective components.