PERSPECTIVES OF FORMER HEAD-START CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS ON SCHOOL AND THE TRANSITION TO SCHOOL

This article presents information from interviews and questionnaires a dministered to 4,582 kindergartners who were former Head Start partici pants and their primary caregivers. Also, students' kindergarten, firs t-, and second-grade teachers rated their academic performance. Most c hildren (74%) had extremely positive perceptions of all aspects of sch ool. However,a subset of children (7%) reported they did not like scho ol very much and were not doing well; further, they reported that they and their parents did not highly value doing well in school. These ch ildren with less positive school perceptions were significantly more l ikely to be boys and to have lower receptive language skills (as measu red by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) than children with more po sitive perceptions. Rates of special education placement and family ri sk variables (i.e., single-parent status, income, welfare status, moth er's age, parent education, parent working status) did not differ for children with higher and lower ratings of school. Parents had highly f avorable impressions of children's early school adjustment, even more favorable than their children's. Teachers' ratings of children's acade mic performance were significantly higher for children with more rathe r than less positive school perceptions in kindergarten, first, and se cond grades. Efforts needed to minimize poor transition-to-school expe riences and to identify children with negative perceptions of school a s early as possible are discussed.