A column in the Washington Post about the effects of Head Start, a federal program for early childhood education, cited a 2009 study from the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. In Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start, author David Deming studies families where some siblings are enrolled in Head Start programs and some are not. He finds that test score gains tend to fade after a few years, but that Head Start has a beneficial effect on outcomes like health, criminal record, and college attendance years later.