This project is an ethnographic study of client governance in Project Head Start. Head Start, a federal pre-school program for poor families that has gained wide public acceptance, gives parents--generally poor women--substantial legal power to make management decisions at the local level. Head Start's client governance component has endured for over a quarter century and remains strong. As such, the program provides a rich store of empirical data on issues of institutional design and cultural pluralism that are both timely and poorly understood. Through demographic and archival research, open-ended interviews with parents and staff, participant observation, and conversational analysis of parent deliberations, the study will provide a detailed, comparative account of the interplay between legal framework and local culture in Head Start's client governance process. Two broad themes, power and community, will structure the data collection and guide the data analysis over a one-year period in two field sites. Parent participation provides an opportunity to explore problems of democratic control over bureaucracies. This research will address theoretical and policy-oriented issues relating to the law's capacity to facilitate greater participation by ethnically and economically subordinated groups in the social institutions of the welfare state. The study will inform our understanding of how parent governance is being enacted, how the formal structure of the law is guiding that enactment, and how that enactment distributes power and facilitates community at the local level. As such, it will illuminate the complex processes of citizen governance and will suggest how the law might more effectively enable the well- being of women and their families within those communities. Also, the research will provide a basis for more generally assessing the potential and limits of parent governance reforms in education.
