Lyndon Johnson, as part of his War on Poverty, wanted to “follow through” on the vanishing gains seen from Head Start. Concerned that “poor children tend to do poorly in school,” the Office of Education and the Office of Economic Opportunity sought to determine what types of education models could best break this cycle of failure. The result was Project Follow Through, an ambitious effort that studied 79,000 children in 180 low-income communities for twenty years at a price tag of more than $600 million.
