Project Follow Through - Program Administration

Program Administration

Because Follow Through came into existence because of executive and not legislative action, overall control for the program rested in Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which spearheaded Johnson’s War on Poverty policy. A major component of the policy was community involvement. The Community Action Program (CAP) was charged with fulfilling this function through the establishment of local agencies and programs that carried out various federally sponsored initiatives for disadvantaged populations. However, CAP (and, to some extent, OEO) fell into disrepute among legislators and others, because "it resulted in the political mobilization of the poor and the undermining of local government agencies" (Watkins, 1997, pp. 4–5). Follow Through was intended to be an extension of the Head Start community action program. Since Head Start was politically popular, a program associated with Head Start would put the OEO "back in the good graces of Congress" (p. 5). Although Follow Through, like Head Start, was initially intended as a social action program, the decision to transform Follow Through from a social action program to a social experiment was not correspondingly changed in the congressional legislation (Evans, 1981, pp. 4–5).

Head Start personnel remained involved in the design and implementation of Follow Through, although it appeared they were working at separate ends from the planning group of the OEO, who viewed Follow Through as an empirical investigation (Egbert, 1981, p. 8). Much of what occurred during the planning stage—which Egbert (1981) describes “as a time of haste and confusion”—was an attempt to satisfy constituencies of both perspectives (p. 9).