This report attempts to respond to a series of questions commonly asked about the nation-wide experiment to provide equality of educational opportunity to children born to families of poverty. The report focuses on the following questions: (1) Why did this program of experimenting with early childhood education happen to get launched midway in the early 1960s?, (2) What were the goals of the program, the hopes for it, and how realistic were these hopes? (3) What have been the accomplishments of Project Head Start and of the related investigations and developments that launching Head Start served to inspire?, (4) What have the public reactions been to what has been called the 'failure of Head Start'?, and (5) What have we learned that will be of use in the future? It is suggested that the challenge for the next decade in early childhood education rests on the construction of ordinal scales for assessing development taking place between the sensorimotor phase and the achievement of concrete operations. In total, this report is a comprehensive, descriptive, 'state of the art' analysis of the major early childhood programs of the sixties. (CS)