The decade from 1987 through 1996 witnessed an explosion in services for young children who were presumed to need specialized preparation before attending school. Head Start was reauthorized and provided its largest increase in funding in twenty years. In 1988, Even Start was funded at a national level. In fact, all sorts of starts were initiated (Fair Start, Healthy Start, Bright Start, and, even, Smart Start in North Carolina). P.L. 99-457 mandated intervention services for children with disabilities and encouraged states to develop intervention programs for children from birth to age 3. Funds from Title I (or Chapter 1, as it was called from 1980 to 1992) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) were increasingly spent on establishing preschool classrooms in Title I elementary schools, and many states began spending state money on prekindergarten programs for children at risk (Marx & Seligson, 1988).

At the same time, it became harder to obtain research funding for experimental work on intervention practices; two decades of model demonstration classrooms and support for the programs themselves in which research occurred drew to a close. Research results reported in the 1990s have been primarily follow-up reports from programs begun in the 1970s, general evaluations of programs implemented on a national scale, small studies of a few new approaches for children with disabilities, and one major, extensively reported intervention program for low-birth-weight babies.