President Bush is in trouble with the Head Start establishment again, if you can believe The Washington Post, whose reporters on this beat seem to have swallowed the view that Head Start is swell and ought not be pushed to do anything different from what it's always done. (See "Head Start Changeover Proposed" by Valerie Strauss and Amy Goldstein, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8588-2003Jan31.html.)
Wrong. The Head Start establishment is pigheaded about the glories of its current program. The Post's reporters should go back to journalism school. And the Bush Administration has this one pegged: Head Start may be an iconic, 38-year-old federal program but it's sagging badly. It needs a makeover. More than Botox.
The President's commitment to such a makeover dates back at least to his 2000 campaign. So does that of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Shortly before his inauguration, we urged that Head Start be recast with greater emphasis on pre-literacy and a structured, cognitive curriculum. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=37.) My own consciousness has been raised by three developments in the decades since Head Start appeared as part of LBJ's War on Poverty:
First, we've all seen studies indicating that typical Head Start programs don't give poor kids much of a head start on success in school - and that such boosts as do occur seldom last long. We now know that a big reason for the program's meager academic impact is its meager academic aspirations. Rather than seeing their three- and four-year-old charges as very young pupils in urgent need of a coherent, research-based, pre-literacy curriculum, most Head Start people are wedded to the "child development" view whereby structured cognitive learning isn't nearly as important as health, socialization, "family support" and self-esteem. Few Head Start staffers view themselves as "teachers." Indeed, many have not even completed college.
Second, E.D. Hirsch and others helped me realize that pre-school programs in many other countries are very different. (France is a good example.) They work at structured learning - appropriate to tiny students, yes, but structured nonetheless. (A pre-literacy curriculum for three- and four-year-olds might, for example, stress shapes, sounds, sizes and colors.)
Third, when Bill Bennett, John Cribb and I wrote the pre-school chapter of The Educated Child (Free Press, 1999), we set out to create a "kindergarten readiness list" that laid out the skills and capabilities that a five-year-old should possess upon reaching school in order to maximize his prospects for succeeding there. To our amazement, that list consumed four pages. (If you have the book, check pages 37-40. If not, you can order it from the usual places.) It included dozens and DOZENS of entries. Fortunate children, we realized, get these from attentive parents, loving aunts and grandpas, private pre-schools, well-chosen software, carefully edited TV, etc. But what about poor kids? They depend far more on programs like Head Start. If it and kindred programs don't do the job, these children will find themselves behind the educational eight ball from the moment they arrive in school.
All of which is to say that the President and his team are right: if we're serious about not leaving poor kids behind, Head Start must refocus from child development to school readiness, especially pre-literacy. It can continue with the hugs, the carrot sticks and the dentist visits, sure, but it also needs to help those boys and girls get ready to read.
The first major Bush proposal along these lines came in April 2002. The National Head Start Association (NHSA) threw a fit. (You can find that plan's main elements at http://www2.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/hsb/initiatives.htm and my earlier commentary at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=63#908.) But elements of it began to be put into place, including summer training for several thousand Head Start staffers-which the Washington Post's reporter said they didn't like receiving - and, more recently, an assessment plan by which to determine how effective individual Head Start centers are and how well their children are doing. (You can find Assistant Secretary Wade Horn's explanation at http://www2.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/hsb/access.htm.) This caused even more fur to fly, since the notion of assessments aimed at evaluating whether four-year-olds have learned age-appropriate literacy skills irks both the "developmentally appropriate" crowd and the anti-testing pack.
Now the Administration is dropping another big shoe. The President's 2004 budget would empower state governors to make major Head Start decisions while refocusing the entire program to include pre-literacy. [To see the Department of Health and Human Services release explaining this proposal, go to http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2003pres/20030203.html.] In the view of the Head Start establishment (and its journalistic mouthpieces), both ideas are dreadful. States have had scant say in Head Start and the program's acolytes don't want them to. And, as noted above, the literacy focus is at odds with the program's traditional child-development thrust - and threatens the job security of staffers (often local moms) who aren't up to teaching it.
As if those two changes weren't distressing enough to NHSA and its cronies, Mr. Bush also proposes relocate Head Start from Health and Human Services (HHS) to the Education Department.
Eeek, goes the response from an establishment that has striven to keep Head Start in HHS ever since Jimmy Carter first sundered the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. (Their main argument, once again, is that it belongs with other child development and family-support programs, not with school-centered programs.)
Expect fierce establishment resistance. Head Start advocates are vehemently opposed to any system that holds this cherished program to account for its results and NHSA president Sarah Green has already pronounced the Bush proposals a "disaster" and vowed to fight on Capitol Hill to "maintain Head Start intact." But the states are interested. Having greater say over Head Start would enable them to coordinate this federal program with their own pre-school and kindergarten efforts, with the Reading First program, with the accountability demands of No Child Left Behind, and with the qualifications they are setting for teachers and curricula.
A good deal of money is at stake: the new Bush budget seeks $6.8 billion for Head Start, $148 million more than last year - about $7367 per child expected to be served. It will, of course, be said that these numbers should be larger. Perhaps that's so. But until this familiar program gets its overdue makeover, more dollars cannot be counted upon to bring more learning. And learning needs to be the name of the game for Head Start just as for the K-12 system that these children move into.
A battle lies ahead. It's one worth fighting. But you may want to follow its progress through some other source than the largest circulation newspaper in the nation's capital.
