It's time to stop Head Start

Gore's Universal Pre-School Plan Takes a Bad Idea and Makes it Worse

Anniversaries have a way of prompting us to reflect on where we've been and where we're going. Thirty-five years ago this summer, the first group of children graduated from the newly begun Head Start program. Now is the time to reconsider the wisdom of this longtime program.

In founding Head Start, President Lyndon Johnson said, "Children are inheritors of poverty's curse and not its creators.... We set out to make certain that poverty's children would not be forevermore poverty's captives."

With seven major objectives-improving the child's physical health, helping the child's emotional and social development, bettering the child's mental processes, establishing expectations of success, increasing the child's ability to relate positively to family, developing in the child and his family a responsible attitude toward society, and increasing the sense of dignity and self-worth of the child and his family-Head Start raised a high bar that, in retrospect, doomed it to failure before it even began.

Clearly Head Start has not stopped poverty in its tracks. Not surprisingly, the program's goals have become less ambitious over time. Head Start now has the overall goal of "increasing the school readiness of young children in lowincome families," according to the Head Start bureau. Yet studies show that Head Start has not been able to meet even this boiled-down expectation.

In 1985, the Department of Health and Human Services undertook the first comprehensive analysis of the available Head Start research and found: "In the long run, cognitive and socioemotional test scores of former Head Start students do not remain superior to those of disadvantaged children who did not attend Head Start."

In other words, the net gain to poor children from Head Start was zero.

But Head Start advocates would not let go. Although the study showed the program's gains were not maintained over time, some children did experience short-term boosts. This, they argued, was Head Start's job. If schools couldn't maintain the gains, that reflected a problem with the schools, not the program.

That certainly sounds reasonable. But it's also reasonable for people to question Head Start's utility. If students test the same with or without Head Start after a year or two, what's the point of sending them through the program in.the first place?

The most thorough, recent analysis of Head Start was conducted by the non-partisan General Accounting Office in 1997. After reviewing more than 600 citations, manuscripts, and studies, GAO concluded, "The body of research on current Head Start is insufficient to draw conclusions about the impact of the national program."

In a sense, the GAO is right: Sloppy study designs and amateur methodological errors so pervade the literature that claims about the success or failure of the program are not convincing.

Given that, one might suggest that more research is needed before giving up on the program. On the other hand, one might also look for guidance from other programs that bear a striking resemblance to Head Start. In this area the findings are conclusive: Early intervention programs can boost children's test scores, but those gains wash out within a few years of exiting the programs.

Despite evidence that preschool programs do little for children, both presidential contenders are reluctant to let go of Head Start. Instead, George W. Bush supports changing Head Start into an early reading and numeracy program, and Al Gore suggests pouring an additional $1 billion into the program.

Both ideas are senseless: Over 35 years, $44 billion and 17 million children have passed through the Head Start gates. By any reasonable standard, that's more than enough time and resources to create a successful program, if that were possible.

To make matters worse, it seems that politicians have learned little from experience with Head Start and other early interventions. The hottest issue bubbling up now is universal preschool." As Vice President Al Gore put it in his nomination acceptance speech, "This nation was a pioneer of universal public education. Now, let's set a specific new goal for the first decade of the 21 st Century: high-quality, universal pre-school, available to every child in every family, all across this nation." In other words, Gore wants government schools, entrusted with educating every three- and four-year-old child in the country.

Gore clings to the notion that preschool improves children's early school performance which, in turn, improves later school performance. "Quality preschool can lead to higher IQs, higher reading and achievement levels, higher graduation rates and greater success in the workplace," he says, echoing President Johnson's early optimism. Today, however, we know better.

Stagnant Government Schools

Consider the views of child-development scholar Edward Zigler, a founder of Head Start. As far back as 1987, when educators were debating the merits of universal preschool, he warned, "This is not the first time universal preschool education has been proposed... [In the past], as now, the arguments in favor of preschool education were that it would reduce school failure, lower dropout rates, increase test scores, and produce a generation of more competent high school graduates... Preschool education will achieve none of these results."