Education & Distance Learning Enthusiasts- Competing visions: President Bush proposes to refocus Head Start on the teaching of academic skills. Should Democrats go along?

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Competing visions: President Bush proposes to refocus Head Start on the teaching of academic skills. Should Democrats go along?

Education Next - December 22, 2004

Continued from page 1.

Practically overnight, the rapid outflow of funds created a large constituency for Head Start. Most congressional districts housed at least one Head Start program. Thus when trouble came--as it inevitably would--Head Start had advocates from communities across the nation who would lobby for the program. Constituent pressure on Congress has helped Head Start not merely to survive annual appropriations battles, but to flourish even in the face of mounting evidence that the program was not adequately preparing children to succeed in school.

The Research Literature

Everyone agrees, and has since the very first studies were conducted in the 1960s, that Head Start produces an initial boost in children's test scores. However, most studies also show that these effects fade within a year or two after children enter school. By the 2nd or 3rd grade, there is no difference between the test scores of children who attended most preschool programs, including Head Start, and those who did not. This is not to say that it is impossible for preschool to elicit long-term gains. Studies of the Abecedarian program in North Carolina and the Perry Preschool program in Michigan have shown remarkable long-term improvements in academic achievement and a host of other important outcomes, including college attendance, employment, delinquency, and crime. But no Head Start programs have been shown to produce this broad range of long-term improvements. Indeed, only a few individual Head Start programs have been shown to produce any long-term gains.

Nevertheless, many high-quality preschool programs appear to reduce placement into special education and grade retentions. Given the costs of special education--at least twice the cost of the regular program in most public school systems--and the costs of grade retention, it is easy to conclude that the high-quality preschool programs that produce these long-term effects may well pay for themselves. However, there is little evidence that Head Start programs as a whole are of high enough quality to make a difference in either of these respects.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to make definitive statements about the effects of Head Start because of the shortage of reliable research. A 1997 study by the General Accounting Office (GAO) screened more than 200 empirical studies of Head Start and found only 22 that met their criteria for worthwhile research. Even these 22 studies had flaws that "weakened confidence in the findings." Furthermore, there was not even one study that included a national sample of Head Start programs. The GAO concluded that "the number of impact studies was insufficient to allow us to draw conclusions about the impact of the national Head Start program."

The strongest evidence that Head Start elicits lasting effects comes from studies published in 1995 and 2000 by Janet Currie and her colleagues at UCLA. Using data from surveys of representative samples of families that included information on whether children had or had not participated in Head Start, Currie found that white children who attended Head Start centers were less often held back in school than siblings who did not participate in Head Start. They also had higher test scores, which persisted into adolescence, and higher high-school graduation rates. However, none of these effects were found among black children, a third of those served (see Figure 2) although one of the surveys suggested that black children who attended Head Start engage in less criminal activity. Black children exhibited the familiar effect of an initial boost in test scores that faded away, leading the researchers to attribute the lack of sustained gains to the abysmal public schools in disadvantaged black neighborhoods.

On balance, the research evidence on Head Start is both mixed and uncertain, inasmuch as the quality of the research literature on Head Start is deficient. During the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start, Congress, recognizing the dearth of good research, ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a scientific study of a national sample of Head Start centers. The first results from this study will be available in 2004. In the meantime, the achievement gap persists, despite all the claims of success for Head Start.

A New Mission

Data on school readiness for children entering Head Start in 1997 and 2001 show that children start the program with test scores far below average. Their performance improves slightly after a year in Head Start, but not enough to make a real difference in the achievement gap (see Figure 3). These striking differences upon the completion of Head Start translate into equally stark differences in school-age test scores, high-school graduation rates, college attendance, and earnings in the workforce.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

These sobering facts convinced the Bush administration that Head Start needed to be retooled to focus on getting children ready to learn. The plan began with the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative, whose purpose was to retrain Head Start teachers and to bring accountability to the program. In effect, Bush is overruling the Cooke committee by making school readiness--an easily measurable outcome--the single most important goal of Head Start.

The shift in emphasis from comprehensive services to intellectual development has provoked strong opposition from Head Start's stakeholders. The National Head Start Association was so opposed to the teacher-training and curricular aspects of the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative that the chairman of the association's board, Ron Herndon, took the remarkable step of sending a letter to all Head Start programs, asking them to boycott the national teacher-training session the administration had planned for November 2002. The association's board believes, Herndon wrote, that "local parents, staff and governing boards, and not the federal government, are in the best position to determine how to improve the operation of their program." Even so, more than 2,000 Head Start teachers and administrators attended the training session.

The president's budget for 2004 contained an even more inflammatory proposal: to turn Head Start over to the states. This would overturn the Cooke committee's other crucial recommendation, that there be no middleman between the federal government and local Head Start programs. In return, states must promote school readiness in a more focused and sustained manner than Head Start programs have been willing to do. States must also meet several other conditions, including: 1) working with the public schools to define the academic and social skills that five-year-olds must possess in order to succeed in kindergarten; 2) developing preschool activities and materials that help poor children acquire these skills; 3) outlining an accountability program for determining whether four-year-olds are learning these skills; 4) maintaining state spending on preschool programs; and 5) continuing to provide comprehensive services.

The reasoning behind the Bush administration's devolution proposal is twofold. First, as Table 1 shows (page 28), several streams of federal and state funding support preschool education and child care. All of these streams, except Head Start, are controlled to some degree by the states. It makes little sense, says the Bush administration, to have state governments in charge of most funds for preschool, but to bypass them with regard to the single biggest preschool program. The administration argues that the states should be able to align all of the funds available for preschool and child care in the service of a coherent statewide plan for improving the education of disadvantaged children.

The second reason is that Head Start programs have been unwilling to accept responsibility for dosing the achievement gap. The devolution proposal requires states to do so. Moreover, the federal No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2001, gives states new incentives to improve preschool instruction. As demonstrated by four decades of research, it is exceptionally difficult for schools to erase the deficits poor and minority children have accumulated by the time they start school at age five. Thus many researchers, educators, and policymakers now believe that high-quality preschool is a prerequisite for improving the achievement of disadvantaged students. Given the opportunity to control Head Start funds and the flexibility to combine all the funds available for early education, states should be highly motivated to build comprehensive preschool programs for poor children.

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