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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

PROJECT HEAD START WAS created during the heady, idealistic days of the mid-1960s. Through two seminal victories, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil-rights movement had won equality in the eyes of the law, but the economic and social legacies of centuries of slavery and racial discrimination remained. President Lyndon Johnson believed that it was the nation's duty to provide not just legal equality but also equality of opportunity. In his 1965 commencement address at Howard University, he called for the "next and the more profound stage" in the civil-rights struggle. "We seek not just freedom but opportunity ... not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result." Johnson's War on Poverty would include a host of initiatives designed to bring blacks and other disadvantaged Americans to what he called "the starting line" of American life with the skills and abilities necessary to compete on a level playing field. The War on Poverty focused on education as a tool for upward mobility, and Head Start was to become one of the cornerstones of the federal effort.

The idea for Head Start, a preschool program for disadvantaged children, emerged from the observation that, on average, poor and minority children arrive at school already behind their peers in the intellectual skills and abilities required for academic achievement. These deficits in turn lead to poor performance in school, which narrows the economic opportunities disadvantaged children encounter when they become adults. In order to counteract the corrosive influences of turbulent neighborhoods, shoddy health care, and undereducated parents, Head Start would attempt to prepare children to flourish in school.

Nearly 40 years after its creation, Head Start has gained the favor of Democrats and Republicans alike. Its budget in 2003 was $6.7 billion, more than tripling (in real terms) since 1990 (see Figure 1 and Table 1). Real per-pupil spending increased from $1,380 in 1966 to $7,170 in 2002. However, despite Head Start's long history and ever-expanding budget, the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged, between white and minority, is still substantial, both during the preschool years and thereafter. This stubborn fact has caused many to question Head Start's strategies and direction. Housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start has in the past emphasized not just early education but also socialization and giving poor children and their families access to an array of nutritional, health, and social services.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Now the Bush administration has proposed reorienting the program to emphasize the acquisition of intellectual skills and to prepare poor kids for school. In order to achieve this objective, the administration is trying to align Head Start more closely with the public school system. After less than a year in office, President Bush implemented by administrative rule a program called "Good Start, Grow Smart," the central thrust of which is to instruct Head Start teachers across the nation in methods for improving school readiness. The program also helps local Head Start centers develop an accountability system that assesses children's learning in literacy, language, and numeracy. The administration had made an earlier proposal to move Head Start to the Department of Education, which would have signaled the program's new commitment to intellectual development. But after encountering fierce competition, in February 2003, the administration proposed an even more dramatic overhaul of Head Start. The plan is to turn control of Head Start over to the states, as long as they commit to making school readiness the program's chief priority and to meet several other requirements. Currently, federal funds flow directly to local Head Start centers, which are run primarily by community-based groups. As a result, Head Start teachers, staff, and parents, working through the National Head Start Association in Washington, have viscerally opposed the administration's proposals, fearing the dilution of Head Start's program of comprehensive services in favor of the focus on school readiness. They regard this as a repudiation of Head Start's historical mission as well as a threat to their control of the program. The Bush proposal, now before Congress, has rekindled a debate that began in 1964.

The Cooke Committee

In that year, Sargent Shriver, a holdover from the Kennedy administration who became one of the chief architects of Johnson's War on Poverty, developed the idea for Head Start from his involvement in programs for retarded children (his wife, Eunice, would later found the Special Olympics). Shriver had visited a remarkable project conducted by Dr. Susan Gray of George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville (which later merged with Vanderbilt University). Gray's project was one of the first preschool education programs in the nation to be carefully evaluated, and Shriver claimed that it demonstrated that early intervention could "change the IQ of mentally retarded children." If this were possible, Shriver thought, why couldn't high-quality preschool also improve the IQ scores of poor children who seemed destined to fail in school?

In the late fall of 1964, Shriver asked Dr. Robert Cooke, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins and the chairman of the Kennedy Foundation's scientific advisory committee, to head a committee whose task would be to make recommendations for a preschool program that would promote the development and school readiness of disadvantaged children. Shriver was in a hurry. With President Johnson's blessing, he had decided to begin the new program the next summer.

Cooke's committee, which met several times in January and February of 1965, had a free hand in designing Head Start, which became the best known and most popular of the War on Poverty programs. Unexpectedly departing from the public statements of Johnson and Shriver, the Cooke committee recommended that Head Start avoid focusing simply on school preparation or IQ development. Instead, Head Start was to offer "comprehensive" services, including health care, mental health services, nutrition, preschool education, and parental involvement. Addressing all the child's needs was thought to have a greater impact on children's development, including their intellectual development, than education alone. Almost none of the present programs that promote children's health and welfare, such as Medicaid and the food-stamp and child-nutrition programs, existed in 1965. In that light, recommending comprehensive services was prescient of the Cooke committee.

Much of the thinking at the time was influenced by J. McVicker Hunt's Intelligence and Experience and Benjamin Bloom's Stability and Change in Human Characteristics, both of which questioned the popular view that intelligence was immutable. There was an increasing faith that social programs could produce sizable gains in IQ scores. Unfortunately, the first major evaluation of Head Start, published in 1969, failed to find permanent IQ gains, thereby raising the question of whether Head Start was incapable of influencing intellectual development or was just implemented poorly. The Cooke committee's decision to make Head Start a comprehensive program enabled its defenders to fudge the issue by arguing that the major goals of the program included many activities crucial to a child's development, such as providing better nutrition and health screening, other than trying to improve IQ scores. The fudging continues to this day.

Another important recommendation made by the Cooke committee was that Head Start funds should travel directly from the federal government to local communities, bypassing the states. This prevented racist governors in the South from killing the program and enabled Head Start to get off the ground quickly. The professionals on the Cooke committee wanted to start small and build up gradually, but Johnson and Shriver were operating on the political logic that called for mounting the biggest program possible, given the money and political will available in the spring and summer of 1965. Amazingly enough, by the early summer of 1965, just four months after the Cooke committee recommended the Head Start program to Shriver, the Johnson administration had funded programs in more than 2,500 communities that enrolled 560,000 children.

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