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New Directions for Head Start
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20210 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
4,521 Words |
| Author
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Douglas J. Besharov
Douglas J. Besharov is a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He was the
first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and
Neglect. His most recent book is Recognizing Child Abuse: A
guide for the Concerned, published by the Free Press. |
Head Start, the federal government's early-childhood development program for low-income children, began in 1965 as a six-week summer experiment in using child development services to help fight the original War on Poverty. It quickly became a year-round, though not full-year, program. Now twenty-six years old, it serves about 600,000 children, at an annual cost of almost $2 billion.
Head Start is one of the nation's most popular domestic initiatives. In 1980, President Carter praised it as "a program that works"; President Reagan included Head Start in the "safety net"; and President Bush has almost doubled its funding.
In recent years, Head Start's importance has increased as national attention has focused on the importance of school readiness as a goal for all American children. In 1990 the president and all fifty governors agreed on six national education goals to be achieved over the next decade. The first, and fundamental, goal is that "by the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn."
Reflecting President Carter's words--and the flood of favorable media publicity--the general public believes that Head Start "works." But the professional view of the program is decidedly more mixed. Among knowledgeable observers, there is a growing consensus that the program is not nearly as effective as it could be and that it needs to be modernized to reflect what has been learned over the past twenty-five years.
The experts have a clear agenda for reform: (1) obtain higher-quality staff who pay more attention to building the children's school-readiness skills, including making better transitions between Head Start and school; (2) place a much stronger emphasis on services to help parents learn how to nurture and teach their own children; and (3) help unemployed parents become self-sufficient by providing educational and job training activities and making Head Start a full-time, full-year program, so that Head Start parents can go to school or work.
Ambiguous Research Findings
Head Start's popularity is based on the widespread impression that it lifts poor children out of poverty by improving their learning ability and school performance. Unfortunately, the actual evidence is disappointing.
Claims that Head Start "works" stem
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