Midwest Voices

E. Thomas McClanahan

The Kansas City Star

The news here isn’t so much that Head Start is yet another ineffective, feel-good liberal program. For years, the rap on Head Start has been that any benefits are short-lived. The news is that liberals, in this case Joe Klein of Time, are admitting it.

Time’s Joe Klein delivers his nugget after a brief screed about the wealthy and the oil industry, but then unloads:

“According to the Head Start Impact Study (by HHS), which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, ‘I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn’t.’”

Cost to the taxpayer: $7 billion a year. Klein explores whether Head Start, like so many other government efforts, is really a jobs program masquerading as a childhood-development program. (Duh.) Ultimately he comes to the right conclusion: Given the country’s financial straits, we can’t afford to be spending billions every year on programs that “do not produce a return.”

Comments

1. 

   Daniel Serda

   4 months ago

   While quoting another columnist may pass for effective journalism these days, you might actually want to read the study under discussion. Nowhere in it will you find a claim that Head Start does “not produce a return.”

   Here are some tidbits from the executive summary (the full study, which I located in a 10-second online search, is available at http://eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED507845.pdf):

   • “Providing access to Head Start has a positive impact on children‘s preschool experiences. There are statistically significant differences between the Head Start group and the control group on every measure of children‘s preschool experiences measured in this study.”

   • “For the 4-year-old group, benefits at the end of the Head Start year were concentrated in language and literacy elements of the cognitive domain, including impacts on vocabulary (PPVT), letter-word identification, spelling, pre-academic skills, color identification, letter naming, and parent-reported emergent literacy.
     There was also an impact on access to dental care in the health domain.”

   o “For the 3-year-old group, benefits were found in all four domains examined at the end of the Head Start and age 4 years, including impacts on vocabulary (PPVT), letter-word identification, pre-academic skills, letter naming, elision (phonological processing), parent-reported emergent literacy, McCarthy Draw-aDesign (perceptual motor skills and pre-writing), applied problems (math), hyperactive behavior, withdrawn behavior, dental care, health status, parent spanking, parent reading to child, and family cultural enrichment activities.”

   The study did find, as Klein notes, that these benefits may diminish by the end of first grade. On that point, however, the authors only suggest that further research is required.

   It may well prove unrealistic to expect a pre-school program to have sustained learning, social or developmental benefits that extend two years beyond the intervention. That question is certainly fodder for public policy debates over the merits of a large-scale early childhood education program for economically disadvantaged children.

   The study does not, however, remotely feed the invective that “Head Start is a waste of money”.

2. 

   Dave Haney

   4 months ago

   Mr. McClanahan: There have been studies showing that (at least for girls) there are tangible benefits produced by head start.

   These benefits tended to bubble up later in life, however. Girls that attended head start were 4x more likely to graduate high school and 3x less likely to be arrested for a crime by age 22 - as compared to peers from the same city ,demographic background, sex, and age. I wouldn’t term this a “waste of money”.

   Take Care.

3. 

   Phil Cardarella

   4 months ago

   Of course, the issue is defining “work”.

   Benefits may not be limited to short term. And, if benefits decline after time, is that an argument to end or extend the help further?

   Head Start is NOT a panacea for all the disadvantages of a poor home. If that is what you expect, you are doomed to failure.

   What is surprising about the idea that Head Start advantages can dissapate in schools where teachers must also deal with children who have not had the program? And, are the results averaging down to the level of those without the benefit? Or is the benefit causing the class as a whole to average up? Are those who did not have the program benefiting from being in the class with those who did?

   In other words, is the unexpected answer the result of asking the wrong question.

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