More Head Start? Not Smart says INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
“President Obama says his budget “cuts” include ending the Even Start program. But what he doesn’t say is that he’s spending more money on Head Start, which is just as ineffective.
In fact, the president’s proposed $66 million in savings from killing Even Start is easily wiped out by his pledge to pump $10 billion a year into similar early education programs like Head Start, which provides preschool for poor children.
He and his education chief deserve cautious praise for pushing charter schools and merit pay for teachers. But their bloated education budget reveals the true nature of their education-reform plan. It’s really just more of the same shopworn, pro-union Democrat approach to education: more spending and less accountability.
Take Obama’s plan to ramp up spending on Head Start programs while quadrupling the number of kids eligible for Early Head Start.
Study after study shows Head Start doesn’t work. Tykes enrolled in the program, at an average cost of $7,700, were able to name only about two more letters than disadvantaged kids who were not in Head Start, according to the Hoover Institution’s “Education Next” reform project. They also didn’t show any significant gains in early math, pre-reading, pre-writing, vocabulary or oral comprehension.
“The unavoidable conclusion,” says Douglas Besharov, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, “is that the measured impacts of Head Start, Early Head Start and Even Start have been tragically ‘disappointing’ — the word used by most objective observers.”
He added, “These three programs do not make a meaningful difference in the lives of disadvantaged children.”
Even Start was authorized in 1988 as a family literacy program covering low-income kids from birth through age 7. Head Start was established in 1965 for 4- and 5-year-olds. Early Head Start was formed in 1995 for children from birth to 3, plus pregnant women.
In the Recovery Act budget just passed, the Democrat Congress added an additional $2.3 billion to the $7 billion-a-year Head Start program.
As well-intentioned as it may be, Head Start plainly has an unacceptably small impact on learning to justify its cost. Yet Obama wants to expand not only Head Start funding, but also its reach by offering the program beyond the inner cities and poor rural areas. His goal — one shared and championed by the first lady — is “universal pre-K,” or mandatory preschool modeled after Head Start.
It’s hard to see why the president thinks it’s a good idea to entrust all pre-K programs — nationwide — to a public system that he admits is fraught with serious shortcomings, especially in inner-city areas most in need of reform.
To reform the nation’s education system, he says he’ll do whatever works and is “backed up by evidence and facts and proof that (it) can work.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan adds that “we must stop doing what doesn’t work.”
Both preach accountability and pragmatism, but their proposals don’t match their rhetoric. They intend to waste more money on early education programs that get failing marks.
Speaking of results: Duncan spent eight years running Chicago’s school system, yet it remains one of the nation’s worst. Scores and graduation rates for the most part stagnated on his watch. Among his reforms: increasing by several thousand the number of kids from 3 to 5 enrolled in early ed programs.
Coupled with spending more on federal pre-K programs, Obama wants the government to “provide affordable and high-quality child care that will promote child development and ease the burden on working families.”
This goal seems to lend credence to the charge that Head Start is really just welfare and day care masquerading as educational instruction.Those billions can be better spent elsewhere, or not at all.
