Americans tend to feel warm, proud, and a mite smug when they hear the phrase "Head Start." Aside from Social Security, it's the most beloved of all federal domestic programs. But no complacency is warranted. Head Start is one of those swell ideas from the 1960's that urgently needs reforming for the 21st Century. One study after another has shown that it's good at hugging little children, keeping them safe, giving them healthy snacks, even getting them to the dentist, but does nothing of lasting value to prepare them to read, write and do arithmetic.
Earlier this week, President Bush proposed a Head Start makeover. He wants it to incorporate a true preschool curriculum, centering on the skills a child needs when entering kindergarten so as to have the best chance of learning there, especially learning to read there. These skills include knowing sounds, shapes, words and colors, even letters and numbers. He would retrain Head Start staff members-many of whom never completed college-so that they would be better able to impart such skills to their 900,000 young charges. And (following the mandate of a 1999 law supported by Bill Clinton) he would evaluate the nation's thousands of Head Start centers to see how well they're fulfilling this mission.
It's a timely and needed rethinking of a familiar and popular program, meant to get more educational bang from the $6.5 billion already being spent on it-some $7000 per young participant, equal to what's spent on schooling their older siblings.
But the preschool establishment wants no part of this reform. Head Start has been around for nearly four decades-it began as part of LBJ's "War on Poverty"-and over the years it has become stubbornly set in its ways and acquired its own army of adult interest groups that resist change.
At the head of this army is the National Head Start Association, which swiftly attacked the Bush reform plan. It makes "little sense," intoned Association president Sarah Greene. It "subjects our youngest children to standardized testing" and "wastes a great deal of money."
No "standardized testing" is involved in Mr. Bush's plan and the "wasted" money would be spent on staff training and program evaluations. But Ms. Greene and her associates don't want those things. Like many in the early childhood field, they view Head Start's mission as fostering "child development" or, worse, providing day-care, not running true preschools. They're content with hugs, snowsuits, blocks, swings, gerbils, carrot sticks, and dentist visits. They shun responsibility for advancing a child's cognitive development.
Yet that's precisely what Mr. Bush wants them to do. And what they ought to do. He accurately notes that tens of thousands of young Americans enter kindergarten each year without having developed the skills they need to succeed there. Many of the least-prepared children are poor and minority. If, as the President says, "reading is the new civil right," it's imperative to get disadvantaged youngsters ready for it.
When Bill Bennett, John Cribb, and I wrote The Educated Child a couple of years back, we decided to list essential "kindergarten readiness" skills. To our surprise, it filled four pages. Some items are things that Head Start programs have long done. But most have serious cognitive components, such as "knows what an alphabet letter is," "places a short series of events in correct order," "recognizes common sounds," "counts aloud to ten" and "recalls basic facts about stories." Expertly parented children get most of these at home. But disadvantaged girls and boys usually need other adults to help them learn such things. That's the proper mandate of Head Start and other preschool programs.
The National Head Start Association is not the only naysayer. Its views of childhood are shared by many other groups that partake in what E. D. Hirsch terms the "naturalistic fallacy of developmentalism": the view that children ought not have their minds stretched by systematic adult efforts to fill them with skills and knowledge. This remains the dominant philosophy of early childhood educators in America. But it's contradicted by research, common sense, and the experience of other countries. It's also one of the biggest reasons that too many of our children enter school unprepared to learn and exit without having learned nearly enough. As the clamor mounts to create "universal" preschool opportunities, George W. Bush is right to insist that we stop wasting those we already have, especially those designed for the neediest children in our midst.
For more guidance on the issue of early childhood education, see pages 79-91 of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, by E.D. Hirsch, Doubleday, 1996. (Available through major book retailers.)
See also pages 37-40 of The Educated Child: A Parent's Guide from Preschool through Eighth Grade, by William J. Bennett, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and John T. E. Cribb, Jr., The Free Press, 1999. (Available through major book retailers.)
Two education experts squared off on the issue of early childhood education in the summer 2001 edition of Education Next. See "Do Preschoolers Need Academic Content?" by Grover Whitehurst (now assistant secretary of education for research and improvement) and "Early Childhood Education: Developmental or Academic" by Tufts University professor David Elkind.
"Bush Offers Plan to Improve Head Start's Teacher Training," by David E. Sanger, The New York Times, April 3, 2002
