No Longer A Sacred Cow

What’s really going on here? Politics as usual. Both Head Start’s critics and advocates say that Bill Clinton’s victory changed the rules of the game. Head Start’s problems haven’t been a secret; indeed, several important government and private studies in the past 15 years have called for reforms. But during the Bush-Reagan years, when the White House’s goal was to limit all forms of government intervention, the program’s supporters kept quiet rather than jeopardize the strongest survivor of the Great Society. With Clinton, a longtime Head Start supporter, in the Oval Office “it’s safe to criticize,” says Helen Blank of the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group Hillary Rodham Clinton once chaired.

Conservatives have another agenda. “I think the Head Start debate is very definitely a microcosm of a larger debate about the merits of government activism,” says John Hood, research director of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina think tank. Proving that Head Start, the most beloved of antipoverty programs, doesn’t work could help end all such government efforts. Head Start, Hood says, is a “test case.”

Both sides agree that Head Start has some serious problems, among them uneven quality, not enough emphasis on management skills and poor staff salaries. Studies have also shown that many of Head Start’s effects fade after several years if children don’t get enrichment programs in elementary school. (Several cities and colleges have run experimental programs extending the Head Start approach into the primary grades.) Clinton has vowed to provide Head Start to all eligible children; at present, only about half are served. But the federal study, from the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Health and Human Services, indicates that expanding Head Start will be difficult because of poor management of many local programs.

Many longtime Head Start backers also worry about rapid growth without quality control. Already, they say, Head Start is disappointing those who view it as a cure-all. In his new book, “Head Start and Beyond,” Yale’s Zigler stresses the need for an objective evaluation of what Head Start can and cannot do. Although there’s lots of research that shows that high-quality early intervention helps, “many people have read too much into this literature,” Zigler says, “to the point that they view preschool education in general, and Head Start in particular, as the definitive solution to major national problems in education, business, and the social structure.” Head Start usually is a yearlong program that stresses social development and tries to get poor kids ready for kindergarten. It was never meant to be an inoculation against all future problems, Zigler says. “It would be like telling a parent, ‘If you’re a terrific parent for one year, you never have to do it anymore’.”

But conservatives contend that during the Reagan-Bush years, some Head Start supporters consciously tried to save the program by overselling it. “The left has basically lied about it for years,” says Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank. “It’s scarcely the program on which we should be pinning the fate of Western civilization.” Last December Hood wrote a controversial paper for Washington’s conservative Cato Institute titled “Caveat Emptor: The Head Start Scam,” in which he suggested that Head Start be disbanded altogether because its claims of success have been so wildly exaggerated. Instead of funding Head Start, he says, the government should give poor parents vouchers to use for any early-childhood program they want.

There are some signs that the debate may be producing light as well as heat. In his State of the Union address, Clinton called Head Start “a success story” and repeated an oftenquoted but unfounded line from the old Head Start liturgy: “For every dollar we invest today, we’ll save $3 tomorrow.” Those figures are largely based on old studies of other preschool programs, not Head Start, and many experts question their accuracy. A few weeks later, in a speech before the Children’s Defense Fund, Clinton, while still a big Head Start fan, was more circumspect. He acknowledged that Head Start needed reform and urged his audience to speak up: “We must become our own most severe critics.”

Head Start’s budget is $2.8 billion, and Clinton is expected to include $1.3 billion more next year. Politicians want to justify that kind of spending by putting more kids into classrooms. “No one wants to go into a presidential campaign saying, ‘I doubled the salaries of Head Start teachers’,” says Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “They want to say, ‘I doubled the number of children in Head Start’.” They can say what they want, but in the end the children are too smart to be fooled.

PHOTO: Does it work? A Head Start teacher and kids in New York City (E. LEE WHITE)

Subject Terms: HEAD Start programs