The Outstater
‘Head Start Never Worked’
CAN A FAILED PROGRAM uphold a billion-dollar budget for decades? Yes, if it is run by the government and promises the impossible in the name of beautiful, vulnerable children.
That in a sentence is Head Start, the federal program created in 1965 with a pledge to provide school readiness for low-income children from birth to age five. That has not been realized. Rather, the program has stood in opposition to more effective self-help programs for single mothers and troubled families.
“Federal mandates do not allow Head Start to adapt to provide parental counseling, an example of the unwillingness of liberals to strengthen the agency of the needy,” writes Robert Cherry, author of the upcoming “The State of the Black Family.” “They refused to support President Bill Clinton’s Welfare-to-Work initiatives that set in motion effective dynamics that transformed the lives for the better of poor single mothers”
I first came in contact with the program as a member of the board of my former church. We were asked to approve a Head Start school in the church building. The experience went downhill from there.
The Head Start representative, a proverbial expert from out of town, began the meeting by offering to not only pay the church rent but drop in a top-of-the-line playground, a security fence and provide free lawn care and snow removal. Out pastor was all in, snow removal being a particular headache for him.
There was one condition: Jesus Christ could not be mentioned in the church during the hours that Head Start was in operation.
To my astonishment, the pastor and several board members voiced agreement. Those of us opposed stated what we thought was the obvious, that is, Christ was the reason for the church building and all that went on there 24 hours a day.
Anyway, we lost the vote. The Head Start executive dismissed my more narrow policy arguments on efficacy with, “You just don’t like government.” That was true, I had to admit. But I also knew a little about Head Start.
For starters, I knew that its $12-billion annual budget was built on the premise of the “blank slate,” that is, all human beings are the product solely of their environment, their upbringing. It denies that human minds are far from blank, that genes and evolutionary history cannot be ignored on command.
In regard to Head Start, this has been known for at least 16 years. That was when a randomized, controlled trial showed that any early gains in school readiness among enrollees had faded by the end of first grade and were absent by third grade. The results were published without refutation by the Department of Health and Human Services. Subsequent attempts to discredit this “fadeout” effect have arguably failed or only muddied the issue with supposed social-leveling claims.
Most recently, the social researcher Heather Mac Donald wrote a blistering critique of Head Start for the Manhattan Institute, “Head Start Never Worked.” She notes that even if the program is the “best” of its type (because it fails less than similar programs, as the New York Times currently tries to argue) its costs are indefensible in relation to its results — $20,000 per child for infants, toddlers and pregnant mothers, and $15,000 per each pre-K student.
Mac Donald proposes an alternative — the nuclear family. “There is nothing that government social-uplift programs purport to accomplish that cannot be done better by parents,” she says. “Civil society must figure out a way to reknit the two-parent family, however daunting that task may be.”
The place to start is with society-wide acknowledgment that both mothers and fathers are crucially important to children, plus hands-on, practical guidance on raising children and strengthening the home and family — not lavishly funding government as a surrogate parent.
But some, alas, will choose free snow removal instead. — tcl
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