Setting Back Head Start

Its chutzpah is the only thing admirable in the Bush administration’s efforts to alter Head Start, arguably the most popular legacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s war on poverty. The administration says its changes -- turning over program management to some states, requiring teachers to hold associate’s degrees and subjecting children to standardized tests -- would combat “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” However promising these reforms may sound in principle, they would be disastrous in practice.

LBJ and others in 1965 launched Head Start -- which offers health screenings, meals, social services and classes to about 103,000 preschoolers in California -- because states neglected poor kids.

Now, when states are in precarious financial shape, is hardly the time to dismantle the program’s federal management. The bill the administration backs, HR 2210 by Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), asks states to “preserve” Head Start but doesn’t financially commit them to it -- and states seem indisposed to do so on their own. California, for instance, recently told 1,700 providers of child care to poor families that they wouldn’t get paid after this week.

Castle’s ambition for new Head Start teachers to hold associate’s degrees in fields related to early childhood education also is impractical now, when public schools paying much higher wages can’t attract qualified teachers and community colleges are slashing classes for early childhood educators.

Most misguided is the administration’s rush to require all 3- and 4-year-olds in Head Start to take standardized tests. Testing for older kids is vital to ensure that students truly are learning. But Head Start programs already assess students three times a year, wisely requiring teachers to observe kids as they play naturally: looking at picture books, stacking blocks or just pretending. At this age, such observations are more “accurate and productive” than results from 30-minute forced, formal tests, say experts like Helga Lemke, the director of Sonoma County Head Start programs.

What, ultimately, will such exams show about this program, in which half the participants have parents making less than $12,000 a year? For poor kids, “Head Start is not eliminating the gap in educational skills and knowledge needed for school,” the federal Department of Health and Human Services concluded last month. But given the immensity of that gap, how could it? Many other studies show the program slashes the chances that poor kids will fall behind in school or become a burden on society. That’s a huge achievement, and the Bush steps do nothing to advance it.