COLUMN ONE : A ‘Great Society’ Survivor : Head Start has been embraced by liberals and conservatives as other programs got the ax. Though widely copied, its long-term benefits remain a question mark.

When 4-year-old Matthew Towler trudges to St. Jerome’s Head Start Center these days to learn skills and self-confidence, his mother comes along--for much the same purpose.

A school dropout and not long ago an abused woman, Shara Towler goes to St. Jerome’s to learn child-care skills and study for a high school diploma. She’s also active on the governing board of the center, which is tucked into the row house-lined lanes of southwest Baltimore.

“They’ve helped my son,” said Towler, 21, “and they’ve given me back my self-esteem.”

Head Start’s assistance to parents is an essential ingredient in a 26-year-old effort that has outlived a host of less durable Great Society experiments to become America’s most popular social welfare program. Offering instruction, meals and medical care to disadvantaged youngsters, Head Start has become a political icon--exalted by liberals, embraced by many conservatives and treasured by the communities it serves.

“It’s a program people love to love,” said Douglas J. Besharov, a policy analyst at American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank.

It exerts an enormous influence. With many social problems worsening, Head Start’s efforts to help poor kids beat the effects of poverty increasingly are being studied and imitated by those who wish to duplicate the rare success of a government social program.

Its focus on early childhood services is repeated in new programs with names such as Healthy Start, Even Start and Follow Through. In California last March, Gov. Pete Wilson called for new programs built on the tenet that it is better to help low-income children when they are very young than to try to deal with them later, when their habits are ingrained.

One of the greatest sources of Head Start’s strength is its mission. It serves the most lovable segment of the poor--children--and aims to help them grow up self-confident and independent. The formula appeals even to conservatives, who are wary of most welfare schemes, and it has ensured that even through the past decade of Republican administrations, its federal allocation has risen 159%, to $1.9 billion.

Perhaps as a result of this support, Head Start has been the ultimate survivor, the only one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs--besides Medicare and Medicaid--to come through the Ronald Reagan years intact. Even President Bush, who has said the country must move beyond the Great Society and become a “Good Society,” has proposed three successive years of budget increases for Head Start.

Indeed, support has been so broad that there is relatively little public discussion of the shortcomings and frustrations of Head Start: Its long-term benefits have not been proved, the program’s quality is not consistent from center to center, and efforts to extend its benefits into the school years only now are beginning to take hold.

Studies have shown that in the years immediately after Head Start participation, children are more confident and socially skilled and less likely to end up in special-education classes. They are healthier, score higher on cognitive tests and even show slightly higher IQs--by an average of about 8 to 10 points, researchers say.

Fading Advantages

Contrary to some claims for the program, however, these gains disappear two or three years after Head Start. A 1985 analysis of 210 studies of Head Start children found no evidence that Head Start kids over the long term would achieve more or be better adjusted than others of similar background.

“The benefits wash out,” said Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute. “How could you expect otherwise, when these kids live in terrible situations and usually go to Head Start three or four hours a day, for nine months?”

Advocates see three key elements in Head Start: It has a comprehensive approach to helping youngsters, structure that ensures parental involvement and ties to community groups that help the program win grass-roots acceptance.

Analysts contrast it with federal job-training programs that failed because they offered instruction in skills but didn’t take account of the other things the poor need to join the work force, such as self-confidence, job-hunting know-how, transportation and child care. Head Start’s goal is to make sure that 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds are healthy, motivated and socially competent--and also that they live in happy, functional families.

Child psychologists theorize that Head Start may owe its effectiveness to the help it gives parents through its panoply of programs, because this enables them to contribute more to their children. “It may be the real secret is the change brought about in parents,” said Edward F. Zigler, a Yale University psychologist and early Head Start administrator who is sometimes called the father of the program.

Wade Horn, who, as commissioner of the U.S. Administration for Children, Youth and Families is Head Start’s top official, says, “We’re not child-savers; we’re parent-empowerers.”

A Mother’s Gifts

The Towlers’ experience shows how this can work.

A single mother of two, Shara Towler learned about Head Start at a time when she was trying to deal with feelings of isolation and depression and struggling with an abusive boyfriend whom a judge eventually ordered from her house. She was first drawn to Head Start, like many mothers, because it was, in effect, free part-time baby-sitting for Matthew.

Head Start doesn’t teach academic skills, but emphasizes development of motor abilities and social skills, such as getting along with others, sharing and following rules. One goal is to give children the positive attitude toward learning and school that many middle-class youngsters absorb at home.

The St. Jerome’s Head Start Center is in a graceful, Romanesque-style Catholic Church, but the neighborhood is arguably Baltimore’s poorest, and it is tough. Drug dealers loiter around the corner under a chestnut tree. Not long ago, a Head Start child brought a syringe to class.

Matthew Towler took to Head Start right away. His mother thinks it has made him easier for her to control. “He loves it,” Shara Towler said. “He was a real hyper child; this is a real change.”

Head Start has also brought change in her life by giving her real responsibility as a member of the center’s board. Under federal rules, parents hold at least 51% of the votes on these boards, so they have the power to hire and fire personnel, oversee the curriculum and approve budgets.

This isn’t just show: Two years ago, the Head Start board of neighboring Baltimore County shut down its program in a dispute with administrators over who held ultimate control.

Head Start has helped the Towlers with the kind of family crises that are chronic in their troubled neighborhood. Recently, when somebody stole cash from Shara Towler’s purse, Mary W. Gunning, director of the St. Jerome’s center, helped her find a government agency that could help pay her bills in such an emergency.

Towler has accepted help, but she has also given it. Earlier this month, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke gave her an award for her contribution to the program.

Counseling Offered

Head Start tries to involve parents in diverse programs. In Baltimore’s centers there are available, among other offerings, psychological help, drug-abuse counseling and counseling for abused women, literacy programs, job training and “crisis nurseries” for families that need emergency child care. Part of the goal is, ultimately, to get parents involved in other community and school groups.

Head Start itself functions as a sort of inner-city jobs program by employing parents of Head Start kids. About 38% of Head Start’s 80,000 paid staff positions are filled by parents; most of the 600,000 Head Start volunteers are also parents.

Of course, the problems that afflict inner-city families are deeply rooted. A Head Start center may end up helping a family again and again, over many years.

Melvina Johnson, 35, brought her daughter, Monique, to Baltimore’s Cold Spring Head Start Center when both she and Monique needed help. Johnson had a master’s degree in biochemistry but was on welfare because her weight problem hurt her confidence and kept her from getting a job, she says.

“I was a very aggressive, demanding mother,” Johnson said, and Monique was an assertive child. “You could even say--I’m being frank--she was a bully,” her mother said.

Head Start helped Monique learn to get along better with others and taught Melvina Johnson simple ways to control her daughter, such as taking away a favorite toy when Monique misbehaved.

Melvina Johnson became an official of the program, then, feeling better about herself, got a job with the Maryland state employment agency. But three years ago, Melvina began to again feel overwhelmed.

She began abusing Monique, she says. When her parents discovered what was happening and came one day to take Monique away, “I said, go ahead, take her, I don’t care.” Later, it was through the Head Start center that Melvina Johnson got the psychological counseling that helped her regain legal custody of Monique.

And how much good does Head Start do for a child? Some children are clearly more receptive than others.

Yvonne Smith, 18, has only warm memories of Head Start. She remembers it as a a place where she learned to live successfully with others, and where teachers gave her a cake and a party for her birthday. The experience seems to have helped her develop the kind of attitude the program is designed to foster, for she’s now a “B” high school student, likes biology and writing poetry and thinks she might become a journalist after college.

“I really like school,” she says.

Her twin brother, Juan, also went to Head Start, but he dropped out of school two years ago. “I just didn’t like the people,” he said. “They all seemed brainwashed.”

Two years ago, Juan was arrested on charges of assault and breaking-and-entering. He has stayed out of trouble since, he says, but spends his time just hanging around and working at odd jobs painting houses or paving driveways.

“I really don’t know what I’m going to do next,” he said.

The fact that Head Start’s benefits haven’t been long-lasting for Juan--or, apparently, for many other Head Start pupils--is troubling to some administrators. Horn says he is frustrated that more public schools haven’t tried to maintain the program’s benefits by offering medical screening, nutritional aid and parental involvement. Head Start is an “inoculation,” but kids need “booster shots” through the school years, he says.

“My view is that the educational system is screwing things up,” Horn said.

After years of such complaints, some states and localities have begun moving to offer these services in the schools.

Last week, the California Senate passed a $20-million bill, sponsored by Wilson, to give localities grants to draw up plans for offering social services through the schools to both parents and children. Efforts to do this are already under way in San Diego and Sacramento schools.

The critics who have lamented the short life of Head Start’s benefits are also unhappy that local programs are not consistent in quality.

Control Is Local

Some attribute this to the autonomy given Head Start programs, which is so essential to its support from community groups and political conservatives.

Others blame the unevenness on the low salaries paid to the teachers, nutritionists, psychologists and social workers on Head Start staffs. A 1988 study found that 47% of Head Start teachers were earning $10,000 a year or less; salaries averaged $12,000 to $18,000.

According to the critics, low pay drives away more highly trained staffers and causes a high turnover rate that hurts the children.

Zigler, a Yale professor and former Head Start administrator, recalled a Head Start classroom in New Haven where an inexperienced teacher became so frazzled that she lined up the children in her class and had them repeat, one after the other, “I am bad.”

“That’s about the worst thing you could do to these kids,” he said.

New Haven’s program has been cited as an example of how Head Start can run into administrative difficulties.

Federal officials abruptly changed the program’s sponsoring agency in the summer of 1989, after it was discovered that the city office running it had allowed enrollment to slump, didn’t have the required parent involvement and wasn’t giving required medical tests--though the agency officials claimed they were.

Kenton Williams, a Boston regional Head Start official, says the problems may have been going on for five or six years. “We were gullible for a long time,” he said.

Horn maintains that such failures are rare. He noted that only about a dozen of some 1,300 programs have their funds canceled each year. He thinks local autonomy is worth the risk, to encourage experimentation and because “sitting here in Washington, I don’t know what’s best for people in Idaho, or Newark.”

Federal officials keep an eye on local programs by requiring agencies to describe their curriculum each year. Every third year, federal officials visit classrooms.

Although Zigler insists he remains the Head Start program’s biggest fan, he asserts that problems such as those in New Haven “aren’t all that rare. . . . Quality control has been a problem with Head Start from the beginning.”

Still, at a time when inner-city children are coming to school poorer, hungrier and emotionally more troubled, the debate in Washington is over how to expand Head Start, rather than whether to cut it back.

For the fiscal year that will begin Oct. 1, the Administration has proposed increasing enrollment by 30,000 to 633,000 and enlarging the program’s budget to $2.05 billion. Congressional Democrats, led by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), want to make Head Start an entitlement for all poor children, which would cost $7.6 billion in 1993 and perhaps triple its enrollment.

The Democrats’ plan may be a long shot, but with both parties vying for close identification with the program, Head Start’s future seems bright.

“The politicians have enjoyed adding kids to the program, and it looks like they’ll keep doing it,” analyst Besharov said.

The Head Start Program: From Rags to Riches?

Federal funding for the Head Start program (In millions of U.S. dollars). ‘65: $96 ‘70: $325 ‘75: $403 ‘80: $735 ‘85: $1.100 ‘90: $1.400 ‘91: $1.900 ‘92*: $2.050 * Administration proposal. Source: Administration for Children, Youth and Families

Children in the Head Start Program (For the 1990 fiscal year). BY RACE Asian: 3% American Indian: 4% Hispanic: 22% White: 33% Black: 38% BY AGE Under age 3: 3% 5-year olds: 8% 3-year olds: 25% 4-year olds: 64% Source: The Report of The Silver Ribbon Panel .