NONFICTION - Oct. 25, 1992

HEAD START: The Inside Story of America’s Most Successful Educational Experiment by Edward Zigler and Susan Muenchow (Basic: $27.50; 274 pp.). “Head Start” was conceived not only in the colloquial sense of the term--affirmative action that lets disadvantaged kids begin life’s race a few moments early--but in the literal, Dr. Frankensteinian sense of “starting a head.” At the time of the program’s mid-1960s inception, you see, America was being dazzled not only by rocket science but also by social science: Keynesian economists could drive the nation’s economy like a Maserati, and psychologists like author Edward Zigler, a professor at Yale, could raise IQs by up to 15 points simply by feeding kids “the right environmental nutrients.”

Or so, at least, it was thought. As he points out in this lively book (co-authored with journalist and social worker Susan Muenchow), Zigler did his best to dispel such fallacies when one of L.B.J.’s Warriors on Poverty hired him to help manage what insiders had begun calling “Project Rush-Rush.” As Head Start became all the rage, however, the misinformation only spread. At a White House tea to launch the program, for instance, an emotional Lady Bird Johnson lamented that “young children . . . lost in a grey world of poverty and neglect . . . don’t even know their own names.” (“Five-year-old children,” Zigler sniffs, “would have to be severely retarded indeed not to know their own names.”)

Zigler’s explanation of Head Start’s real aims will shock those more privileged among us who think that giving kids a head start means letting them learn algebra or Microsoft Word in elementary school: “Today in many Head Start classrooms in Lee County, Alabama, the most striking feature is a four-foot model of a tube of toothpaste suspended from the ceiling. Class time is set aside for kids to brush teeth. This is a serious effort to give children a ‘head start’ on reaching adulthood with a full set of teeth.”

But while Head Start may not have worked social or scientific miracles, it does offer a deeply reassuring reminder that Democrats and Republicans can cooperate, as well as a sharp rebuke to those who think that enterprise zones and home ownership will be enough to counteract poverty. “It is clear that successful programs of this type must be comprehensive,” the authors write, “involving activities generally associated with the fields of health, social services, and education.”