Head Start’s Fresh Start

If Donald, Phelicia, Terranique and the other preschool children sprawling on the floor of an aging Head Start classroom here are to have a brighter future than their parents, much depends on Jennifer Armstrong, the tall young woman holding aloft a defective jigsaw puzzle.

“What’s wrong with this puzzle?” she asks her charges at the Lower North Child Development Center, located in the heart of the desolate Cabrini-Green public housing projects.

Donald and others answer that one of the pieces is missing. “Right,” Armstrong replies, careful to add, “You’re so brilliant.”

Modest as this little exercise may seem, it is part of a nationwide effort to supply a piece that has often been missing from Head Start: a well-designed program for developing the skills that toddlers from poor families need to succeed in school.

Historically, Head Start has emphasized development of social skills and parental involvement, as well as medical, nutritional and family support services.

Prodded by Congress and the Clinton administration, Head Start centers around the country are engaged in an embryonic but critical effort to bolster the educational component of their programs. It is potentially the most far-reaching change in Head Start since it was created as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Armstrong is an example of what is changing: Armed with a master’s degree in speech pathology and a new curriculum field-tested on Head Start children in the Chicago area, she rotates through Lower North’s classrooms conducting drills designed to strengthen the perceptual, verbal and other skills needed for later mastery of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Children Who Start Behind Often Are Left Behind

The stakes are high. Research shows that poor children generally begin school far behind their more affluent peers in vocabulary and other vital skills. And the academic problems that become crippling by high school usually have their roots in the preschool and primary grade years.

In today’s information-based economy, finishing high school with strong basic skills is the minimum required for a good job. Union factory work and other such jobs that once provided security for workers with minimal formal education are disappearing.

Yet the push to strengthen what has historically been a weak link in Head Start faces enormous obstacles. Money is scarce. Well-qualified teachers are hard to recruit. And Head Start, which is funded by the federal government but operated by community agencies, has a tradition of local autonomy that can make reform a slow, piecemeal process.

An even bigger obstacle is the world in which many Head Start children live--an atmosphere of gangs, drugs, violence, splintered families and other elements of modern-day poverty--which can disrupt a classroom.

Not long after Armstrong finished on a recent morning, for example, and the children began to eat lunch, Donald’s face gradually clouded over. Suddenly he leaped up and attacked a boy at a nearby table with startling fury. Flashes of temper are not uncommon in preschool children but the level of rage in this case went far beyond a routine behavioral problem.

Head teacher Clementine Al-Jaloudi quickly pulled the angry child aside. “What’s wrong, Donald?” she asked, holding him close and repeating the question when he did not answer.

“If you won’t talk to me, I can’t help you,” Al-Jaloudi said. “But there’s no violence here. This is a violence-free zone.”

Gradually, Donald relaxed.

“We spend a lot of time just helping children relieve anger,” said Pamela Flowers Thomas, director of Head Start in Lower North. “What we have on the lesson plan may not happen. Something may have happened in the community--a shooting--and we’ll spend half our time calming the kids down, soothing them.”

Still, Washington has begun pressing Head Start to put greater emphasis on education. “Congress is redefining Head Start more clearly as a school readiness program,” says Kevin Hannaway of the Chicago Department of Human Services, which oversees Head Start programs serving 14,000 children.

“If we don’t change, we will become a dinosaur,” says Ruby Smith, Hannaway’s boss.

To help spur change, Congress has increased federal funding to $4.5 billion a year, triple what it was in 1990. In California, the largest program with 10% of the nation’s Head Start students, the federal government last year provided $528 million to Head Start programs serving more than 86,000 children--about 25,000 of them in Los Angeles County. The state’s funding is rising by about 5% this year. And officials all over the state are examining their programs, looking for ways to respond to the mandate for more explicit emphasis on educational skills.

“There is a greater focus [on education] now,” says Norma Johnson, president of the California Head Start Assn. and director of Head Start for Sacramento County. “We are revising our curriculum to include more focus on literacy and numeracy.”

In Los Angeles County, most Head Start programs operate under the county Office of Education, and the new emphasis on academic standards “falls perfectly into alignment with where the state of California is going” in establishing standards for kindergarten through high school, said Andrew Kennedy, who heads the county’s preschool division.

In the past, when Congress raised Head Start’s budget, it usually preferred that the increase, or “new” money, be spent for expansion, since Head Start still serves only 40% of eligible children nationwide--830,000 youngsters in 16,000 centers.

But last year, Congress asked the programs to put top priority on improving educational quality. Most Head Start programs have used the extra dollars to raise teacher salaries, which lag so far behind public schools in most places that well-trained teachers are hard to get or keep.

Congress has also established higher minimum training requirements for Head Start teachers, to be phased in over several years. Today, most Head Start teachers do not have bachelor’s degrees. Many have associate degrees earned after two years of college; others have certificates awarded by Head Start itself on the basis of classroom experience and some college work.

Even in the best private preschools, preparing 3- and 4-year-old children to do well in first grade and beyond is a subtle and demanding process. It requires skilled teachers, a curriculum attuned to how children learn and attention to individuals’ differing needs.

Nina Dunas, for instance, found that many of her students at the El Valor Head Start program, which serves a predominantly Latino population on Chicago’s South Side, had proudly learned to count from 1 to 5 or even 10.

But when Dunas asked the children to show her three objects or five objects, many could not do it. They had learned the series of words--”row counting,” she calls it--but they did not understand the underlying concept.

Helping parents is also important if Head Start is to succeed academically. School reform experts are nearly unanimous in saying that greater parental support is especially vital to improving the academic performance of disadvantaged children.

At El Valor--where urban blight has replaced the steel mills, foundries and factories of an earlier manufacturing age--one young father, for example, had trouble getting his 4-year-old daughter to class on time for breakfast.

Clara Lopez, who directs the El Valor center, found out the father was working a night shift in a restaurant kitchen, trying to raise his daughter alone after her mother deserted them.

“We found that if we gave him a call in the morning, it helped,” Lopez said. “He’s a young father trying very hard to be a good father.”

El Valor is part of the Reyes Gonzalez Family Life Center, a brand-new facility that typifies the shift away from traditional church basement programs toward larger institutions that can bring more services together.

By next year, for instance, Lopez expects to have at least one area college providing classes at the center itself. That will make it easier for teachers and parents to pursue additional education and provide new ties to the community.

“It’s different now, and people have to see Head Start in a different way, putting child care almost in the same category as public school,” Lopez says. “Now we are preparing them cognitively and socially. Before it was just socially.”

Helping Parents to Help Their Children

The Effie Ellis Head Start center, a model facility on Chicago’s West Side, reflects the attention to educational quality that Congress is seeking to encourage--and El Valor is trying to emulate.

Head teachers in the Effie Ellis classrooms have master’s degrees; many assistants have bachelor’s degrees. Classrooms are filled with books, educational toys and other equipment.

At night, to help working parents, Ellis offers them such things as computer training, “boot camp math,” a lending library stocked with $10,000 worth of books, and assistance with drug and other personal problems.

To help its young graduates make the transition to regular school, Ellis has also established contact for the first time with the kindergarten teacher at the nearby elementary school to discuss ways to make the two curricula fit together, as well as the strengths and needs of students who will be moving up.

In Head Start programs that operate as part of a public school system, such coordination is often routine. Most Head Start programs are run by other local government and community agencies, however, and the gulf separating them from public schools is sometimes wide.

Like many preschools in affluent areas, the Ellis program uses computer games, fairy tales, art projects and play to build basic preschool skills--the ability to follow directions, work with others, express oneself in words and grasp the sounds and patterns of language.

By year’s end, teachers and parents say, most children have learned the alphabet and can read their own names--small but significant signs of reading readiness.

How all this can come together is illustrated by a girl in a pale blue dress named Nykeseia. One recent day, she was sitting in a big rocking chair beside the dollhouse, nestled in the lap of head teacher Grace Munson.

Munson was carefully transcribing a story Nykeseia dictated, a technique widely used in good preschools to promote language skills.

Nykeseia’s mother, Kenya Williams, describes herself as a recovering heroin addict who works part time. “I’ve been clean for five years . . . and I’m just determined to teach my children the things I wasn’t taught that led me down the path,” she said.

As Nykeseia talked, Munson did not coach or instruct her in any formal sense. Her goal was to encourage the little girl to use words to describe her life--the kind of technique other Head Start programs are being encouraged to adopt.

“Mama, you bought a big Christmas tree and then you put up the decorations,” Nykeseia dictated.

“My mama wants another job--so she can get some money. . . .

“Said she’d teach me to write my name.”