Beef Up Head Start’s ABCs

R eady. Set. Go . In a race of 4-year-olds, most head straight for the finish line. And if a few plod or run in circles or veer off after a butterfly, so what, right?

Right, if we’re talking about playtime. But some races are serious, even for young children. That’s why President Bush is correct in insisting that Head Start, the federally funded preschool, offer a little less play and a little more reading.

The shift to more structured learning will require a philosophical change at some centers. When the first Head Start preschool opened in 1965, as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the idea was to prepare poor children for kindergarten by providing nutrition, dentistry, health care and basic socialization skills.

Most programs encouraged children to be free and learn at their own pace, which suited the program well since the pay was so low that one in three “teachers” were really parents with little training.

Today, however, preparing to read is as important as knowing how to brush your teeth, and the building blocks of reading should figure as prominently as dental care, nutrition and immunizations. Poor children who may not have been bathed in bedtime stories since infancy, whose homes may not be rich in books, stories and great conversations, need that exposure.

The best Head Start programs already provide it. Federal policy should require all to emphasize it. The Bush administration wants to train preschool teachers and has requested $75 million for that purpose in the education bill now before a conference committee in Congress. That’s good.

The White House is also correct in moving Head Start from the Department of Health and Human Services, which knows about nutrition and vaccinations, to the federal Department of Education, which presumably knows how to inoculate low-income preschoolers against the national epidemic of reading failure.

The gap between those who read well and those who don’t is widening in elementary schools, and it’s mainly poor children falling behind. To compete in this serious race they need coaching. They need a really good Head Start.