Testing Expands to Kids in Head Start

The tests will be simple: preschoolers will probably be asked to identify letters, squares and triangles and count to 10.

The exam, to be instituted this year for about 500,000 children enrolled in Head Start programs throughout the country, represents the first time children as young as 4 years old will be tested on such a grand scale, education researchers said. But it is not being welcomed everywhere.

The Bush administration, in advocating the test, said the pre-kindergarten Head Start program should join the movement in K-12 grades to test youngsters’ academic skills as a way to assess schools’ competency. Head Start, a national child-care program that serves 850,000 low-income children up to 5 years of age, receives $6.7 billion in federal money and should not be exempt from such scrutiny, federal officials say.

“There’s no reason to panic about this,” said Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. “Let’s be clear. This is not going to be used as an entrance exam for kindergarten.”

However, the plan has been met with skepticism by some Head Start officials and early childhood experts who say 4- and 5-year-olds are developmentally too erratic to provide meaningful test results. Those educators say the test is being created too quickly and they fear being possibly penalized based on assessment practices they don’t endorse.

“It’s still very controversial to give validity to assessments for little children,” said Sarah M. Greene, president and CEO of the Head Start Assn., a nonprofit membership organization that advocates for 2,500 programs in the country. “Any given day they could be happy or sad. You don’t know how they’re going to perform.”

Early childhood learning experts said a successful assessment would have to be more labor-intensive than the federal plan allows and would need to take children’s social and ethnic backgrounds more into account.

Critics of the test also voiced worry that too much focus on math and reading will undermine the other objectives of Head Start, which was developed as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty to bring social, health and educational services to needy children and their families.

Federal officials disagreed, saying they are mandated to ensure preschoolers meet educational standards developed in the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start. According to those standards, such children should appreciate listening to books, recognize the importance of the alphabet and be able to hold simple conversations.

Unlike older children taking other standardized tests, Head Start youngsters will not have to do any writing. Instead, they’ll be asked to name or point out letters of the alphabet or count out loud, said Nicholas Zill of Westat, the Rockville, Md., company contracted for $1.8 million to develop the national assessment.

The test will likely last 20 to 25 minutes and will be performed on a one-on-one basis with children in their final year in the program, starting in the fall.

Federal officials said similar techniques were successfully used in a smaller national sample of 2,400 Head Start children conducted by Westat in the late 1990s.

If a Head Start program is found to be underperforming, its staff would receive additional training and technical assistance, Horn said. The program would be shut down only if all attempts to improve failed, he said.

“Is there someone on this planet who thinks we should continue to fund [such a] program?” Horn said.

Horn said the test results also can be used to develop individual education plans for children before they enter kindergarten but would not block entry to that grade.

The tests, he added, will not affect any other aspect of Head Start. As for cost, he said, $170 million previously earmarked for professional development will be used for the assessments.

In addition to the testing, Head Start faces other controversial proposals. The Bush administration wants Head Start to move from HHS to the U.S. Department of Education, a shift critics said will hurt its nonacademic programs. In addition, President Bush proposed that states be given more power to set Head Start standards for service; some educators expressed concern that Head Start could reduce services in some states.

Sarah Dennis, a veteran Head Start teacher at one of the 27 Kedren Community Health Center sites in Los Angeles County thinks her students will rise to the challenge of the test. But she’s also one of many employees who think the program is under enough scrutiny.

“Some kids can count to 20,” she said while overlooking a handful of preschoolers in her South-Central L.A. classroom recently. “I know because we have our own assessments.”

Every three years, the Kedren Community Health Center, like other agencies, is reviewed by the federal government and the California Department of Education to check such things as enrollment and spending. The Los Angeles County Office of Education, which allocates the Head Start money, also regularly monitors agencies.

“We’ve been here a long time and we’ve refined what we do,” said Donna Domroy, assistant director of the Kedren agency, which was opened in 1965, Head Start’s inaugural year. “The fact that someone is coming in trying to change things really scares us.”