Essay: Head Start - 11/19/07

What was then called Operation Head Start was started as an experimental eight-week summer program in 1965. It was seen at first as a small battlefield in President Lyndon Johnson’s great War on Poverty. We knew, even then, that by the time a disadvantaged child reaches school, it is often too late.

So someone had the idea of reaching out to preschool children from low-income homes. Head Start would seek to touch these kids on every level. It would try and make sure they were fed and stimulated and felt cared about. It was popular right from the start.

So much so that succeeding administrations, many not at all friendly to anti-poverty programs, found it impossible to kill Head Start, which has now reached more than 22 million children.

What it does is help kids who don’t get the kind of help at home that kids with educated, middle-class parents often do. It gives them a head start not only academically, but socially and emotionally.

I learned how important this was when I bumped into a class of tiny Head Start students touring Detroit’s Heidelberg project. I chatted with them, for some reason, about horses. Some of them knew what a horse was, but my impression was that most did not.

They were all about four. The night before, Nora, my goddaughter, also four, had quizzed me about different types of horses, and been highly annoyed that I didn’t know enough about the breed of horses in her favorite movie. I also had learned that many children in Detroit start kindergarten not knowing their primary colors.

I asked Nora what color a wall hanging was. I would have called it purple. “It’s not purple,” she said. “It’s mauve.” It’s not that Nora is not a child prodigy. The difference is her parents.

They read to her, and she went to preschool. Head Start now enjoys widespread bipartisan support. House Minority Leader John Boehner is a staunch Bush conservative from Ohio. But he strongly supported the Head Start bill. “For low-income children, having some kind of early-childhood development is critically important,” he noted.

In the end, Head Start passed almost unanimously. Tim Walberg was the only Michigan congressman to vote against it. I like that this bill puts new focus on concentrating on disadvantaged children right from birth. If a child’s mind and emotional needs are neglected, even age three is often too late.

Head Start, by the way, is commonly seen as one of the few successes to come out of the War on Poverty. The conventional wisdom, or what you hear on Fox TV, is that it was a disastrous failure that wasted money and swelled the bureaucracy.

But consider this: The national poverty level was 19 percent when the war on poverty was launched.

Ten years later, it was down to 11 percent. Maybe, just maybe we should take the blinders off and look what else might have been done right, back when we believed that we as a nation could do better.

Hear Audio Story   

Comments

[Any Salyer]

Thanks. I have been so upset at hearing that the war against poverty was a failure because all poverty didn't fail to exist. Nonsense!

[Anonymous]

For the record, let me say that based upon my own anecdotal knowledge of Head Start (my mother was one of the first Head Start teachers and administrators in the 1960's and 70's), it is one of those programs that produced benefits that far outweighed its costs. It was, in a word, that strangest of all phenomena; a government program that mostly worked. But for persons who remember that early Head Start program, it bore some notable differences to today's public education atmosphere.
First, I don't remember any powerful Head Start teachers' unions. Were ANY Head Start teachers unionized? Second, I don't remember much in the way of any federally-mandated Head Start curriculum. The genius of the early Head Start program was that it was a modest program, which simply provided block-grant-type funding to hire teachers and open centers at market rates. And it worked.
There is a story, that I can only hope to accurately paraphrase, about R. Sargent Shriver's desire to get the Head Start program off the ground. He was apparently trying to strategize with his brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy, and his boss, President Lyndon Johnson, about how to get the program through Congress. They were talking about making the program very modest in the initial proposal. Shriver's statement was something like, "I just need to get any amount of funding to get it started. After that, no one would ever dare to kill the program. We'll worry about more and bigger funding later on."
I guess he was right.