April 2011
Supporting failed programs is moral vanity.
My
friend E. J. Dionne Jr., a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, is
a fine man with, I feel safe in asserting, a warm heart. But he betrays in a
recent column a persistent failing of the Left — imperviousness to evidence.
Describing Speaker Boehner’s tactics in the budget fights with Democrats, Dionne
wrote:
Begin with the outrageous $1.1 billion, 15 percent cut from Head Start, a
program that offers preschool education to roughly 965,000 poor children.
According to the Center for Law and Public Policy, this would knock 218,000 kids
out of Head Start and force 16,000 classrooms to close. That is an excellent way
to lose the future, as Obama ought to be saying. What could be a better use of
public money than helping our poorest children early in life so they might
achieve more in school, and later?
Like
most liberals, Dionne is enchanted with the idea of Head Start — the romance of
a government program that would provide care, nutrition, education, and skills
to impoverished preschoolers in order to erase, to the degree possible, the
handicaps poverty imposes. That was the idea in 1965, when Head Start was
founded. Lyndon Johnson, upon signing the enabling bill, declared, “Today we
reach out to five and half million children held behind their more fortunate
schoolmates by the dragging anchor of poverty.” Head Start, he promised, would
be their “passport” out.
It
would have been worth the $166 billion taxpayers have spent on the program since
1965 if a significant portion of Head Start alumni did improve their educational
outcomes and escape poverty. But that did not happen.
As
any number of studies have demonstrated over the years, the effects of Head
Start are modest to nugatory. Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom chronicled the
failure in No Excuses. One study found that Head Start students were
slightly more likely to be immunized than others — a good thing of course, but
a) not primarily what the program was sold as, and b) achievable far more
cheaply through other programs like Medicaid. A 1969 study found that any gains
participants displayed faded away in the early grades. By third grade, Head
Start graduates were indistinguishable from their non-participating classmates.
Rather than scrap the program, President Nixon (a sheep in wolf’s clothing where
domestic policy was concerned) concluded that “Head Start must begin earlier in
life, and last longer, to achieve lasting benefits.”
Later surveys showed similarly dismal
results. By 1987, even the program’s founder, Yale psychologist Edward F. Zigler,
declined to claim educational benefits for the program. But as the Thernstroms
concluded, “Everyone could agree that poverty was hard on blameless children, so
any federal effort purporting to help them was difficult to attack without
seeming mean-spirited.”
That
remains true, as witness Mr. Dionne.
A
just-released study by the Department of Health and Human Services delivers
incredibly harsh news about Head Start. A large, nationwide survey of 4,600
preschoolers who were randomly assigned to either Head Start (experimental
group) or no program (control group) were studied on 114 different measures
ranging from academic skills to social/emotional development to health status.
The study found no statistically relevant effects from the Head Start program by
the end of first grade.
If a
study falls in the forest and the major news organizations fail to report it,
does it make a sound? Hardly a whimper. A few conservative websites like
Heritage, Cato, and the Independent Women’s Forum noted the results, but
elsewhere all was silence. Or, not silence actually; complete denial. President
Obama had boosted funding for Head Start from $6.8 billion in 2008 to $9.2
billion in 2009. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius and
Education Secretary Arne Duncan support even greater “investments” in the failed
program in the future. Study? What study?
According to Douglas Besharov of the University of Maryland, it costs $22,600
annually to keep a child in a year-round Head Start program. Typical preschools
run about $9,500. But the price simply doesn’t matter. The lack of results
doesn’t matter. The only thing that seems to matter is that liberals be able to
preen about their compassion — oh yes, and condemn anyone not impervious to
evidence as heartless.
Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 Creators Syndicate.
National Review on Line, March 8, 2011.
First Comment:
If we put the billions we’ve poured into Head Start into state voucher programs for low-income kids, how many more kids do you think would have been able to break the cycle of poverty? Who is really compassionate here?
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