The program works to serve the most at-risk children, including those who are disabled. The Battle Over Head Start: What the Research Shows. As a comprehensive child development program, Head Start provides. Does Head Start Fade Out? The Early Head Start program ensures that children with disabilities will not be excluded.
Ax Head Start: Ending Programs That Don't Yield Results. Illustration by Matt Dorfman for TIMEBarack Obama has been accused of . This is a curious charge: class warfare seems to be a one- way street in American politics. Over the past 3. 0 years, the superwealthy have waged far more effective warfare against the poor and the middle class, via their tools in Congress, than the other way around.
How else can one explain the fact that the oil companies, despite elephantine profits, are still subsidized by the federal government? How else can one explain the fact that hedge- fund managers pay lower tax rates than their file clerks? Or that farm subsidies originally meant for family farmers go to huge corporations that hardly need the help? Conservatives, like liberals, routinely take advantage of a structural flaw in the modern welfare state: there is no creative destruction when it comes to government programs.
Even the best- intentioned programs are allowed to languish in waste and incompetence. Take, for example, the famed early- education program called Head Start. You take the million or so poorest 3- and 4- year- old children and give them a leg up on socialization and education by providing preschool for them; if it works, it saves money in the long run by producing fewer criminals and welfare recipients — and more productive citizens. Indeed, Head Start did work well in several pilot programs carefully run by professionals in the 1.
We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, . Why do so many succeed as pilots and fail when taken to scale?
In this case, the answer is not particularly difficult to unravel. It begins with a question: Why is Head Start an HHS program and not run by the Department of Education?
Early Head StartEarly Head Start (EHS). How much does the program cost? Head Start/Early Head Start is free of charge. Government: Our “Head Start” Program Doesn’t Work. Andrew Coulson; December 26, 2012. The Head Start program is authorized by the Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007
Not only does Head Start have no impact on children. Yet Head Start continues to receive billions of. Head Start (program) This article may need to be rewritten entirely to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards. Head Start is the most successful, longest-running. Head Start is a federally-funded program that works directly with localities. 111 reviews from Head Start employees about Head Start. Head Start is an awesome program for low income. I loved my Head Start family and was very proud.
The answer: Because it is a last vestige of Johnson's War on Poverty, which was run out of the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The War on Poverty attempted to rebuild poor communities from the bottom up, using local agencies called community action programs. These outfits soon proved slovenly; often they were little more than patronage troughs for local Democratic Party honchos — and, remarkably, to this day, they remain the primary dispensers of Head Start funds.
As such, they are far more adept at dispensing make- work jobs than mastering the subtle nuances of early education. Happily, the Administration is taking steps to clean up the mess and channel money to the local programs that work most effectively, but a more complete overhaul will undoubtedly be needed.
There are those who argue that this is a fool's errand, that the federal government simply can't run an effective local education program. They are called conservatives, and they have a point. Then there are those who say that even if Head Start isn't working so well, at least it's funneling money to poor neighborhoods that need it. They are called liberals, and they have a point too. But we can no longer afford to be sloppy about dispensing cash — whether it's subsidies for oil companies or Head Start — to programs that do not produce a return.