When my friend Al Smith wrote an opinion piece in the Herald-Leader, calling on Governor Beshear to fund pre-K programs in Kentucky, I got curious: How well have pre-K programs worked? The most familiar and longest running pre-K program is Head Start.
It began in 1965 as part of President Johnson’s war on poverty. Based on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) 2010 final report, “Head Start has the ambitious mandate of improving educational and developmental outcomes for children from economically disadvantaged families. Head Start’s mandate requires that it meet the needs of the whole child, including the cognitive, social-emotional and health needs of children, and positively influence the parenting practices of their parents. This study examined the impacts of Head Start on these four domains.”
Roughly 900,000 children are currently enrolled in Head Start programs across the United States at a cost of $8 billion, approximately $9,000 per child.
Here are the verbatim excerpts from the 2010 report: “These impacts on children’s experiences translated into favorable impacts at the end of one year in the domains of children’s cognitive development and health, as well as in parenting practices. Yet, by the end of first grade, there were few significant differences between the Head Start group as a whole and the control group as a whole for either cohort.” Of the 112 measurements in the study, only a handful showed a statistically significant advantage for students in the Head Start program.
In 1985, an HHS study reported, “In the long run, cognitive and socio-emotional test scores of former Head Start students do not remain superior to those of disadvantaged children who did not attend Head Start.”
In 2000, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said, there is no “conclusive evidence on whether children having school readiness skills stemmed from being in Head Start.”
Not only has the program failed to help disadvantaged children be better prepared to succeed in school, it has been a honey pot of waste and fraud. Some selected examples:
• The 2000 GAO study found 76 percent of those grantees receiving Head Start funds were not in compliance with financial management standards.
• In 2005, the New York Times reported that a Maryland Head Start director was charged with stealing $335,000, and a South Dakota woman embezzled $185,000.
• In 2007, an Ohio state audit found that Head Start received $7.5 million for children it did not serve.
If Head Start has not helped the children, you might wonder who has Head Start benefited, and why has it continued for almost half a century? Besides cheaters and embezzlers, the primary beneficiaries appear to have been our “public servants,” the senators and representatives who come with great fanfare to their local constituents bearing checks funding Head Start.
After 47 years and over $166 billion in expenditures, it is time to put an end to Head Start. The 2010 HHS report can be found at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/impact_study/reports/impact_study/executive_summary_final.pdf.
Ray Davis is a career and job search coach.