For more on preschool, please read “What Happened When Kindergarten Went Universal,” by Elizabeth Cascio, Ed Next, Spring 2010, and “The Preschool Picture,” by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Ed Next, Fall 2009.

—Education Next

Because, at least when it comes to education policy, just about everything he wants the federal government to do involves things that can’t be done successfully from Washington but that well-led states can and should do: raise academic standards, evaluate teachers, give kids choices, and more.

His latest passion in this realm is “quality early childhood education for all.” And as post–State of the Union specifics seep from the White House, we see more clearly what he has in mind: a multi-pronged endeavor, including home visits by nurses, programs for poor kids from birth to age three (“Early Head Start”), more Head Start (mostly for three-year-olds), lots more state-sponsored preschool for four-year-olds (subsidized up to twice the poverty line), and full-day Kindergarten for all.

All are plausible undertakings by states. Only one, however, could be satisfactorily carried out by Uncle Sam: a thorough and much-needed makeover of the five-decade-old Head Start program. But that isn’t likely to happen. The retrograde Head Start lobby is too strong, and the program’s iconic status means it’s easy to resist fundamental changes in it.

Yet Head Start is by far the largest extant preschool program in the land—serving about a million kids, well targeted at low-income families, and costing about $10,000 per child. The problem is that every program evaluation over many years has reached the same sorry conclusion: Head Start is fine and dandy as a provider of child care, social services, decent food, and some dental and health care, but it’s a total washout in terms of school readiness. Whatever limited cognitive gains its participants show after their year in the program vanish soon after (or even before) they enter school.

Yes, we can blame elementary schools for failing to capture those gains, but as Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution points out, the main culprit is Head Start itself, which doesn’t try very hard for cognitive gains and which has defenders who stoutly resist even viewing it as an education program. (That’s why it’s housed in the Department of Health and Human Services.)

To its credit, the Obama Administration has pushed to reform Head Start (as did several prior presidents), but with very limited success. The fact is that big federal programs, once entrenched, are exceptionally hard to change. Head Start should be turned over to the states—where, with governors like Barack Obama, it might be merged into states’ own efforts to provide preschooling to those who need it.

But states face mighty challenges of their own on this front. Besides cost, two are paramount.

First, the early-childhood-education crowd cannot agree on what “quality” means in preschool education. What it should mean is evidence of school readiness and a preschool operator’s success in getting kids to meet curricular standards that mesh with the state’s Kindergarten standards. What “quality” usually ends up being defined as, however—and the White House documents half-slip into this trap—is a bunch of “inputs” related to class size, room size, teacher credentials and such.

Second, the politically appealing impulse to promise “universal” preschool education is in direct conflict with who actually needs it and isn’t getting it today. The overwhelming majority of American four-year-olds already participate in some form of preschool—and more than 40 percent enjoy the publicly financed kind. Universalizing access to public preschool, besides being very expensive for taxpayers, amounts to a huge windfall for public schools (and their teacher unions), as well as for middle class families and communities that have already found ways of obtaining it for their kids. And it’s invariably a low-intensity program that doesn’t deliver the degree of help and duration that might put the neediest youngsters onto a more level education playing field. (Essentially all the evidence of lasting gains—and long-term savings—from preschool comes from a few very pricey and intensive boutique-style programs targeted on small numbers of exceptionally disadvantaged children.)

These are tough nuts for states to crack, but the federal government can resolve neither. In a time of tight budgets and staggering debt, Uncle Sam can’t do much on the cost front, either.

Well-led states can make some headway. Oklahoma (mentioned by the president) hasn’t done badly. Neither has Florida, despite its risky embrace of “universalism”. Washington can surely jawbone—Arne Duncan is far better at this than Kathleen Sebelius—and may deploy some modest incentive dollars for states to match. But if Mr. Obama really wants to make a difference on the preschool front, he should first clean up the Head Start mess, then go back to Illinois and straighten out his own state’s policies and programs.

A version of this article also appeared on The Corner.

Now the Obama administration is trying again and one can only hope that they, too, aren’t blocked. Proposed new regulations would subject the least effective 25 percent of Head Start grantees to not having their grants renewed, which in the past has been virtually automatic. This is a big deal if done properly—veteran Head Start observer and critic Ron Haskins terms it “potentially…the most serious reform in the history of Head Start.” The tricky part, of course, is determining what constitutes effectiveness. And that’s not resolved. The draft regulation states that “we are requesting public comments on several possible criteria to use to strengthen the test for redesignation of poorly performing Head Start grantees.” One path they’re considering leads to traditional input-and-process measures while another points toward “evidence-based rating instruments,” i.e. sophisticated gauges of student-teacher interactions and school readiness. Settling for the first of those paths is just another tightening of regulatory screws. By contrast, the second path incorporates a serious and much-needed overhaul not only of Head Start but also of how the entire early-childhood community defines “quality” in preschool programs, much more akin to where K-12 education has been moving these past twenty years. The Head Start lobby won’t like it at all. We’ll see whether Congress intervenes. Cross your fingers.

Download the Podcast

For more about the campaign for universal preschool education in the United States, see “The Preschool Picture”

Voters Choose Neighborhood Schools over Socioeconomic Diversity (10/29/09)
The Nobel Committee Isn’t the Only One Giving Speculative Prizes (10/22/09)
Will Michelle Rhee Triumph? (10/14/09)
Will the Federal Role in Education Double? (10/8/09)
Charter Schools Narrow Achievement Gaps in New York City (10/1/09)
What Congress Is Not Working On (9/24/09)
Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data (9/17/09)

He writes:

The early-childhood crowd is, of course, gaga over this bill… In reality, however, it’s a flawed piece of work that the Senate would do well to fix. Not that anyone actually expects such repairs to get made. There’s every reason to expect the Senate to accede to the House (and administration) and hand the president a bill to sign on Christmas Eve as his gift to America’s children.

It will be particularly disappointing if this–plus more money under the Christmas tree–turns out to be the full extent of Obama’s attention to early childhood. While it’s good that his team has not climbed aboard the “universal pre-school” bandwagon, strong federal leadership could make valuable contributions in this area, starting with a total makeover of Head Start (and its $7 billion per year) into the school readiness program that it ought to be. What a pity if this mixed bag of a bill is all they do.

Checker’s commentary draws on his analysis of the problems with the universal preschool movement published in an Ed Next article this summer (The Preschool Picture) and a book earlier this year (Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut). For those who prefer videos, an interview with Checker about these same issues is available here.

So notes Chester E Finn, Jr. in a new article on the Ed Next website, “The Preschool Picture.”

Chester E. Finn Jr. talks with Education Next about the contradictions within the movement for universal preschool in a short video here:

Education Next interview with Chester E. Finn, Jr.

For more on this topic by Chester E. Finn, Jr., please see The Preschool Picture in the Fall 2009 issue of Education Next.

The campaign for universal preschool education in the United States has gained great momentum. Precisely as strategists intended, many Americans have come to believe that pre-kindergarten is a good and necessary thing for government to provide, even that not providing it will cruelly deprive our youngest residents of their birthrights, blight their educational futures, and dim their life prospects. Yet a troubling contradiction bordering on dishonesty casts a shadow over today’s mighty push for universal pre-K education in America (see “Preschool Puzzle,” forum, Fall 2008).

The principal intellectual and moral argument that advocates make—and for which I have considerable sympathy—is similar to that of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) backers: giving needy kids a boost up the ladder of educational and later-life success by narrowing the achievement gaps that now trap too many of them on the lower rungs. Serious pursuit of that objective would entail intensive, educationally sophisticated programs, starting early in a child’s life, perhaps even before birth, and enlisting and assisting the child’s parents from day one.

Yet the programmatic and political strategy embraced by today’s pre-K advocates is altogether different. They seek to furnish relatively skimpy preschool services to all 4 million of our nation’s four-year-olds (and then, of course, all 4 million three-year-olds), preferably under the aegis of the public schools.

Either this discordant plan is a front for public school expansionism, bent on adding another grade or two to its current thirteen, and adding the staff (and dues-paying union members) that would accompany such growth, or it’s a cynical calculation: only by appealing to the middle-class desire for taxpayers to underwrite the routine child-care needs of working parents will any movement occur on the pre-K front, and the heck with the truly disadvantaged youngsters who need more than that strategy will yield. On balance, it appears to me, the interests of poor kids are being subordinated to the politics of getting something enacted. And the unabashed reasoning behind this strategy is that nothing will be done if it’s only for the poor. That’s nonsense. America is awash in enormous, well-funded programs that target the poor. Medicaid and Pell Grants leap instantly to mind. And in the early-childhood field, of course, there is already Head Start—spending more per pupil than any universal pre-K program is likely to cost—as well as chunks of the big Title I program that pay for pre-K education.
Surely the advocates know this. Why, then, do they deny it?

Growing Interest
Pre-kindergarten is one of the hottest topics in American education in 2009. Twice during the presidential-campaign debates, Barack Obama termed early-childhood education one of his highest priorities, and even before serious planning got under way for an antirecession “stimulus” package, he had pledged to this priority an additional $10 billion in annual federal funding. Education secretary Arne Duncan is a strong booster of pre-K education, and Congress is busy on this front, too. The whopping economic-stimulus package enacted in February included $2.1 billion more for Head Start and $2 billion more for child care, plus additional funding for disabled preschoolers and some $54 billion in assistance to state and local education budgets.

In state capitals, meanwhile, many governors have embraced preschool with something like the fervor they brought to K—12 education reform during the late 20th century. Pre-K and kindergarten-expansion proposals topped their priorities in myriad “state of the state” messages in 2008. Even as the economy slowed and budgets tightened, state-funded pre-K programs added more than 100,000 youngsters, meaning that about one in four four-year-olds now takes part in such programs.

Preschool also looms large for some prominent education analysts who doubt that K—12 schooling alone can accomplish much gap closing due to other powerful forces in the lives of children and families. In this view, school-centric initiatives such as NCLB are destined to fail because they don’t start early enough and don’t address those outside forces. Instead, they urge a “broader, bolder” approach that includes sharply increased investment in “developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, preschool, and kindergarten education.”

This widening enthusiasm for universal or near-universal pre-K education is no accident. In the background, plenty of strings are being tugged and dollars spent, particularly by the $6 billion Pew Charitable Trusts, which has made universal pre-kindergarten one of its top priorities, investing $50 million in this effort as of 2006. Many other foundations and individual philanthropists are similarly engaged. As a result, a half dozen energized, high-profile national groups now fill cyberspace, policymakers’ in-boxes, and committee witness lists. Many of them also have affiliates advocating away in state capitals.

Though some cracks have recently appeared in these widely held positions, as a handful of partisans now favor intensive programs targeted at a relatively small group of acutely disadvantaged children, most of the advocacy effort is still directed toward universality: pre-kindergarten for every American four-year-old.

Who Needs It?
Many youngsters arrive in kindergarten with learning deficits. For some, these deficits are mild and can be dealt with by competent early-grade teachers. For others, the shortfalls are already so severe that these hapless tykes are gravely unprepared to flourish in today’s more “academic” kindergartens. This means that—barring some change or miracle—those children won’t likely be ready to prosper in 1st or 2nd grade and beyond. They typically bring their learning deficits from disorganized homes in troubled neighborhoods, places where ill-prepared and overstretched adults, very often young single moms with minimal education of their own, offer babies and toddlers too little true conversation, intellectual stimulation, and cognitive growth.

Large bodies of research make clear that whether children successfully acquire literacy skills in the early grades of school correlates strongly with a half dozen “precursor” skills that are normally picked up between birth and age five, skills such as knowing the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, and being able to write those letters—and one’s own name.

Middle-class kids with attentive, educated parents, grandparents, and other adults in their lives tend to acquire these (and many other) skills through the course of conventional child rearing. But what about youngsters whose lives lack a sufficient number of such adults? The evidence indicates that they number about 10 percent, maybe 15 to 20 percent, of all children.

There’s also evidence, though much debated, that ultra-intensive pre-K programs can remedy the deficits. But the programs commonly cited in this regard—notably Michigan’s Perry Preschool and North Carolina’s Abecedarian Project—turn out to be truly exceptional. These were richly financed, highly sophisticated, multifaceted interventions in the lives of extremely disadvantaged youngsters and their families, and they took place decades ago. The University of Maryland’s Douglas Besharov calls them “hothouse programs,” noting that they were “run by top-notch specialists,…served fewer than 200 children, cost at least $15,000 per child per year in today’s dollars, often involved multiple years of services, had well-trained teachers, and instructed parents on effective child-rearing. Significantly, the children they served had low IQs or had parents with low IQs.”

Some studies have found that these programs had positive impacts on their participants that endured into adulthood, such as reducing the likelihood of incarceration. That’s obviously encouraging, albeit somewhat remote from school readiness. But the long-term effects also turned out to be uneven and mostly small. Besharov and his colleagues note, for example, that the Abecedarian Project “achieved positive and lasting gains on a wide range of cognitive and school-related outcomes, including IQ, reading, and mathematics achievement scores.” Yet “these gains became ambiguous as time went on” and “did not lead to many improved outcomes in adulthood…with, for example, no statistically significant differences in high school graduation rates, employment, or criminal activity.”

It’s almost impossible to picture the conditions, circumstances, and cost structures of these boutique programs being replicated on a large scale. And it’s naive to suppose that their intensive features would be found in the sort of universal program that pre-K advocates are bent on creating.

As for more-typical pre-K programs, a number of studies find that they produce desirable short-term effects, especially for disadvantaged youngsters. As Berkeley sociologist Bruce Fuller says,

The short-term effects of preschooling…on poor children’s cognitive growth are well established.…The general effect size—even for poor children—ranges from one-fifth to one-third of a standard deviation.… Significant benefits [also] accrue to children from middle-class households, but at considerably lower levels of magnitude.

But the big issue with pre-K education is whether the gains and gap reductions last. Evidence is limited because the longitudinal studies needed to answer such questions are costly, complex, and obviously time-consuming. But the available evidence is profoundly discouraging. Most of the gains that can be found upon entry into school ebb over time, and the differences attributable to various kinds of programs tend to wash out, too. In fact, effects that may appear significant at the conclusion of the program itself frequently fade to the vanishing point by the time youngsters have progressed as far as 3rd grade. That fadeaway doubtless has more to do with what happens to students in the K—12 system—and the continuing malignant influences in the outside lives of many youngsters—than with preschool programs themselves. But it also suggests that universalizing the preschool experience is not the way to achieve lasting gap reduction. Indeed, as Fuller and others have noted, if the policy goal is to narrow gaps between haves and have-nots, why would the same programmatic intervention be administered to everybody?

Confusion Reigns
It’s no wonder the evidence about the effects of preschool is confused and ambiguous, given the shaky, antiquated condition of standards and quality criteria in this field. While the K—12 policy world now mostly equates quality with academic outcomes, the pre-K world remains fixated on inputs like spending levels, staffing ratios, and college degrees. Of the three most widely used measures of quality in the field of early education—the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS), the standards of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), and those of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)—none pays much heed to whether the “graduates” of preschool programs are ready for academic success in kindergarten and beyond.

The situation is hard to rectify because assessment in this domain is underdeveloped and heavily disputed and because many early-childhood educators care more about noncognitive elements of child development. To be sure, particularly when dealing with small children, adults must attend to “the whole child” and to varied developmental needs. Still, in today’s pre-K policy context, what matters most is a program’s effectiveness in imparting essential school-readiness skills to its young participants, principally in the cognitive domain. Key attributes of such programs include clear goals, accurate assessments, and a willingness to be judged by outcomes as well as by the high-quality classroom interactions most apt to yield them. But that isn’t how most early-childhood educators prefer to view their work, much less to be evaluated on their performance.

The Problem of Head Start
Nowhere is resistance to structured, curriculum-based, standards-and-assessment-driven early education clearer than in the big, iconic, federal early-childhood program known as Head Start, a legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s mid-1960s declaration of war on poverty.

In a letter to Congress in February 1965, LBJ characterized his proposal as “a school readiness program for 100,000 children about to enter kindergarten.” Within a few years, however, studies began to suggest that the program was not, in fact, preparing children very well for regular school. In 1969, the Westinghouse Learning Corporation and Ohio University published the first major evaluation and concluded that while Head Start did commendable things for needy children by way of socialization and health care, its impact on cognition was nil once those youngsters reached the primary grades.

This finding launched a four-decades-long battle over how to judge Head Start’s effectiveness and whether it should even be regarded as an education program. Study after study—including comprehensive federal reviews in 1985 and 2005—showed time and again that the impacts on cognition were feeble and transitory. In response, Head Start’s defenders and boosters, as well as the burgeoning and organized groups of program operators and staffers, denied ever more vociferously that the program is primarily about school readiness—and insisted that it ought not be appraised as such.

Concerned that Head Start participants benefited from little gap narrowing despite the expenditure of nearly $10,000 in federal funds on each of them, Health and Human Services (HHS) assistant secretary Wade Horn mounted an ambitious effort in 2003 to beef up the program’s preschool elements and to evaluate its providers on the basis of their cognitive outcomes. That caused the National Head Start Association to go wild.

Much argument and rival testimony followed. The program’s old guard won, its familiar assumptions were reinforced, and the wind went out of the reformers’ sails. Although the most recent Head Start reauthorization pays lip service to the program’s school-readiness role, no real enforcement mechanism remains or is likely to be reestablished any time soon.

Costs and Benefits
When one is looking at federal programs such as Head Start or the state programs being pressed by Pew and its grantees, the policy dilemma is inescapable: how important is it to expand participation in services whose effects are unpredictable and uneven or that don’t last? It’s a fine thing to give kids an early boost along life’s highway. But how much of a priority can this be when, not far down that road, either those kids slow down or others pick up speed (or both) and the pre-K advantage slowly ebbs?

A truly universal program, one that actually served all 4 million four-year-olds, would cost not less than $11.6 billion a year at the low-budget end and as much as $57.8 billion at the high-budget Perry Preschool end. Including three-year-olds would at least double those sums. If we assume universal participation and pick a midlevel cost—say, $9,000 per child, which is close to where Head Start is today and approximates average per-pupil spending on K—12 public education—the outlay for four-year-olds would be about $36 billion per annum.

What’s more troubling is this calculation: since 85 percent of four-year-olds already participate in some sort of pre-K program, as much as $30 billion of that $36 billion figure would replace money that is presently being spent—by federal or state programs, private charity, and out of pocket by parents—while as little as $6 billion would go to pre-K services for children who currently have none. And that’s if they participate. Since no pre-K program will be compulsory, at least some of the families that don’t sign on today will not do so tomorrow, either because they’re too disorganized or because they truly don’t want it for their daughters and sons.
Could this large additional public expenditure be worth it? The most dramatic claims for “investing in young children” have been made by economist James Heckman, who argues that this is a fundamentally important national strategy for building human capital, enhancing workforce productivity, and reducing welfare-type outlays. His analyses have been widely cited by pre-K advocates and, we read, taken seriously by President Obama (presumably not just because they’re both from Chicago). It’s crucial to note, however, that Heckman actually confines himself to disadvantaged children, and that the evidence he cites is based on analyses from the Perry-style “hothouse” programs. Although this may strengthen the case for highly targeted, high-intensity intervention programs for seriously disadvantaged preschoolers, it does little to advance the “universal” argument.

On the grounds of economic returns, in fact, Heckman plainly states that his analysis has led him to favor funding for targeted pre-K programs for disadvantaged youngsters, not those that enroll everyone. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2006, he acknowledged that, because “Children from advantaged environments received substantial early investment” from their families, “there is little basis for providing universal programs at zero cost.” Doing the latter, he explained, would be inefficient, costly, wasteful of public dollars, and probably not effective in helping poor kids. Ironically, advocates’ success in pushing for more universal-style pre-K programs is probably dimming the prospects for more Perry-style intensive interventions in the lives of the neediest children and families.

What to Do?
Society plainly has an interest in upgrading its human talent across the board, as well as in narrowing harmful and unjust learning gaps and ensuring that everybody has a fighting chance to develop their intellect and skills to the maximum. Yet it’s not self-evident that society has a compelling interest in paying for pre-K education except insofar as it demonstrably and durably accomplishes one or more of those objectives.

If states took the $4 billion that, according to NIEER, they’re currently spending on universal-style pre-K programs and concentrated it on the roughly one-tenth of four-year-olds who most need intensive preschooling, they’d have about $40,000 per child to spend. That amounts to a pretty decent kitty, enough to pay for more than two years of Perry Preschool or Abecedarian-style programming. Even stretched across the entire period from birth to age five, it would work out to about $8,000 per child per year, without touching the separate federal child-care dollars, leveraging the Head Start appropriation, or tapping into other current public-sector spending on needy children (including the additional “stimulus” dollars that may or may not prove permanent).

Looking at the pre-K issue that way, one can begin to picture programs that might actually make a difference in young lives. Adding the $10 billion per year envisioned by President Obama would multiply those present outlays.

A powerful case can be made for well-crafted experimentation and innovation in this arena. Despite all the pilot projects, studies, and evaluations, not enough is known with certainty about the essential elements of effective pre-K education and how to make those effects last. More also needs to be learned about the key elements of program quality (concentrating, one hopes, on results rather than on inputs) that can be successfully replicated and brought to scale. Nobody has yet devised the perfect pre-K program, and it’s likely that different approaches will work better for different kids and circumstances. It is therefore folly for states not to try diverse designs and evaluate them all.

Head Start needs urgent attention, too, if policymakers are serious about preschool. Despite its popularity, despite the billions spent on it, and notwithstanding the decent job it does of targeting services on needy kids, today’s Head Start, when viewed through the lens of pre-K education and kindergarten readiness, amounts to a wasted opportunity.

In a rational world, it would make vastly more sense—and cost the taxpayer far less money—to overhaul Head Start (and pre—Head Start and Early Head Start, etc.) utilizing existing programs that are already targeted, perhaps focusing them even more tightly on the neediest kids, making them start earlier and last longer, and insisting that they emphasize pre-literacy, vocabulary, and other school-readiness skills. Such programs would be delivered by standards-based, outcomes-focused, rigorously assessed providers who are willing to be judged and compared on the kindergarten readiness of their graduates.

Getting Head Start right—turning it into an effective pre-K program for poor kids—should be the focus of a joint effort from education secretary Duncan and HHS secretary Katherine Sebelius. It could remain a separate, federally run enterprise, as it has been for four decades, though it would likely work better if states could merge programs and funding with their own intensive pre-K efforts. If Head Start stays separate, its educational effectiveness (and other outcomes) needs to be rigorously appraised, just as Wade Horn undertook to do in the previous administration.

But preschool policy cannot be made in a vacuum. Why the gains that it produces later dissipate and the gaps that it narrows later widen has much to do with unchanging home and neighborhood situations. But we must also ruefully acknowledge, despite all the K—12 education reform of recent decades, the crummy, ineffectual schools that most poor children still enter, the absence of decent choices among schools, and the system’s still-widespread weak expectations, limp curricula, slipshod accountability, and ill-prepared, ill-compensated, ill-motivated, and often inexperienced teachers.

Sustaining whatever pre-K gains can be produced, especially for poor kids, is therefore principally a challenge for K—12 policy and practice. But that does not mean entrusting pre-K education to public-school systems. Today, those systems cannot even sustain their own gains, which is why American 4th graders tend to have stronger results than 8th graders, and high school students do less well than middle schoolers. Adding more years to the present public-education mandate would simply give ineffectual school systems additional time to fumble around while entangling pre-K education more tightly in the web of school politics, federalism disputes, bureaucratic rigidities, and adult interest groups.

Preschool, done right, tightly targeted, and intensively delivered, with sound cognitive standards, quality criteria and readiness assessments, is the proper work of early-childhood educators and what is already a vast preschool and child-care industry. Capitalizing on, maintaining, even magnifying the results of such early education is the proper work of the primary-secondary system—in addition, that is, to all the other serious challenges that confront it.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior editor at Education Next. This article is excerpted and adapted from Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut (Education Next Press, May 2009).

EDUCATION NEXT: What does the evidence tell us about the effectiveness of early childhood education programs and interventions?

DOUGLAS BESHAROV: The idea that early childhood education “works” stems largely from the widely trumpeted results of two experimental programs operated in the 1960s and 1970s. Both the Perry Preschool Project and later the Abecedarian Project [see Figure 1] reported substantial initial gains in cognitive indicators followed by significant long-term improvements in later school performance, rates of teenage and nonmarital births, and employment and earnings.

Debate continues about the validity of these findings, but there is no denying that these programs operated in a far different social and demographic setting than programs today and that they were “hothouse” programs: Run by top-notch specialists, the programs served fewer than 200 children, cost at least $15,000 per child per year in today’s dollars, often involved multiple years of services, had well-trained teachers, and instructed parents on effective child rearing. Significantly, the children they served had low IQs or had parents with low IQs. Since these two pioneering initiatives, no other rigorously evaluated programs have had similar results, despite many efforts to replicate them.

Recent assessments of school-based pre-K programs in Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia indicate that they substantially raise children’s vocabulary, math, and reading comprehension test scores at the end of one year. This important development points to the promise of such programs, but questions have been raised about the studies. In any event, they have so far only measured immediate or early gains in learning. There is as yet no evidence that these programs will have a lasting impact on the children.

One additional note: American families are divided about how much time young children should spend in child care. Although some advocates seem to think that early childhood education can begin in infancy, many families—and experts—are worried about having young children spend too much time in nonparental care. In this discussion, I assume that the early education is being offered for older preschoolers.

CRAIG RAMEY: The evidence is quite strong in favor of early education benefits, particularly for children from low-resource families. Low-resource families have limited parental education, very low family incomes, and/or parents unable to consistently provide high-quality learning opportunities essential for normal brain and behavioral development. Early education yields results in terms of later academic achievement that are greater and last longer than do educational interventions that begin after failure in school. The Abecedarian Project was not a one-time hothouse program; it was immediately replicated with a new group of similar children (in Project CARE) who demonstrated equal benefits throughout their school years and early adulthood. Next, we adapted this educational intervention for low birth-weight and premature children in the Infant Health and Development Program, conducted in eight cities with 985 participants, and found benefits in all eight cities, with the greatest benefits for children from families with the lowest levels of parent education. The last time these children were assessed, at age 18, they showed continued benefits from their early education. Other rigorously studied interventions include the Milwaukee Project and the Chicago Parent-Child Centers, which served thousands of children in multiple locations and resulted in long-term gains.

Key features of the proven programs that most likely account for the benefits are 1) employing highly competent staff, trained for their positions and then actively supervised; 2) monitoring children’s progress; 3) providing educationally focused professional development or in-service training; 4) directly addressing children’s needs to become capable in language and cognitive/academic abilities; 5) having adequate, stable facilities and supplies to support the educational, social, and recreational activities; 6) including and respecting parents as natural partners in preparing children for school; and 7) reporting the findings frequently to multiple audiences.

EN: Can we generalize the results from well-designed, generously funded pilot programs to large-scale efforts at the state or national level?

CR: It is a serious misrepresentation to claim that the best evidence for benefits of early childhood programs comes only from “pilot programs” that were extremely expensive. The costs of programs that have produced positive results are in the same ballpark as or lower than those of many already funded public and private programs serving three- and four-year-olds. Two very large, congressionally initiated programs that provided funding levels well in excess of the costs for the so-called “hothouse” programs failed. The first one, the Comprehensive Child Development Program, served poverty-level families and their children throughout the first five years of life, at more than twice the cost of the successful programs. The second, the National Head Start/Public School Early Childhood Transition Program, served children, families, and schools from kindergarten through 3rd grade, offering comprehensive Head Start–like services to poverty-level families. Despite very high levels of funding, these programs did not produce any measurable benefits to children, families, or communities.

In contrast, results from some of the state and local programs are highly encouraging for low-income children. The Louisiana four-year-old program (known as LA 4) has shown with four successive cohorts of children (totaling more than 15,000 children to date) that a high-quality, full-day pre-K program accelerates children’s achievement in math, language, and early literacy skills; reduces grade repetition when they enter public school; and reduces special education placement. The first cohort, now old enough to participate in third-grade testing, scored higher than did other low-income children who did not receive public pre-K. I lament that many of the best-known federally funded grant programs have produced disappointing or no evidence of benefits to children; I judge that this is because too many of these grantees failed to deliver the high-quality programs for which they were funded.

DB: However one interprets the evaluations of demonstration projects like the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian, the unavoidable conclusion is that the measured impacts of three national programs that seek to implement their approach—Head Start, Early Head Start, and Even Start—have been tragically “disappointing,” the word used by most objective observers.

According to repeated evaluations, these three programs do not make a meaningful difference in the lives of disadvantaged children. Here’s just one example: After almost a year in Head Start (with an average cost of about $7,700 in 2005), children were able to name only about two more letters than their non–Head Start counterparts, and they did not show any significant gains on much more important measures, such as early math learning, vocabulary, oral comprehension (more indicative of later reading comprehension), motivation to learn, or social competencies, including the ability to interact with peers and teachers.

EN: Advocates of expanded early childhood education forecast large long-term savings to taxpayers. How are those figures arrived at and do you find those projections to be credible?

DB: The only two rigorously evaluated early childhood education projects with a formal benefit-cost analysis are the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian projects (both performed by Steven Barnett). According to Barnett, for every dollar spent, the Perry Preschool saved taxpayers $7.20 and Abecedarian saved taxpayers $3.78. However, in both analyses, the bulk of accrued taxpayer savings is questionable; in the Perry Preschool analysis, the majority of savings resulted from probably inaccurate calculations in crime reduction. (Barnett uses self-reported arrest data from the children when they were older, but these arrest data seem inconsistent with official convictions data, an indication that the arrest data are inaccurate.) In the Abecedarian analysis, the majority of estimated savings accrued from projected participant earnings, which have no effect on savings to the taxpayer. If these questionable savings are removed from the calculations, according to RAND Corporation researchers the Perry Preschool saved taxpayers about $2.50 for each dollar spent; according to my calculations, Abecedarian saved taxpayers about $.66 for each dollar spent.

William Dickens of the Brookings Institution recently performed a revised benefit-cost analysis for the Pew Charitable Trusts (the leading foundation supporting the expansion of preschool programs). Although he only considered the benefits to taxpayers, his findings are instructive. Even taking the impacts of the two projects at face value, the benefit-cost ratio of an institutionalized Perry Preschool–type program would turn positive only after about 90 years. For Abecedarian, the ratio would turn positive after about 55 years.

Still, we should not use the absence of valid benefit-cost estimates as an argument against early childhood education. How children are raised, including the content and quality of early education and child care, unquestionably shapes their development. The question is not whether some vastly oversimplified benefit-cost claim can be used as a political argument in favor of early childhood education but, rather, how best to improve existing programs so that they are more effective in narrowing the achievement gap.

CR: There have been several different methods used to calculate benefits—and wildly different returns claimed—sometimes as high as $16 returned for $1 invested (definitely not realistic returns for most children and communities) to more conservative estimates of $1.40 returned for $1 invested (far more sustainable and based solely on costs to the public). A similarly high rate of return is unlikely for most current and proposed pre-K programs because many of the children being served have relatively low levels of risk for school failure, placement in special education, later criminal behavior, or failure to become economically self-sufficient in adulthood. The largest benefits claimed economically come from a relatively small study of 123 children in the Perry Preschool Program, where all of the children by age three were performing in the category now labeled developmentally or cognitively delayed (IQ scores below 85 prior to entering the program). This fact is seldom shared in public venues where a community is fighting to obtain support for expanding or improving its supports to vulnerable young children. By overstating the economic return, advocates may be creating unrealistic expectations and ultimately dooming the long-term community support for providing high-quality educational programs to all young children.

The largest short-term savings will be from reduced grade repetition (cut in half in the Abecedarian Program) and special education costs (reduced by 75 percent in the Abecedarian Project). Special education tends to cost double what regular education costs, and special education students today are eligible for free education until the age of 21 (rather than 18).

EN: Are there clear instructional standards that states ought to require providers to adopt? Should we consider a national curriculum for preschool?

CR: A single national curriculum should not be adopted for preschool. Early childhood education programs can succeed only when consistent high levels of instruction are provided in ways that are adapted to the learning and behavioral needs of young children. Young children learn through active engagement and play, not just sitting quietly or passively and receiving teacher-dominated lesson plans. Key evidence-based features of what three- and four-year-old children need to learn to prepare for becoming strong early readers have provided the core for a number of new published curricula, some of which have been rigorously evaluated and reported on; others are now being tested and evaluated. When instructional standards are made explicit, then programs can plan in ways that ensure that all teachers and teaching assistants have the knowledge, skills, and appropriate attitudes to provide high-quality instruction.

DB: It is highly unlikely that any one curriculum will meet the needs of all American children. Various curricula, however, show promise and, more importantly, indicate that much more can be done to prepare disadvantaged children for school. For example, both Project Upgrade (funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and Early Reading First (funded by the Department of Education) used rigorous evaluation techniques and found that a properly or narrowly focused early childhood intervention can make a significant improvement in at least some elements of the cognitive development of disadvantaged children. Both programs provide staff with step-by-step, practical guidance about teaching language and literacy to preschoolers.

Congress should mandate a systematic program of research and experimentation, one that tries and evaluates different approaches to see what works best. Most important, making distinctions among children from different family backgrounds and with different degrees of need will be crucial. Those who are most behind almost certainly need a more intensive curriculum.

EN: Should we license early childhood educators?  If so, what are the appropriate criteria?

DB: The nature and quality of staff surely matter. The available research, however, is ambiguous at best. Some studies, for example, find that having a preschool teacher with a BA increases math scores; others find no effect on math scores but significant increases in writing scores; and still others find no effects whatsoever. However, the likelihood of selection effects in such studies has led many to question these results. (Better teachers tend to self-select into programs with children from more affluent and better educated families, and that is why the children may do better).

Many have become disenchanted with licensing and specific educational requirements for teaching K–12. Such requirements may not improve child outcomes significantly, and might even compromise them. Imposing more formal educational qualifications might exclude good teachers who were unable to obtain higher levels of education or are unwilling to make the career investment that licensing entails.

The preschool curriculum evaluation studies mentioned above suggest a more promising approach. Project Upgrade had as much impact as the state pre-K programs but, rather than rely on much more expensive public school staff, the program taught the regular child-care staff how to be more effective.

CR: The idea that licensing will help drive up the quality of instruction is a sound one. Licensing would be a major advance if it were grounded in practical demonstration that teachers and teaching assistants have the right set of skills to educate young children, and know how to individualize instruction and interactions with young children who differ in their social and emotional needs, their linguistic needs, and their needs related to specific early academic skills. The traditional ways of preparing teachers for elementary-school education will not suffice to prepare highly skilled educators for children under five years of age. What we urgently need is a thorough review and report about the adequacy of existing college preparation programs that grant associate degrees in early childhood education. Ideally, in the future, the degree-granting programs would work collaboratively with licensing entities in a manner similar to what exists in nursing, clinical psychology, medicine, dentistry, and allied health professions. What should be emphasized is how well teachers instruct in their classrooms, not just their formal education and degrees earned.

EN: What kinds of accountability measures, if any, would you advocate for early childhood education?

CR: The more than a dozen early childhood education programs that produced lasting benefits could point to those results because they held their programs accountable. Following the example these programs set, accountability has been accepted as valuable and been well implemented in a number of large-scale pre-K programs, such as those in Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and parts of California. I further want to refute the myth that assessing the progress of individual children is stressful to children (all teachers are expected to monitor and document children’s progress already). But I also think that classroom practices should be documented. When classroom instruction is directly observed and feedback is provided in ways that help teachers and teaching assistants improve their classroom practices, children have been shown to increase their gains. How could we not require that each and every program document the instruction and other supports provided, including the quality and consistency of instruction, the amount of time the program is offered, and the progress of the participating children and families?

DB: If we are to believe the repeatedly negative evaluations of Head Start, Early Head Start, and Even Start, these programs have unacceptably small impacts to justify their cost. The political process has begun to recognize their limited effectiveness and to hold them accountable. Presumably because of disappointing evaluations, Head Start’s funding has essentially remained flat since 2001, at about $7 billion. Yet, during the 2007 reauthorization of Head Start, nary a word was spoken about its questionable impacts. Most members proclaimed that Head Start “works” or “is highly successful.” Worse, Congress eliminated the Head Start National Reporting System, a series of cognitive tests administered twice a year to all Head Start children and designed to be “used in planning training and technical assistance efforts for local programs.” Critics argued that the tests focused only on cognitive impacts, that the questions were not age appropriate, and that the process was intentionally designed to prove Head Start was ineffective and therefore should be terminated.

Whether or not these complaints are valid, the accountability system was still in the development stage, and there is now no systematic way to measure the progress of Head Start children through the program. A better route would have been to improve the testing system the way all testing systems are improved: by trial and error, while keeping an open mind.

EN: If the government is to finance early childhood education, how should the funds be distributed: through the school system, by giving tax credits or vouchers to parents, or by some other mechanism?

DB: Up to now, the early childhood education movement has focused on expanding school-based pre-K programs [see Figure 2 for enrollment and state spending trends], with the ultimate goal of “universal pre-K.” According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, in 2006 states spent $3.3 billion on pre-K programs, up from $970 million in 1992. As much as 90 percent of these funds go to public schools, with the remainder going to selected center-based child-care providers. It is difficult to see why all pre-K programs—nationwide—should be entrusted to a public system fraught with so many serious shortcomings, especially in the low-income communities most in need of effective early education programs.

When early education funds are given to schools and other agencies to serve a specific neighborhood, parents must either send their child to the local free program or use their own money to pay to use a different one. Hence, they are denied real freedom to select the provider of their choice, or at least to receive government help to pay for their chosen provider.

More troubling, this top-down approach to funding early education programs is a retreat from the unquestionable success of child-care vouchers. Since 1991, the Child Care and Development Fund and other federal programs have provided almost $100 billion in child-care subsidies via state-distributed vouchers—with nary a problem—and low-income parents have had the freedom to choose the particular providers they want, largely without government constraints (even unlicensed providers can be used in most states).

CR: We do not have an adequate scientific basis, thus far, to endorse any single system of funding for early childhood education. I also do not think that programs with little or no benefits should continue to receive funding. The mega–child care subsidies program has funded programs that sometimes are of extremely low quality. Head Start and Early Head Start programs have ambitious goals and reasonable standards, but their actual implementation is far too uneven. These public subsidies for poor quality care must not be tolerated. Accordingly, I favor competitive market-driven approaches alongside publicly funded initiatives, so long as all of these are held publicly accountable using the same standards and measures of performance and benefits. Several interesting ideas have scarcely been tried, such as adequately funded vouchers, substantial tax credits, public-private partnership programs, and parent participatory contributions to early childhood programs. We need to support rigorous investigations of alternative strategies for providing young children with the care and education they need to succeed in school and life. There is likely to be plenty of room for having multiple approaches—all of which could be held to the same high quality standards—to help young children and their families.

-Douglas M. Call assisted Douglas Besharov in the preparation of his responses.

Project Head Start was created during the heady, idealistic days of the mid-1960s. Through two seminal victories, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil-rights movement had won equality in the eyes of the law, but the economic and social legacies of centuries of slavery and racial discrimination remained. President Lyndon Johnson believed that it was the nation’s duty to provide not just legal equality but also equality of opportunity. In his 1965 commencement address at Howard University, he called for the “next and the more profound stage” in the civil-rights struggle. “We seek not just freedom but opportunity. . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Johnson’s War on Poverty would include a host of initiatives designed to bring blacks and other disadvantaged Americans to what he called “the starting line” of American life with the skills and abilities necessary to compete on a level playing field. The War on Poverty focused on education as a tool for upward mobility, and Head Start was to become one of the cornerstones of the federal effort.

The idea for Head Start, a preschool program for disadvantaged children, emerged from the observation that, on average, poor and minority children arrive at school already behind their peers in the intellectual skills and abilities required for academic achievement. These deficits in turn lead to poor performance in school, which narrows the economic opportunities disadvantaged children encounter when they become adults. In order to counteract the corrosive influences of turbulent neighborhoods, shoddy health care, and undereducated parents, Head Start would attempt to prepare children to flourish in school.

Nearly 40 years after its creation, Head Start has gained the favor of Democrats and Republicans alike. Its budget in 2003 was $6.7 billion, more than tripling (in real terms) since 1990 (see Figure 1 and Table 1). Real per-pupil spending increased from $1,380 in 1966 to $7,170 in 2002. However, despite Head Start’s long history and ever-expanding budget, the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged, between white and minority, is still substantial, both during the preschool years and thereafter. This stubborn fact has caused many to question Head Start’s strategies and direction. Housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start has in the past emphasized not just early education but also socialization and giving poor children and their families access to an array of nutritional, health, and social services.

Now the Bush administration has proposed reorienting the program to emphasize the acquisition of intellectual skills and to prepare poor kids for school. In order to achieve this objective, the administration is trying to align Head Start more closely with the public school system. After less than a year in office, President Bush implemented by administrative rule a program called “Good Start, Grow Smart,” the central thrust of which is to instruct Head Start teachers across the nation in methods for improving school readiness. The program also helps local Head Start centers develop an accountability system that assesses children’s learning in literacy, language, and numeracy. The administration had made an earlier proposal to move Head Start to the Department of Education, which would have signaled the program’s new commitment to intellectual development. But after encountering fierce competition, in February 2003, the administration proposed an even more dramatic overhaul of Head Start. The plan is to turn control of Head Start over to the states, as long as they commit to making school readiness the program’s chief priority and to meet several other requirements. Currently, federal funds flow directly to local Head Start centers, which are run primarily by community-based groups. As a result, Head Start teachers, staff, and parents, working through the National Head Start Association in Washington, have viscerally opposed the administration’s proposals, fearing the dilution of Head Start’s program of comprehensive services in favor of the focus on school readiness. They regard this as a repudiation of Head Start’s historical mission as well as a threat to their control of the program. The Bush proposal, now before Congress, has rekindled a debate that began in 1964.

The Cooke Committee

In that year, Sargent Shriver, a holdover from the Kennedy administration who became one of the chief architects of Johnson’s War on Poverty, developed the idea for Head Start from his involvement in programs for retarded children (his wife, Eunice, would later found the Special Olympics). Shriver had visited a remarkable project conducted by Dr. Susan Gray of George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville (which later merged with Vanderbilt University). Gray’s project was one of the first preschool education programs in the nation to be carefully evaluated, and Shriver claimed that it demonstrated that early intervention could “change the IQ of mentally retarded children.” If this were possible, Shriver thought, why couldn’t high-quality preschool also improve the IQ scores of poor children who seemed destined to fail in school?

Unexpectedly departing from the public statements of Lyndon Johnson and Sargent Shriver, the Cooke committee recommended that Head Start avoid focusing simply on school preparation or IQ development.

In the late fall of 1964, Shriver asked Dr. Robert Cooke, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins and the chairman of the Kennedy Foundation’s scientific advisory committee, to head a committee whose task would be to make recommendations for a preschool program that would promote the development and school readiness of disadvantaged children. Shriver was in a hurry. With President Johnson’s blessing, he had decided to begin the new program the next summer.

Cooke’s committee, which met several times in January and February of 1965, had a free hand in designing Head Start, which became the best known and most popular of the War on Poverty programs. Unexpectedly departing from the public statements of Johnson and Shriver, the Cooke committee recommended that Head Start avoid focusing simply on school preparation or IQ development. Instead, Head Start was to offer “comprehensive” services, including health care, mental health services, nutrition, preschool education, and parental involvement. Addressing all the child’s needs was thought to have a greater impact on children’s development, including their intellectual development, than education alone. Almost none of the present programs that promote children’s health and welfare, such as Medicaid and the food-stamp and child-nutrition programs, existed in 1965. In that light, recommending comprehensive services was prescient of the Cooke committee.

Much of the thinking at the time was influenced by J. McVicker Hunt’s Intelligence and Experience and Benjamin Bloom’s Stability and Change in Human Characteristics, both of which questioned the popular view that intelligence was immutable. There was an increasing faith that social programs could produce sizable gains in IQ scores. Unfortunately, the first major evaluation of Head Start, published in 1969, failed to find permanent IQ gains, thereby raising the question of whether Head Start was incapable of influencing intellectual development or was just implemented poorly. The Cooke committee’s decision to make Head Start a comprehensive program enabled its defenders to fudge the issue by arguing that the major goals of the program included many activities crucial to a child’s development, such as providing better nutrition and health screening, other than trying to improve IQ scores. The fudging continues to this day.

Another important recommendation made by the Cooke committee was that Head Start funds should travel directly from the federal government to local communities, bypassing the states. This prevented racist governors in the South from killing the program and enabled Head Start to get off the ground quickly. The professionals on the Cooke committee wanted to start small and build up gradually, but Johnson and Shriver were operating on the political logic that called for mounting the biggest program possible, given the money and political will available in the spring and summer of 1965. Amazingly enough, by the early summer of 1965, just four months after the Cooke committee recommended the Head Start program to Shriver, the Johnson administration had funded programs in more than 2,500 communities that enrolled 560,000 children.

Practically overnight, the rapid outflow of funds created a large constituency for Head Start. Most congressional districts housed at least one Head Start program. Thus when trouble came–as it inevitably would–Head Start had advocates from communities across the nation who would lobby for the program. Constituent pressure on Congress has helped Head Start not merely to survive annual appropriations battles, but to flourish even in the face of mounting evidence that the program was not adequately preparing children to succeed in school.

Just four months after the Cooke committee recommended the Head Start program to Shriver, the Johnson administration had funded programs in more than 2,500 communities that enrolled 560,000 children.

The Research Literature

Everyone agrees, and has since the very first studies were conducted in the 1960s, that Head Start produces an initial boost in children’s test scores. However, most studies also show that these effects fade within a year or two after children enter school. By the 2nd or 3rd grade, there is no difference between the test scores of children who attended most preschool programs, including Head Start, and those who did not. This is not to say that it is impossible for preschool to elicit long-term gains. Studies of the Abecedarian program in North Carolina and the Perry Preschool program in Michigan have shown remarkable long-term improvements in academic achievement and a host of other important outcomes, including college attendance, employment, delinquency, and crime. But no Head Start programs have been shown to produce this broad range of long-term improvements. Indeed, only a few individual Head Start programs have been shown to produce any long-term gains.

Nevertheless, many high-quality preschool programs appear to reduce placement into special education and grade retentions. Given the costs of special education–at least twice the cost of the regular program in most public school systems–and the costs of grade retention, it is easy to conclude that the high-quality preschool programs that produce these long-term effects may well pay for themselves. However, there is little evidence that Head Start programs as a whole are of high enough quality to make a difference in either of these respects.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to make definitive statements about the effects of Head Start because of the shortage of reliable research. A 1997 study by the General Accounting Office (GAO) screened more than 200 empirical studies of Head Start and found only 22 that met their criteria for worthwhile research. Even these 22 studies had flaws that “weakened confidence in the findings.” Furthermore, there was not even one study that included a national sample of Head Start programs. The GAO concluded that “the number of impact studies was insufficient to allow us to draw conclusions about the impact of the national Head Start program.”

The strongest evidence that Head Start elicits lasting effects comes from studies published in 1995 and 2000 by Janet Currie and her colleagues at UCLA. Using data from surveys of representative samples of families that included information on whether children had or had not participated in Head Start, Currie found that white children who attended Head Start centers were less often held back in school than siblings who did not participate in Head Start. They also had higher test scores, which persisted into adolescence, and higher high-school graduation rates. However, none of these effects were found among black children, a third of those served (see Figure 2) although one of the surveys suggested that black children who attended Head Start engage in less criminal activity. Black children exhibited the familiar effect of an initial boost in test scores that faded away, leading the researchers to attribute the lack of sustained gains to the abysmal public schools in disadvantaged black neighborhoods.

On balance, the research evidence on Head Start is both mixed and uncertain, inasmuch as the quality of the research literature on Head Start is deficient. During the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start, Congress, recognizing the dearth of good research, ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a scientific study of a national sample of Head Start centers. The first results from this study will be available in 2004. In the meantime, the achievement gap persists, despite all the claims of success for Head Start.

A New Mission

Data on school readiness for children entering Head Start in 1997 and 2001 show that children start the program with test scores far below average. Their performance improves slightly after a year in Head Start, but not enough to make a real difference in the achievement gap (see Figure 3). These striking differences upon the completion of Head Start translate into equally stark differences in school-age test scores, high-school graduation rates, college attendance, and earnings in the workforce.

These sobering facts convinced the Bush administration that Head Start needed to be retooled to focus on getting children ready to learn. The plan began with the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative, whose purpose was to retrain Head Start teachers and to bring accountability to the program. In effect, Bush is overruling the Cooke committee by making school readiness–an easily measurable outcome–the single most important goal of Head Start.

The shift in emphasis from comprehensive services to intellectual development has provoked strong opposition from Head Start’s stakeholders. The National Head Start Association was so opposed to the teacher-training and curricular aspects of the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative that the chairman of the association’s board, Ron Herndon, took the remarkable step of sending a letter to all Head Start programs, asking them to boycott the national teacher-training session the administration had planned for November 2002. The association’s board believes, Herndon wrote, that “local parents, staff and governing boards, and not the federal government, are in the best position to determine how to improve the operation of their program.” Even so, more than 2,000 Head Start teachers and administrators attended the training session.

The president’s budget for 2004 contained an even more inflammatory proposal: to turn Head Start over to the states. This would overturn the Cooke committee’s other crucial recommendation, that there be no middleman between the federal government and local Head Start programs. In return, states must promote school readiness in a more focused and sustained manner than Head Start programs have been willing to do. States must also meet several other conditions, including: 1) working with the public schools to define the academic and social skills that five-year-olds must possess in order to succeed in kindergarten; 2) developing preschool activities and materials that help poor children acquire these skills; 3) outlining an accountability program for determining whether four-year-olds are learning these skills; 4) maintaining state spending on preschool programs; and 5) continuing to provide comprehensive services.

The reasoning behind the Bush administration’s devolution proposal is twofold. First, as Table 1 shows (page 28), several streams of federal and state funding support preschool education and child care. All of these streams, except Head Start, are controlled to some degree by the states. It makes little sense, says the Bush administration, to have state governments in charge of most funds for preschool, but to bypass them with regard to the single biggest preschool program. The administration argues that the states should be able to align all of the funds available for preschool and child care in the service of a coherent statewide plan for improving the education of disadvantaged children.

The second reason is that Head Start programs have been unwilling to accept responsibility for closing the achievement gap. The devolution proposal requires states to do so. Moreover, the federal No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2001, gives states new incentives to improve preschool instruction. As demonstrated by four decades of research, it is exceptionally difficult for schools to erase the deficits poor and minority children have accumulated by the time they start school at age five. Thus many researchers, educators, and policymakers now believe that high-quality preschool is a prerequisite for improving the achievement of disadvantaged students. Given the opportunity to control Head Start funds and the flexibility to combine all the funds available for early education, states should be highly motivated to build comprehensive preschool programs for poor children.

Nonetheless, the administration’s agenda faces strong opposition from both congressional Democrats and the Head Start community. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut told the New York Journal News that the president’s proposal would “absolutely destroy this program.” At a Brookings Institution forum in May, California representative George Miller likened turning Head Start over to the states to “handing your children over to Michael Jackson.” Many of the nation’s leading newspapers have also adopted forceful editorial stances against devolution. In general, the opposition to Bush’s proposal to give states increased responsibility for Head Start hinges on three arguments: 1) Head Start, as constituted, is an immensely successful program that should not be toyed with; 2) there is little evidence that states can do a better job than Head Start programs of improving children’s school readiness; and 3) states, especially in the current budget environment, may try to reduce spending on Head Start in order to use the money for other purposes.

The National Head Start Association has maintained its exceptionally critical position regarding the president’s proposal. When the president unveiled the devolution plan in February 2003, the association’s president and CEO, Sarah Greene, called the proposal a “potential disaster.” Writing in USA Today, Greene claimed that the administration’s real goal was “not to help Head Start children but rather to dismantle Head Start.” When Bush visited a Maryland Head Start center in July 2003 to explain and defend his agenda, the association unleashed a barrage of criticism. Asked if she had attended the president’s visit, Greene said that she didn’t “have time for floor shows.”

The association’s national office sent Head Start directors a letter with detailed instructions about how to lobby against the Bush proposal. Parents were encouraged to seek help in their lobbying from Head Start staff members. The Bush administration, concerned that Head Start programs were using federal resources, including paid staff, to support lobbying, sent Head Start programs a letter of caution, signed by Windy Hill, the national director of Head Start. The letter warned local programs that they would be subject to penalties if they used government resources to lobby Congress. The National Head Start Association responded by bringing suit against the administration in federal court for threatening local programs and trying to create a “chilling effect” on actions that parents and Head Start staff might take to save Head Start. The suit was subsequently withdrawn, but the tensions between Head Start’s supporters and the Bush administration remain.

Meanwhile, the administration negotiated a compromise with House Republicans. The administration agreed to scale back its broad devolution plans in favor of a pilot project. Up to eight states would be authorized to conduct demonstration programs testing whether state control of Head Start actually leads to better coordination of preschool programs, greater emphasis on school readiness, improvement in poor children’s preschool test scores, and progress in closing the achievement gap between poor and advantaged students. At this writing, the compromise legislation has passed the House by merely one vote and appears headed for an equally rocky reception in the Senate.

In several respects, the House’s compromise legislation is an improvement over the administration’s plan to allow every state to assume control over Head Start. As the administration recognizes, Head Start is a good program with a decent track record. Studies show that Head Start provides higher-quality care and education than most child-care facilities and even most state-sponsored preschool programs. Moreover, if we ignore the inflated rhetoric being used by those defending Head Start, their major arguments against the administration proposal are reasonable. So rather than abandon a modestly successful program in our attempt to promote equality of education, the best policy would be to let a few states have more control of Head Start funds, carefully study their subsequent reforms, and then determine future policy based on solid evidence.

Whatever the outcome, the Bush administration should be commended for taking on a politically difficult issue and sticking to its agenda, despite Head Start’s overwhelming popularity. For too long, Head Start has been merrily rolling along, enjoying ever more generous increases in funding, without demonstrating its value. Its stakeholders may take comfort in turn by spreading false claims of success or in excusing its ineffectiveness by lowering expectations. After all, they argue, no one should expect a single year of preschool to overcome the difficulties of being raised in a troubled family or neighborhood. True, perhaps. But these claims provide little comfort to the disadvantaged children who find themselves behind from the second the starter’s gun goes off. The greatest challenge may come when even the overhaul of Head Start fails to change things much, as I expect it may. Will we then be willing to pay for preschool teachers with college degrees, who will replace the parents and poorly paid staff who presently work in Head Start centers? For two years of preschool education? Three years? There is every reason to doubt that the nation’s policymakers are ready to take the politically difficult and potentially expensive steps that will be necessary to achieve Johnson’s vision of equality of education as a fact and a result.

-Ron Haskins is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.