The Head Start Program

The Head Start Program

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The Head Start program has cost the American taxpayer more than the price of putting men on the moon. Yet it has been judged a complete failure by many people, as you can read below.

Preschool ineffective, for children. Gov. Mike Rounds recently proposed a preschool program for South Dakota that might as well be called "No Child Left With Parents." Not only is expanded preschool ineffective in improving academic achievement, it may be bad for children. National Center for Education statistics show that any achievement advantages realized from preschool have disappeared by the third grade.

Head Start: A $150 Billion Failure. President Obama and other supporters of increasing government spending on preschool have argued that "investments" on early childhood education yield big results later in life. As President Obama told an audience last March, "For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health care costs, and less crime." The president and other preschool backers generally base these claims on impressive results from one or two small-scale preschool programs that existed decades ago and that have not been replicated since.

The Failure of Head Start. It is now 45 years since this program was begun. Today, we spend more than $7 billion each year on the Head Start program, serving over 1 million children. [Joe] Klein writes that "there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start does not work." The title of the HHS report is "Head Start Impact Study" and it declares that the positive effects of the program are minimal and vanish by the end of first grade.

It's Time to Stop Head Start. In 1985 the Department of Health and Human Services undertook the first meta-analysis of Head Start research and shook the establishment with its dire findings: "In the long run, cognitive and socioemotional test scores of former Head Start students do not remain superior to those of disadvantaged children who did not attend Head Start." In other words, Head Start was a false start — the net gain to children was zero.

Head Start and Other Subsidies. The formula for allocating Head Start funds is very complex. Each state receives an initial allocation based on the amount it received the prior year. Between 2.5 percent and 3.0 percent of total funding is used for training and technical assistance from HHS. A complex formula then allocates remaining funds to provide a cost-of-living adjustment. If there are funds remaining after that, 40 percent are used for quality improvement purposes, 45 percent for expansion of programs, and 15 percent for funding State Advisory Councils. Convoluted funding formulas in grant programs generate bureaucracy and encourage interest groups and politicians to battle to get a greater share.

Head Start Fraud. GAO investigators attempted to register children from fictitious families in Head Start programs in six states and the District of Columbia. The GAO created 13 fictitious families that earned too much income or possessed other characteristics that would disqualify the children from participating in Head Start. The result is embarrassing: ["]In 8 out of 13 eligibility tests, our families were told they were eligible for the program and instructed to attend class.["]

Head Start: A Tragic Waste of Money. Head Start, the most sacrosanct federal education program, doesn't work. That's the finding of a sophisticated study just released by President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services. Created in 1965, the comprehensive preschool program for 3- and 4-year olds and their parents is meant to narrow the education gap between low-income students and their middle- and upper-income peers. Forty-five years and $166 billion later, it has been proven a failure.

Head Start's Impact Evanescent — HHS Study. We have spent more than $100 billion on the program to date and HHS's own research shows that its results diminish to essentially nothing by the end of the first grade. There are other government education programs whose effects actually grow substantially over time, and that are comparatively economical. Consider the federal DC voucher program. ... But Congress, and particularly Democrats, have defunded the DC voucher program while raising spending on Head Start. President Obama is at the forefront of this travesty. If you weren't already jaded and disgusted by education politics and its domination by employee unions opposed to educational choice, start now.

Did someone mention the teachers' unions?

'Head Start': The $166 Billion Fed Ed Failure. "Head Start," the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That's the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services. An earlier iteration of the study, published in 2005, had found a few modest improvements in the language skills of participating students while they were enrolled in the program. But by the end of the first grade, even those few effects have disappeared, according to the follow-up released this month.

How the Media Are Covering 'Head Start's' Failure. I particularly liked this, from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: "Research clearly shows that Head Start positively impacts the school readiness of low-income children." Umm, yes Ms. Secretary, but the same research shows those effects vanish by the end of first grade. I guess that information is on a need-to-not-know basis. The public needs to not know about it or the administration hasn't got a snowball's chance in Kauai of getting American tax payers to throw another $100 billion or so at government pre-K, as President Obama is so very keen to do.

Some Head Start workers commit fraud so kids qualify, investigators say. Undercover investigators trying to enroll a handful of fictitious children in federally funded Head Start child care centers found that in about half of the cases, workers fraudulently misrepresented parents' incomes, addresses and other information to allow kids to qualify for a slot. In one instance, according to the investigators' report, a Head Start worker in New Jersey handed back one of two pay stubs and told an investigator posing as a parent, "Now you see it, now you don't."

Head Start Program: Fraudulent and Ineffective. The year 2010 will surely go down as a bad year for Head Start — a "Great Society" pre-school program intended to provide a boost to disadvantaged children before they enter elementary school. First, a scientifically rigorous experimental evaluation of Head Start found that the program largely failed to improve the cognitive, socio-emotional, health, and parenting outcomes compared to the outcomes of similar children. Second, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Head Start centers located in California, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area were actively enrolling children from families not qualified to participate in the early education program.

Head Start Fraud: It's Worse than You Think. "Fraud," "deceit," and "exploitation." Those words were used this week at a hearing about the Head Start programÐthe federal government's long-standing preschool program for low-income children. An investigation carried out by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), revealed several cases of underreporting of income and the falsification of addresses by Head Start employees in order to "qualify" children for the program. Head Start grantees receive money based on the number of children they serve.

Kill This Test. Enacted in 1965, Head Start funds public and private groups that run local centers which provide what the Head Start Bureau calls "comprehensive child development services" for preschoolers from poor families. In 1966, Head Start enrolled 733,000 children and spent $198.9 million. By 2005, enrollment had increased modestly to 906,993, but spending had rocketed to $6.8 billion.

Head Start Needs to Clean House. Some of the most alarming cases included: the indictment of both a Maryland Head Start director on charges that she stole $335,777 and a South Dakota woman for embezzling $185,000 from a Head Start service provider; and a New Mexico program suspected of defrauding the program of $526,000. The latter program received a $2 million federal grant while the fraud case was still pending.

Inquiry uncovers fraud in Head Start program. A budget of $3.7 trillion and you begin to wonder how much of it is flushed down the tubes through gargantuan waste and fraud. We are spending $7.2 billion on the Head Start program this year with an additional $2.1 billion in stimulus funds. The question in this case is how much of that is going to help the kids the program is meant to help?

Head Start costs $7.1 billion per year.
Government Says Head Start Made Millions in Improper Payments. A House Appropriations subcommittee has proposed $7.1 billion in funding for the Head Start program for Fiscal Year 2009, even though the program has made over $400 million in improper payments since 2005, according to government audits. ... Head Start's improper payments seem minor compared to the Medicaid program, which made improper payments of $12.9 billion in FY 2007, the GAO said.

Time to face failure of Head Start. Washington has spent hundreds of billions on Head Start as a Great Society program designed to ensure that at-risk kids from poor and minority communities start school on an equal footing with those from other neighborhoods. For years, nobody questioned Head Start's efficacy, but in 1997 a Clinton administration advisory panel recommended that funding be approved for the Head Start Impact Study. ... The study found that Head Start "has no demonstrable impact on [students'] academic, socio-emotional, or health status at the end of first grade."

Head Start rife with enrollment fraud. An undercover investigation into the federal government's Head Start program has found enough enrollment abuses to generate a report to President Obama and a major damage-control effort by the agency that runs the program. At a hearing Tuesday [5/18/2010], members of the House Education and Labor Committee heard dramatic audio clips of fraud being taken by Government Accountability Office (GAO) agents. In one clip, a New Jersey Head Start worker handed back a $23,000 pay stub to two agents who were pretending to enroll their children in the preschool program.

Head Start: Can a Failed Program Ever Be Killed? To grasp the scope of this program's profligacy, compare the federal government's attempts at early-childhood education to its efforts to send men to the moon: Head Start has actually cost more ($170 billion to $145 billion) than the Apollo program.

Politicizing Preschool: Does Head Start provide lasting benefits? In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson created Head Start, the first national preschool and childcare program serving low-income children. Nearly 45 years later, the federal government has spent more than $100 billion on it. With annual funding of approximately $7 billion, Head Start currently spends at least $7,300 annually on each of the 900,000 low-income children served. For more than a decade, Congress has been trying to figure out whether Head Start has provided lasting benefits for participating children. In 1997, the GAO reviewed the available literature on Head Start's impact and concluded that body of research was inadequate for drawing conclusions about the program's effectiveness.

Higher (Priced) Education. How is it that Americans who lived hard scrabble lives 150 years ago could read, write, do math problems and quote at length from Shakespeare and the Bible, while today, in spite of "Sesame Street," pre-school, Operation Head Start, computers and mind-numbing hours of homework, millions of youngsters entering college can do none of those things? It seems obvious to me that our education system, which costs us billions and billions of dollars, is a wreck.

12 Policies that Undermine Civil Society. [#1] Massive Expansion of the Welfare State. Within his first two years in office, President Obama will have increased spending on means-tested programs for the poor by 30 percent, and over the next decade he will spend $10.3 trillion on welfare programs alone. These are programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing, and Head Start that are targeted at low-income people. In addition to increased spending, the President and Congress are widening eligibility for the programs so that more people will qualify. Government-sponsored welfare programs do little to actually help move families from a position of dependence to self-sufficiency.

The "War on Poverty" Turns 40. In his State of the Union address forty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty in America." Since then, the federal government has created vast new bureaucracies and raised taxes to a staggering level not seen since World War Two. LBJ helped create welfare (AFDC), Medicare, Head Start, the Job Corps, and Medicaid. Worst of all, most of LBJ's War on Poverty was a failure.

Impervious to Evidence. Like most liberals, [E.J.] 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 declared, upon signing the enabling bill that "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.

Head Start Racked by Failure and Fraud. [Scroll down] Cutting Head Start doesn't make sense? What really doesn't make sense is that at a time when the President has said, "We've got to live within our means" and "get serious about managing our budget," he then draws a line in the sand over an agency on which, Congress, without seeing any solid results, has spent $167.5 billion from its founding in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society until two years ago. Head Start, which was designed to boost disadvantaged children before they enter elementary school never had a thorough evaluation of its effectiveness until Congress mandated one in 1998.

Rep. Joe Walsh Blasts Obama's $1B for Head Start. As a study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) earlier this year clearly points out, Head Start is by no means financially strapped, in spite of the critical assessments it received in 2010. According to the CRS study, "The FY2012 President's Budget, released on February 14, 2011, requests $8.1 billion for Head Start for FY2012, an increase of roughly $866 million over the program's FY2010 funding level of $7.2 billion". The same study noted that the program expanded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, P.L. 111-5), which appropriated $2.1 billion for Head Start and Early Head Start in FY2009."

Turns Out Head Start's as Bad as It Always Was. While dining out with my wife some time ago, I found myself waxing poetic about the latest government offense: the folly of dumping additional billions of dollars into the ancient Head Start program, naturally as part of the President Obama's voluminous economic stimulus plan. Studies have revealed, I explained, that children who participated in this 46-year-old multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar "educational" program exhibit no better academic achievement than do children from the same socioeconomic background who did not make use of Head Start.

The Buck Always Stops with Taxpayers. Since Obama took office a short three weeks ago, he has proposed a second $1 trillion "stimulus package," which reads like the greatest pork orgy in human history, and makes FDR's New Deal look like a Raw Deal for Americans permanently affixed to the public teat. [It includes]
$1.2 billion in grants to states for youth summer jobs programs and other activities
$2 billion in Child Care and Development Block Grants for states
$1 billion for Head Start programs
$1.1 billion for Early Head Start programs
$1.5 billion in homeless prevention activities

True Cost of Stimulus: $3.27 Trillion. All of the major news outlets are reporting that the stimulus bill voted out of conference committee last night [2/11/2009] has a meager $789 billion price tag. This number is pure fantasy. No one believes that the increased funding for programs the left loves like Head Start, Medicaid, COBRA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit is in any way temporary.

Ten Reasons Why the "Economic Stimulus" Should Not Include Education Spending. The draft American Recovery and Reinvestment Act calls for an unprecedented increase in federal education funding. The proposed legislation includes at least $142 billion in new federal funds to be disbursed over the next two years — nearly double the total outlays of the U.S. Department of Education in 2007. It nearly matches the level of all on-budget federal funds for education in 2006: $166.5 billion. ... The package provides funding increases for early childhood education and care programs. Specifically, the proposal calls for $2.1 billion in new funds for Head Start.

The Editor says...
The Head Start program is already a bottomless pit which cost the taxpayers $6,441,044,000 in FY 2003. [Source: page 119 of this document.

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