Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Education, Freedom, History, Liberalism, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics | Tags: President Barack Obama, The Head Start Program, Universal Pre-Kindergarten
One of President Obama’s favorite “big ideas” is universal pre-kindergarten. It has long been a cherished liberal idea that the poor suffer from the absence of the advantages of the stuff that the middle class takes for granted. If you give them free phones, free food stamps, free housing vouchers, and free pre-kindergarten with breakfast and lunch, then they will become happy middle class people.
Republicans believe in a safety-net for those in need, but believe that you can best help people to get out of poverty by offering opportunity. We have lots of examples of accomplished black Americans who climbed out of a childhood of poverty through the encouragement of a strong mother, a grandfather, who saw to it that the child had the opportunity and insisted on the dedication and struggle to make the best use of it. Celebrated Neurosurgeons, CEOs, Supreme Court Justices, Scholars, Economists, Writers, Society’s elite.
Head Start was established in 1965, as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society poverty program. It originally was a summer school program that would help poor children catch up to their age-group with what they needed to know to start kindergarten. A federal program is forever.
It quickly grew to a year-round program, funded a program that would become Sesame Street. The program has provided education, health and social services for nearly 30 million children between the ages of 3 and 5. There’s also an Early Head Start Program for prenatal outcomes, healthy families and infant and toddler development. There are programs for migrant and seasonal farm workers as well as Native American children.
Just before Christmas, Health and Human Services (HHS) were preparing to release their long-overdue evaluation of the Head Start Program. Since it’s inception in 1965, taxpayers have spent more than $180 billion on the program. The HHS scientifically-rigorous study tracked 5,000 children who were randomly assigned to a group receiving Head Start services or a group that did not participate. It followed their progression from age three or four through the end of third grade.
The first-grade study found that any benefits the children may have accrued while in the Head Start program were gone by the time they reached first grade. It also found that Head Start failed to improve the literacy, math and language skills of the four year-old cohort and had a negative impact on the teacher-assessed math ability of the three-year-old cohort. The results of the third-grade evaluation were even worse.
HHS sat on the study for four years. They had finished collecting all the data in 2008. In spite of prodding from Congress, they did not make the study public until the Friday before Christmas. A possible attempt to attract no attention at all?
Well, my goodness. $180 billion on a program that produces no benefits at all. Would you be surprised that many members of Congress argued that the way to fix this would be to appropriate more money? So they did. You will find another $100 million in new funding for Head Start tucked into the Hurricane Sandy relief bill — ostensibly to provide funds to Head Start centers in the Northeast affected by the storm. The $100 million will be divided up among 265 centers at more than $377,000 per center.
Head Start fails children and costs taxpayers exorbitant amounts of money every year. And it’s just one of 69 federal preschool programs.
Congressional Republicans looked at the evidence and refused to finance a new expensive universal preschool proposal from President Obama, even with the president’s proposal to fund it by raising tobacco taxes. As the president has told us — if Congress won’t cooperate with his big ideas, he will just go around Congress — and so he has.
Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have turned to discretionary funding allocations in Race to The Top, a federal education grant to the states and even to ObamaCare. A provision in ObamaCare set aside money for both state and federal authorities to fund school readiness programs for at-risk children. There’s a $500 million pile of money for state education projects, and the Education and HHS have doled out $89 million to six states for early childhood education.
A far better opportunity would be if they just let the kids take their share of Head Start funding to a private preschool provider of their own choosing. But we all know that’s not going to happen — even if we have all these piles of money sitting around in one program or another.
Just one of 69 federal preschool programs!!!
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