Early childhood development is essential to success in school.

George W. Bush plans to change Head Start, the nation’s preschool program for poor children. If he has his way, oversight of the program will transfer from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Education. In addition, the states will be given the opportunity to exercise more control over Head Start.

These ideas have been in the air before.

Four years ago, a group of psychologists (including one of the founders of Head Start, Edward Zigler) addressed these same ideas in a paper published in American Psychologist called, “Will Fifty Cooks Spoil the Broth? The Debate Over Entrusting Head Start to the States.” They concluded then that “devolving all preschool programming to the state level could be a step backward in ensuring that all American children are prepared for school.”

Their conclusion stands today. If anything, research on early child development in the intervening four years has strengthened that conclusion.

Head Start rests on a simple premise. Children frequently fail in school because they fall behind in acquisition of basic cognitive skills. Research by Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford University’s School of Education, shows that economically disadvantaged children are already behind their more advantaged classmates when they begin school. They need a head start, but will they get it under the Bush plan?

I don’t think so.

According to psychologists and educators today, school readiness is a multidimensional concept involving family, peer, school and community levels of influence. Recently, developmental neuroscientists have highlighted the critical role that emotions play in school readiness. Based on research evidence, they have argued that early emotional development is essential for the behavioral regulation that children need to succeed in school. Young children cannot learn to read, write or compute if they have emotional and behavioral problems that distract them from lessons. These neuroscientists believe that the biological and physiological processes of emotional development are the keys to boosting cognitive competence at school entry.

What does this new research have to do with Bush’s proposal? Head Start was founded with a view of the whole child that included physical, cognitive, social and emotional development.

At present, social and emotional standards are part of the performance standards for the program. So is physical development, which receives attention through the program’s nutritional standards as well as dental and mental health screenings. Neuroscientists point out that nutritional adequacy is a crucial influence on brain development.

With his proposed move to the Department of Education, Bush turns a deaf ear to everything we are learning today. The planned focus on cognitive development in general and literacy in particular will not help the child suffering from malnutrition or the child too disruptive to teach. The planned devolution to the states will result in uneven services, which the psychologists four years ago carefully documented. Loss of the comprehensive services that address the whole child will be devastating.

Critics argue that Head Start has neglected education. They still cite the Westinghouse study, published over 30 years ago, as evidence that the program doesn’t work.

This study deserves the place it has in most psychology curricula: it is used as a textbook example of a flawed research study. Soon after its publication, statisticians pointed out that the study suffered from what they call a regression artifact: the Head Start children came from a population that was more extreme than the control (no Head Start) children.

Whenever you try to compare groups that come from different populations, you run into difficulty. If groups are not from the same underlying population to start with, it is impossible to compare their scores at the end of the study. The Westinghouse study was a classic case of this artifact, and it does not deserve continued credit.

Since the Westinghouse study, many others have demonstrated the positive effects of Head Start. Research by economists Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas is just one example.

Their research shows significant gains in test scores for children who attend Head Start. It also shows that some of the initial effects of Head Start fade over time. As they argue, the reasons for fadeout lie in the larger society, beyond the reach of Head Start.

Let’s be realistic. We cannot expect long-term emotional and cognitive gains on the part of young children if they later attend poor-quality schools and their families continue to face chronic stressors, such as deep poverty, inadequate housing, and violent surroundings.

Head Start works, but we have much work to do if we want to safeguard this investment in our most vulnerable children.

Georgia Nigro is Whitehouse Professor of Psychology at Bates College. As a graduate student at Cornell University, she worked for the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, which carried out an independent evaluation of preschool programs, including Head Start.


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