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The Bush administration, ready to reauthorize Head Start, has proposed dramatic changes that educators argue will hurt children and families.

What makes the debate so interesting is that both sides – the White House and Head Start advocates – agree the program works and use many of the same statistics to defend their positions. What they don’t agree on is administration of this hugely beneficial program.

Head Start was founded 38 years ago as an outreach system to provide special services for low-income families to get children ready for school. Not ready in the sense that youngsters will have just the right wardrobe and lunch box, but ready in the really important social and academic sense. Ready in the sense that they are as prepared to learn as their peers, giving deserving children extra confidence and abilities to succeed.

This is good for individual families and society at large in both comfort and cost.

Children who don’t succeed in school are more likely to become permanent dependents of welfare and social services. They are also more likely to enter the criminal justice system. So, taxpayers whose children do not require the services of Head Start still benefit from delivery of services to those children who do.

President Bush, in his State of the Union address last year, said he wanted to strengthen the Head Start program. Specifically, he intends to develop a system of education standards and educator training, building on reauthorization directives of 1999. These are desirable goals of accountability that are hard for anyone to protest.

The problem for Head Start advocates is that the president intends to move Head Start under the supervision of the Department of Education instead of the Department of Health and Human Services, funding operations through community block grants instead of direct grants to community Head Start programs.

The former is a good idea. The latter is not.

Head Start, while it does provide some medical and social services, is primarily an educational program. Although it is supposed to meet certain curriculum standards to align children for entry into their local school systems, a lot of Head Start programs fail to do that. If the programs were implemented through the Department of Education, which translates to greater local control, communication between early childhood and elementary educators would naturally increase. And, if districts are imaginative, program administration could be reduced to free additional dollars for classwork or to expand programs.

Head Start advocates are right, though, to raise their voices in opposition to the change in funding.

Block grants are discretionary and communities may, if they choose, divert funds from Head Start programs. Government is quite good at picking pockets of other programs to fund popular ones and balance budgets and, while the block grant funding may be viewed as a local budget windfall, if the money is not used for Head Start we are inviting an increase in future costs of law enforcement, special education, unemployment and social services.

Moving Head Start away from DHS to improve the educational component makes sense. Switching to a community block grant funding stream threatens the future of this vital program.


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