A study by the US Department of Health and Human Services has found that the Head Start program is not adequitely helping children in key educational areas such as basic math and reading skills.
Head Start is one of the government’s sacred cows, which means that it’s virtually impossible to reform elements of the program that are broken. Moreover, it’s illustrative of the central problem with liberalism – the government programs that are supposed to help the poor and downtrodden usually do an exceptionally poor job of it, and are so resistant to change that meaningful reform becomes virtually impossible.
Federal programs usually do more to assuage liberal guilt than in helping people. It is imperative that programs like Head Start be held accountable for producing results rather than consuming funds. The future of America’s children is too valuable to be left to government bureaucracy.
Reading just a few paragraphs into the study, it was obvious that the entire article was an infomercial for Bush’s plans to “reform” Head Start. It certainly isn’t unexpected to see negative indicators for the Head Start program by the Health and Human Services Director of a President who’s hostile towards public education who belongs to a political party that’s hostile towards public education. It will take a series of studies by less partisan groups to convince me of Head Start’s trouble.
Whatever extent the program is failing to meet expectations can be closely attributed to the kinds of students who are most often in the program, as politically incorrect as it is to say. The Head Start classes in my town are nearly two-thirds Hispanic children, most of which coming from homes where English is the second language. It’s not at all surprising that these children go onto to elementary school and lag behind children coming from English-speaking homes. And I don’t think the Head Start office in my town is unusual in this.
The high rate of immigration creates a very slippery way which the Republican party can point to a natural decline in a public education system forced to take in a revolving door of non-English speaking students and then criticize that system for failing to instantly make these kids as intellectually adept as white kids from the suburbs whose mamas read and spoke to them every day from their infancy in English. The Republican party enjoys the steady stream of cheap labor that immigration provides for their corporate constituency, but also enjoys using the social consequences of the infusion of immigrants to point to a non-existent public education meltdown.