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DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Romney's Head Start
By Derrick Z. Jackson | January 21, 2005
WHILE IT was not as nuclear as Harvard president Lawrence Summers questioning the innate abilities of women in engineering and the sciences, Governor Mitt Romney recently rolled a dirty bomb into the debate on education. In a December visit to The Boston Globe, Romney suggested that Head Start was a failure.
"I'm still looking at it, but the research I've seen so far says that programs like Head Start do a terrific job in giving kids a head start for their first kindergarten, one, two, three years, but if you look at graduation rates and the dropout rates of those individuals, it doesn't seem to be the key to getting kids the future they need," Romney said.
This echoed President Bush, who said in 2002 that Head Start in its current form was a significant waste of taxpayer money. "Over the past decade, federal funding for early-childhood programs has nearly tripled," Bush said. "Yet many children are still showing up in kindergarten not ready to learn. That's going to change."
Bush's rhetoric was a cover for willful neglect. His only purpose was to plant enough doubt about Head Start on Capitol Hill to ensure that nothing changed. President Clinton pushed for increases that allowed about 60 percent of eligible children to become enrolled. The increases fueled optimism that the nation was finally on the road to full funding.
Under Bush, Head Start is rotting. This fall the National Head Start Association announced that Bush's miserly increases in Head Start funding fell so far below inflation that 9,000 of the previous 912,000 spots were lost. (The association says that 660,000 more children are eligible.) The Washington Post last year detailed an internal memo in which the White House contemplated $177 million in cuts to Head Start if Bush was reelected. The Center for Budget Priorities estimated last year that under current Bush funding projections, Head Start could lose 62,000 slots by 2009.
Romney should look more at research that points to what Head Start could be with quality teaching and parent involvement. For instance, he does not cite the High/Scope Perry preschool study. For 40 years the study has followed 123 low-income African-American children in Ypsilanti, Mich. In its latest findings issued last year, the study found that 65 percent of youths who were in a high-quality preschool graduated from high school compared with a 45 percent graduation rate for those who had not attended quality preschool. The difference was pronounced among girls. Eighty-four percent of girls who were in a high-quality preschool program graduated from high school compared with only 32 percent of girls who did not enroll in preschool.
The study found that when the participants reached age 27, 80 percent of the women who had been in preschool had jobs compared with 55 percent of those who had not gone to preschool. It found that 27 percent of the preschooled adults owned homes by age 27, compared with 5 percent of the non-preschooled adults. Eighty percent of the preschooled men owned a car by age 27, compared with only 50 percent of the nonpreschooled men.
Preschooling, according to this study, significantly reduced crime, drug use, and dependency on social services. With the higher levels of employment, homeownership, and consumer spending, the study estimated that the economic return of preschooled adults was $17 for each dollar invested. The biggest savings to society was in crime.
Nor did Romney, in his "looking at" the research, quote a long-running Chicago Child-Parent Center study. That study, following records up to age 21, found that preschooled children had a 29 percent higher graduation rate. Preschooling resulted in a 41 percent drop in placements in special education and a 42percent decline in arrests for violent crimes.
That study also did a cost-benefit analysis. It found tremendous savings on the criminal justice system and school remedial services and increased participation in the general economy. It calculated that the public benefits of the 100,000 children who have gone through the Chicago centers are worth as much as $2.6 billion.
Somehow this research does not roll off the lips of the likes of Romney and Bush, certainly not as much as charter schools and standardized testing, the latter of which only serves to prove the obvious. Children in whom we do not invest will test poorly. The jury is still out on Romney, who has yet to push his new education agenda through the Massachusetts Legislature. But Bush's behavior should make everyone wary of anyone who trashes preschool.
Summers got into hot water for raising the possibility that women aren't so good at learning science. Bush proved with his first term that low-income children are not worth the investment of preschool. It will be interesting to see whether Romney learns enough to make the investment or decides that such children lack the innate abilities to make this worth our while.
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