Key Republicans Say a New Approach on Head Start Bill Might Be Necessary
By Bill Swindell, CQ Staff The Bush administration is coming up short in its search for Senate support for a plan to allow states to take over local Head Start centers, but a House committee chairman who backs the White House proposal said he wants to work with Democrats to find common ground.
Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a key Republican on education issues, said a majority of senators have not been convinced that the proposed state pilot project would improve academic achievement for the 919,000 children in Head Start, a $6.8 billion program operated locally by nonprofit organizations and religious charities.
he proposal has been the central sticking point for the reauthorization of the program for more than two years.
“I am not ready to turn the money over to the states and then have them turn the money over to the grantees,” Alexander said after chairing a hearing Tuesday on the program in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee on Education and Early Childhood Development. “I don’t sense most of the senators want that.”
Alexander’s comments come at the same time that John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, House Education and the Workforce Committee chairman, has suggested a new willingness to look at bipartisan alternatives beyond the pilot project.
“In those areas where there was disagreement, I’m more than willing to look at alternative routes that can be taken to reach the same goal, if we can show they might be effective,” Boehner said during a similar Tuesday committee hearing on the program. “That includes the issue of coordination of state programs.”
George Miller of California , the ranking Democrat on the panel, said Boehner’s statement was “very encouraging” because he had finally “discarded” the Bush proposal.
“The record will show that I haven’t discarded anything,” Boehner retorted.
The Block Grant Debate
During the 108th Congress, the House passed by one vote GOP legislation that included the proposal to allow up to eight states to take over their local Head Start programs.
The administration said the proposal would help coordinate curriculum standards with elementary schools and improve test scores. Democrats and a few GOP moderates said the plan would effectively turn Head Start into a block grant program that would lose its non-academic services, such as improving nutrition or offering health care referrals.
The HELP Committee later approved a companion Head Start bill without the block grant proposal. Instead, the panel included an Alexander provision that would establish 200 “centers of excellence” across the country to help states coordinate their early childhood programs with local Head Start centers, without actually taking over the federal programs.
Senate Democrats would not allow the bill to come to the floor because they feared they would be shut out in a GOP-controlled conference committee and the state pilot project would be included in the final bill.
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