HEAD START: NOT ENOUGH
Grant, Gerald
HEAD START: not enogh by GERALD GRANT " A MERICANS are such manic depres sives. First Head Start was a brilliant success. Now it's a complete failure." Thus did a high official in the...
...HEAD START: not enogh by GERALD GRANT " A MERICANS are such manic depres sives...
...Nearly two years ago, when Head Start was just getting off the ground, Dr...
...The blame for the spotty health care also lies partly with the Federal anti-poverty agency...
...But there was then an almost fanatical fervor in Washington about Head Start...
...Nearly ninety per cent had not had measles vaccine, for instance, and as many as forty per cent of the children had cavities or poorly formed teeth...
...one night asking them to report the next morning to War on Poverty headquarters to review applications for Head Start grants that were pouring in from all parts of the country...
...In the long run, Head Start's massive follow-up "failure" may be just the jolt the nation needed to realize the magnitude of the changes that are demanded in the schools in the slums...
...Such simple steps as making convenient appointments for Head Start mothers and providing baby sitters for younger children were often all that was needed, he said...
...Though the lack of follow-through and year-round continuation of Head Start is disturbing, it still does not justify a mood of public depression, nor the conclusion that the hundreds of millions expended for Head Start were wasted...
...North blames the failure on "institutional and bureaucratic inertia, especially in the large cities...
...To speed things up even more, college students and other part-time employes boarded planes on Friday afternoons, their briefcases packed with Head Start application forms, and winged to local outposts of the anti-poverty war to talk to church groups and school officials about putting in a bid to open a Head Start center...
...The creation of such a huge national program in six months was no small achievement and one which few believed could have been duplicated through traditional school channels...
...This goal was cut to 350,000 the first year (with about half that number actually enrolled) and to 187,000 this year...
...Now, however, research findings have come to light confirming all too clearly what Deutsch had predicted two years earlier...
...It demonstrated that concentration of funds and services—resulting in almost double the average per pupil cost—was justified in terms of the gains that could be achieved...
...We must be concerned with what will happen to the children after their preschool experience, and therefore must engage in systematic attempts to plan programs for them...
...Originally it was hoped that half a million children might continue in the year-round programs...
...Children were tested at the begin ning and end of their Head Start ex perience...
...Dr...
...Frederick North, senior pediatrician for Head Start...
...But he observes that it is highly probable that gains will fade if Head Start youngsters graduate to crowded kindergarten classrooms in the slums...
...There was a wide range of other disorders, from adenoids to heart trouble...
...What we need desperately is long-range planning, research, and model experimentation in order to anticipate the problems of school organization with relationship to these children throughout their school experience, and to plan programs on every grade level...
...Deutsch was highly skeptical about Head Start, and he said so in a memorandum dated March 18, 1965, that was circulated in the Administration: "Operation Head Start is an 'instant' program with wonderful, wholly acceptable objectives," Deutsch wrote, "but one which has not been, as yet, sufficiently thought through, planned for, or effectively organized...
...It was also the major proving ground for the idea that the poor could be trained to work in the schools as teacher aides...
...He argues that "we do not yet have the data proving conclusively that Head Start benefits fade away...
...the Administration has proposed a $135 million "Follow-Through" program...
...Physicians found an exceptionally high rate of iron deficiency anemia...
...Ordinary medical care simply had not been offered to most of these children in the past...
...At the end of the first summer, there was practically no follow-up medical treatment provided, according to Dr...
...Head Start remains the biggest lever for change that has ever been pried under the American schoolhouse...
...The pace was so frantic that teachers who were on the substitute teaching lists for the District of Columbia's public schools received calls as late as ten p.m...
...Edmund Gordon of Yeshiva University, estimates that perhaps half the youngsters needing medical treatment were referred to follow-up agencies and that twenty to thirty per cent had their treatment completed...
...This year improvements have been made but the "data that we have is rather like the care of the poor child, fragmented, discontinuous, and often not too well recorded...
...Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner, an expert in child development research at Cornell University, challenges some of the conclusions drawn by these researchers, based upon a close analysis of the data they have gathered...
...Gordon sees "no solution except a national program of health care for these children . . . there's got to be an aggressive program with almost the same kind of insistence on treatment as we demand educationally by compulsory school attendance...
...of about ninety to the middle or average range of nearly 100, though usually short of the scores most middle-class children enter school with...
...To keep the momentum of the Federal preschool program moving into the early elementary school grades, GERAtD GRANT is national education writer for The Washington Post...
...Glowing tributes to the beneficent educational effects of Head Start were not long in coming...
...It is even possible," Deutsch concluded, "that some children will be so disappointed with the contrast between their original experiences in a rich environment, and the typical slum schools to which they graduate, that their performance levels will deteriorate further...
...But more of the blame lies with local school officials and Congress...
...The manic feelings about Head Start grew out of early and somewhat inflated claims about what the program had accomplished...
...Head Start's research director, Dr...
...Big objectives require money, but they also require more than just money...
...Martin Deutsch, one of the nation's leading experts on preschool education, warned of the unhappy consequences of the lack of follow-through...
...Thus did a high official in the Johnson Administration ruefully sum up the prevailing mood about what was once billed as the brightest victory of the War on Poverty...
...And Congress never provided the funds to continue Head Start on a year-round basis through the anti-poverty agency...
...In other cases, Dr...
...Perhaps most importantly, Head Start set new standards for the schools...
...Spurred by the depressing research findings, President Johnson has given Head Start follow-through programs high priority in the Ninetieth Congress...
...f Baltimore's Head Start program was rated one of the best in the country, yet a follow-up study disclosed that children's intellectual gains declined as the year progressed, although they maintained a small lead in vocabulary skills...
...Launched that spring of 1965 with the goal of reaching 100,000 four to six-year-olds, Head Start snowballed so rapidly that by summer's end more than 560,000 children were enrolled for six and eight week sessions...
...In Washington, D.C., for instance, 7,551 children attended Head Start classes last summer, but less than ten per cent of that number were enrolled in year-round programs...
...f Max Wolff and Annie Stein of Yeshiva University found in their study of New York City Head Start children that academic gairte disappeared six to eight months later although some of the "social and emotional" benefits remained...
...He charges that in some cases public health departments "refused to allow their examining doctors to treat even the minor defects discovered, thus creating a need for cumbersome and often unsuccessful referral systems...
...about a third of the children were affected...
...It should have moved earlier to strengthen its guidelines to require sound health care follow-up before handing over funds to local agencies...
...The revolution in the use of mothers and other "amateurs" in a wide variety of subprofessional jobs in the schools today can be traced in large part to Head Start...
...The results showed that with a lively curriculum, sympathetic care, and small classes (one teacher or aide for every five children), youngsters could make surprising gains on standardized intelligence tests...
...The Baltimore study, by David A. Wallers and C. Keith Conners of the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, concluded that "without an attempt to maintain the benefits acquired from such a program, the opportunity for instituting significant and enduring changes will not be realized, and the promise of the head start afforded these children will go unfulfilled...
...As director of the Institute for Developmental Studies, now affiliated with New York University, Dr...
...As those first 560,000 Head Start children enter kindergarten and first grade classrooms in the fall of 1965, local school officials also were receiving nearly a billion dollars under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act for the schooling of deprived children...
...The same could be said for the educational aspects of the program...
...The depression set in this winter when long-term evaluations became public confirming what some skeptics had feared in the beginning: that for many children it would be a fast Head Start and a quick finish as the educational and health benefits were washed away through lack of follow-through...
...But less than seven per cent of it went into programs to continue Head Start-style operations and these rarely maintained Head Start's high standards...
...As unsettling to some as the lack of educational follow-through has been the spotty treatment of medical and dental ills uncovered by Head Start...
...About, ninety per cent of all children in Head Start had a medical examination...
...Deutsch had run for several years, in Harlem and the Lower East Side of New York, a number of successful demonstrations of what could be done for youngsters in the slums if their schooling were begun at age three...
...Bronfenbrenner says there are some indications that when Head Start youngsters enter good middle-class kindergartens, the gains are maintained...
...One major accomplishment of Head Start is that it dramatically cast the spotlight on the importance of the preschool years in a way that no program had done before...
...There is some evidence that children who do get a 'head start' which has no follow-up momentum will return to their original failure levels...
...North adds, local agencies blamed mothers for "apathy" when investigation would show that few efforts were made to help mothers bring their children to treatment centers...
...The following findings indicate that the quick intellectual gains were wiped out as children moved into the more typical watered-down kindergarten and first grade programs: H In Camden, New Jersey, children who were enrolled in an eight-week Head Start program scored no higher at the end of the kindergarten year than other deprived children who had not been enrolled in Head Start...
...Gains ranged from eight up to an occasional nineteen points, enough to boost children from the so-called "dull normal" I.Q...
...Dr...
Vol. 31 • March 1967 • No. 3
