Besharov and Call: Fact and Fiction

I have taught pre-k for
12 years--a state funded program for 5 years and Head Start for the
past 7 years. In that time, I have found many folks who don’t
see the benefits of Head Start. If they only spent some time in a
classroom they would see its benefits firsthand, but until that
happens, we will have to settle for policy debates like this pot shot
of Obama’s preschool plans from conservative scholars, Douglas
Besharov and Douglas Call in the New
York Times.

The problem with
an article like this is that it confuses facts and truth. In trying to
say that by supporting pre-k, President Obama is supporting a failed
enterprise, Besharov and Call twist the facts into a form that looks
scary but that is ultimately brittle and falls apart under close
scrutiny. I
will address each of Besharov and Call's points. Some of this will be
from experience, some research, some from facts."After
spending six months in Head Start, 4-year-olds on average could
identify only two more letters than children from similar backgrounds
not in the program; 3-year-olds could identify one and a half more
letters." There is no reference for this claim. It is
true that children begin to blossom in language and literacy during
the 4 year old year. Teaching students to recognize letters at 3
years old is not necessarily a developmentally appropriate practice,
although I have successfully taught 14 out of 17 three year olds to
recognize all capital, lower case, and letter sounds in 9 months so
that we could begin reading in the 4 year old year. The study in the article was
conducted with 4600 students, likely in community based Head Start
classrooms. The 6 months could have been over the summer, or from
September to February. The federally recognized reading curriculum
put into place with the National Reporting System did not call for
students to begin learning letter identification until after about 4
months. The real falsehood of the claim is that Head Start students
learned to identify "two more letters than children from similar
backgrounds not in the program." It does not tell us if these
students were in a state funded program, high-quality day care, or
staying home with their mother.

The article also
mentions the National
Reporting System, the accountability tool put into
place by the Bush administration to de-fund Head Start. Sadly, (for
opponents of Head Start) Head Start classrooms all over the country
passed the NRS just fine even though the measure was found to be
unreliable as a measurement tool. From personal experience, I know
that the assessment asked students to tell the meaning of different
vocabulary words in the Fall than it did in the Spring and that
teachers never knew what would be on the assessment from one
administration session to another including from pre-test to post
test.

The implied assumption
when you read the above statement about letter acquisition is that
these students only learned 2 or 3 letters when they most likely
learned 20 - 24 letters and their peers learned 18 - 22 letters.
Counting letters aside, the real focus of Head Start is helping
families out of poverty. Bickering over numbers of letters will not
shed any light on how many families were able to go to work knowing
their children were learning how to read, how many parents entered
and or completed their GED or how many families were able to receive
health services that wouldn't have received them if they weren’t
in Head Start. One of the biggest impacts that Head Start has is on
families' ability to locate resources to help their families out of
poverty. Head Start is primarily a social service program,
not an education program. Even though the direct benefits to the
child are great, there are also significant benefits for families and
communities. "From 1997 to 2004, even as Congress
gave Head Start enough money to increase enrollment by 22 percent,
the number of children in the program increased by only 2
percent." I am not sure where these numbers came from
but Head Start had been flat funded since 2000 until its re-authorization in 2008. This time period also saw the creation and
implementation of Early Head Start, a program that supports at-risk
pregnant mothers and their young children up to 3 years old. In
2004-2005, there were about 97,000 children in Head Start and 93,000
children in Early Head Start. Head Start almost doubled the number of
students they were serving while only increasing costs by 22 percent.
Not bad for a social program. "So many poor families now
use other programs that Head Start has, for all practical purposes,
run out of poor 4-year-olds to serve. Rather than try to make the
program more attractive to families, Head Start advocates persuaded
Congress in late 2007 to raise the income eligibility ceiling, from
essentially the poverty line to 130 percent of poverty."According
to the National
Head Start Association, in 2004-2005 the program
served 45 percent of children eligible for Head Start. The increase
in the eligibility level is to accommodate for the lessened value of
the dollar. Many families within 130% are still poor and needing the
comprehensive services Head Start provides. "Lack of
money is not the problem: to keep a child in Head Start full-time,
year-round, costs about $22,600, as opposed to an average cost of
$9,500 in a day care center." This is blatantly not
true. According to Steven Barnett of the National Institute for Early
Education Research (NIEER), Head Start student costs about $8000
dollars a year. In fact, Head Start is often funded with kind
donations of local communities. High quality day care is more
expensive than $9,500 a year. Day care can cost between $6,000 and
$20,000 per year. The difference is that you often get what you pay
for in terms of private day care. Besharov is a scholar
associated with the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative
think tank that came to prominence during the Bush Administration.
Members of the organization have included Newt
Gingrich, Paul
Wolfowitz,  John
Bolton, and Lynne
Cheney.
Skewing of facts on either side of the pre-k debate is not about
helping kids, it is about helping an argument. An article like this
really seems to be preaching to a chior that already supports the
dominant ideas expressed in it. However, for better or worse, that
chior left Washington D.C. on January 20th, 2009.