Head Start, Piaget, and me

Twenty-two years after the creation of the preschool program for low-income children, its cofounder, Edward Zigler, acknowledged, "We simply cannot inoculate children in one year against the ravages of a life of deprivation." Nevertheless, Zigler remains confident that Head Start brings some benefits to the children it serves.

On average, poor children enter school with far fewer vocabulary, literacy, math, and social skills than their middle-class peers. They start off a step behind and never catch up; the gap in academic proficiency follows them to the end of their schooling.

Since 1965, taxpayers have spent more than $66 billion on Head Start to provide comprehensive health, social, educational, and mental health services to poor children. Currently, the $6.6 billion program enrolls more than 900,000 three- and four-year-olds at a cost of roughly $7,000 per pupil.

[snip]

Today, nearly four decades since Head Start was launched, the school readiness gap between poor children and their middle-class peers remains stubbornly large. On average, low-income children enter kindergarten with a vocabulary a fraction of the size of their middle-class peers'. They are also less likely to know the letters of the alphabet or even how to follow words left to right across the printed page. Nicholas Zill, vice president of Westat, a research firm, notes, "Poor kids make gains in most of the elementary schools that they go to. The gains are parallel to those of more advantaged kids, but the gap still remains."

This achievement gap persists into high school. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as the "nation's report card"), poor students score substantially lower than their middle- and upper-income peers, at all three grades--4th, 8th, and 12th--in all subjects. In math, science, and history, three to four times as many middle- and upper-income students receive "proficient" scores when compared with poor students, who are much more likely to be rated as "below basic," the lowest level on the tests.

[snip]

Westat's Zill points out:

When you look at where Head Start has been in the last few years, they've been bending over backwards to avoid literacy skills. The Piagetian slant has been very strong. The ironic thing is that most Head Start parents want their kids to learn those skills.
source:
Head Start for Poor Children?

Yup.

That's ironic, alright.

Amazing how these low income parents want their kids to learn academic content.

Amazing how pundits don't seem to be able to get this.


how politics don't work

Have I ever mentioned my theory that you don't want to see the right and the left agreeing on stuff?

Just in case I haven't, and just in case you were inclined to disagree, check this out.

David Brooks is conservative.

Politika Erotika is not conservative. (Which we know, because.... ummm ..... Politika Erotika seems to have a lot of dirty photos accompanying re-postings of New York Times op-ed columns.)

OK, now that I've offended anyone who has a defined political position (I'm sorry! I am!) I'm going to crash ahead with this......

When you've got ill-informed pundits on the right banging on about character deficits in the poor, and ill-informed bloggers on the left re-posting conservative character deficit columns in full, your goose is cooked.

Our schools, not to mention our pundits (and our bloggers), need to stop worrying about everyone's character and start worrying about teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.

And history and science.


Head Start, Piaget, and me
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