My friend E. J. Dionne Jr., a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, is a fine man with, I feel safe in asserting, a warm heart. But he betrays in a recent column a persistent failing of the Left — imperviousness to evidence.
Describing Speaker Boehner’s tactics in the budget fights with Democrats, Dionne wrote:
Begin with the outrageous $1.1 billion, 15 percent cut from Head Start, a program that offers preschool education to roughly 965,000 poor children. According to the Center for Law and Public Policy, this would knock 218,000 kids out of Head Start and force 16,000 classrooms to close. That is an excellent way to lose the future, as Obama ought to be saying. What could be a better use of public money than helping our poorest children early in life so they might achieve more in school, and later?
Like most liberals, Dionne is enchanted with the idea of Head Start — the romance of a government program that would provide care, nutrition, education, and skills to impoverished preschoolers in order to erase, to the degree possible, the handicaps poverty imposes. That was the idea in 1965, when Head Start was founded. Lyndon Johnson, upon signing the enabling bill, declared, “Today we reach out to five and half million children held behind their more fortunate schoolmates by the dragging anchor of poverty.” Head Start, he promised, would be their “passport” out.
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It would have been worth the $166 billion taxpayers have spent on the program since 1965 if a significant portion of Head Start alumni did improve their educational outcomes and escape poverty. But that did not happen.
As any number of studies have demonstrated over the years, the effects of Head Start are modest to nugatory. Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom chronicled the failure in No Excuses. One study found that Head Start students were slightly more likely to be immunized than others — a good thing of course, but a) not primarily what the program was sold as, and b) achievable far more cheaply through other programs like Medicaid. A 1969 study found that any gains participants displayed faded away in the early grades. By third grade, Head Start graduates were indistinguishable from their non-participating classmates. Rather than scrap the program, President Nixon (a sheep in wolf’s clothing where domestic policy was concerned) concluded that “Head Start must begin earlier in life, and last longer, to achieve lasting benefits.”
Later surveys showed similarly dismal results. By 1987, even the program’s founder, Yale psychologist Edward F. Zigler, declined to claim educational benefits for the program. But as the Thernstroms concluded, “Everyone could agree that poverty was hard on blameless children, so any federal effort purporting to help them was difficult to attack without seeming mean-spirited.”
That remains true, as witness Mr. Dionne.
A just-released study by the Department of Health and Human Services delivers incredibly harsh news about Head Start. A large, nationwide survey of 4,600 preschoolers who were randomly assigned to either Head Start (experimental group) or no program (control group) were studied on 114 different measures ranging from academic skills to social/emotional development to health status. The study found no statistically relevant effects from the Head Start program by the end of first grade.
If a study falls in the forest and the major news organizations fail to report it, does it make a sound? Hardly a whimper. A few conservative websites like Heritage, Cato, and the Independent Women’s Forum noted the results, but elsewhere all was silence. Or, not silence actually; complete denial. President Obama had boosted funding for Head Start from $6.8 billion in 2008 to $9.2 billion in 2009. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius and Education Secretary Arne Duncan support even greater “investments” in the failed program in the future. Study? What study?
According to Douglas Besharov of the University of Maryland, it costs $22,600 annually to keep a child in a year-round Head Start program. Typical preschools run about $9,500. But the price simply doesn’t matter. The lack of results doesn’t matter. The only thing that seems to matter is that liberals be able to preen about their compassion — oh yes, and condemn anyone not impervious to evidence as heartless.
Mona, I love you, but EJ is anything but a "fine man with a warm heart." He's a leftist water carrying Obama sycophant state run journolist, who aids and abets the most corrupt regime to ever occupy Washington.
I attended HeadStart and I can definitively tell you I don't remember anything about it other than that I attended it. My kids have never been to daycare or preschool, yet they can speak, can read and do basic math before they even got to kindergarten. They learned it by watching Spongebob Squarepants, Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, and Avatar: The Last Airbender (among many other kids' shows).
The purpose of HeadStart wasn't to help children; it was a means to implement an ever-increasing bureaucratic program. Ironic that it is called "HeadStart". Government expands at the expense of liberty.
It is no more than hundreds of bad day care centers with the theme of helping children. How much waste is there beyond the Fed's outlay? Transporting children to central locations with no windmill to support this oil application? Wear and tear on our streets, fire, police, etc. resources? LBJ, Obama, JFK, Harry, FDR, The Bent One, Cahtah, -- and the list goes on.
Liberal planners and their enablers don't learn anything from the actual results of their endless planning. Planners plan in spite of the results of their plans. The failure of their plans only teachs the planners their plans were thwarted by some other seemingly unrelated events or simply weren't all encompassing to begin with. Consider the fact that we read, see or listen to virtually no commentary pointing out that dogs bark. Perhaps that's because most of us recognize that barking is simply what dogs do. Central planners plan, irrespective of further study or analysis of this fact by the rest of us.
History has demonstrated repeatedly that liberals will enact any policy on behalf of "the poor" except those that might help people out of poverty. Why this is any suprise to anybody at all is surprising to me.
Squint your eyes and look at these first few comments in toto.
They collectively scream: "Bad motive!"
What is it about conservative philosophy that can't even get to "Well-meaning but wrong-headed"? Why does the Left have to be mean-spirited, corrupt or power-mad in the eyes of conservatives?
To my mind, there are two possible answers: reality and transference. By the first, I mean that the Right has accurately perceived the Left as largely a bunch of mean-spirited, corrupt and power hungry people. By the second, I mean that the Right feels a little guilty about something and tries to tag the Left with character flaws that the Right truly owns.
My goodness, MikeB -- the entire article is about being well-meaning but wrong-headed, at least on Dionne's part. But we ask ourselves what is it that drives the wrong-headedness. There has to be a motive. The answer, some say, is corruption etc.
And instead of using evidence to demonstrating that the previous comments are erroneous, you simply assert that the character flaws are the conservatives' flaws. What, pray tell, is mean-spirited, corrupt or power-hungry about exposing failed programs that waste money -- and in the process freeing up billions of dollars for productive uses?
Why is it that liberal so much tend to deflect conversations away from the issue at hand, like my liberal friend who, even when I agree with one of his positions, somehow manages turn even that agreement into an attack on Fox News? Sigh ...
"Why does the Left have to be mean-spirited, corrupt or power-mad in the eyes of conservatives?"
Perhaps because they are mean-spirited, corrupt and power-mad? How else to explain describing as "outrageous" a plan to cut a program that has been proven to be ineffectual and have no bearing on a child's development? Indeed, after expanding spending by trillions, Democrats are complaining about cuts in the ten billions. If that isn't evidence of mean-spiritedness, corruption and power madness I don't know what is.
1. Apparently Head Start doesn't help much, if at all.
2. Head Start actually costs $8 billion a year, or $7,300 per student, so even if it's just viewed as government-run daycare, at least it's cost-effective from that standpoint.
3. What would Republicans do about millions of preschool-age, low-income kids?
MikeB: To take your rhetorical questions seriously, the reason why conservatives tend to see liberal motivation as "mean spirited, corrupt and power mad" is out of respect. It is rather condescending to describe a political opponent as well intentioned but mistaken. It makes infants of them. It is more respectful to assume your opponent can see the ghastly consequences of liberal policies but finds them acceptable. Conservatives are astounded that liberals can be obtuse to the abuses of a social program like welfare. Aside from the ruinous expense to the taxpayer, it has demoralized generations of minority recepients and made them dependant on the State. A conservative cannot help but notice that the situation does actual harm to the recipient but benefits the liberal politician. Who can blame the conservative if he draws an unflattering conclusion about the liberal's character? As H.L. Mencken observed: "If A harms B under the pretense of helping C, A is a scoundrel."
"3. What would Republicans do about millions of preschool-age, low-income kids?"
Let them watch Nickelodeon, NickJr, Nicktoons, Disney XD, Teen Disney, Cubo, hub, play videogames, and use the internet. Reading the millions of children's books and buying the millions of activity books won't hurt either. :P
Don't worry: with 85% penetration for both cable and satellite, chances are one of those low-income families can afford cable and satellite and to buy children's books and activity books.
MikeB, the calculation you provide of $7,300 per student does not take into account part time versus full time participation. I didn't check the numbers but Besharov calculated his number of $22,600 as a year round cost. That is a distinction that likely will change your math. If a child is in Head Start for a week or for just part time I am sure that the government would count them.
Tacitus, good point, but apparently the difference between the two figures has to do with the fact that HeadStart isn't a full year program in many cases, and Besharov also folds into the cost certain services (food, medical care) that aren't really HeadStart but that you might like to have furnished to kids.
As others have correctly observed, Head Start is government-subsidized day care.
The problem is, how can government demand that women work at low-paying jobs without providing the day care required? The cost of private day care would make the rest of life unaffordable.
One previous post argues that the problem can be ignored: "Why is it the Republicans job to find daycare for people who can't afford the kids they choose to have?" Any politician making that argument would be excoriated.
There are better solutions like intact families and fewer children. But those are future hopes.
Better now to acknowledge what Head Start does, and make the program as cost-effective as possible. Unfortunately it can't be made to disappear as another failed example of good-heartedness.
MikeB, I guess I have a hard time reconciling the social concerns of the left with their actions. Like the president's proposal of capping the charitable contribution deduction for the wealthy. According to a study referenced from the University of Indianna, it could reduce charitable given by several billion dollars a year.
I guess it's all good when it's the federal government spending our money on their causes but not a wealthy american. Just gotta have that boogy man, regardless of who loses.
MikeB: My wacky answer assumes that people-especially smart people- can see the results of their own policies. As for Mencken, any journalist who fought so hard against the wretched excesses of FDR and his administration can't be all bad.
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