The Pity Party by William Voegeli

Author:William Voegeli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 4

HOW LIBERAL COMPASSION LEADS TO BULLSHIT

Head Start, a War on Poverty initiative, provides federal funds for preschool programs intended to prepare three- and four-year-olds from impoverished families for elementary school. Democrats constantly extol and promise to expand the program, and attack Republicans for criticizing and seeking to diminish it. The 1988 Democratic platform, for example, declared that few federal programs were more successful than Head Start.1

If that praise is accurate, all Americans should be apprehensive, liberals especially. “Head Start simply does not work,” according to Joe Klein’s summary in Time magazine of a long-term study released in 2010 by the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the program.2 The official HHS reaction to its Head Start Impact Study shed more light on why it was a failure than on how it might be improved. According to the department, the study showed that Head Start “positively influenced children’s school readiness”—but only if you tested them after they finished Head Start but before they started kindergarten. On this basis the assistant secretary for children and families declared, “Head Start has been changing lives for the better since its inception.” The department acknowledged, however, that “measured again at the end of kindergarten and first grade,” children who went through Head Start “were at the same level on many of the measures studied” as ones who did not.3

Less vaguely, the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson sifted through the study’s data to discover that when researchers gave both Head Start participants and an economically and socially similar control group of students never enrolled in the program “44 different academic tests at the end of the first grade, only two seemed to show even marginally significant advantages for the Head Start group. And even those apparent advantages vanished after standard statistical controls were applied.”4 HHS subsequently released data showing there were no latent benefits from Head Start, either, ones that manifested themselves as its graduates proceeded through their school years. Thus, by the end of the third grade children who had been enrolled in a program were no better off than those in a nonparticipating control group.5

Head Start, in other words, did a good job preparing children for school—right up until the day they started school, when it quickly became clear they were no more academically ready than children from outside the program. That HHS could, nonetheless, congratulate itself on improving the “readiness” of Head Start participants, who turned out not to be ready for the thing Head Start was supposedly getting them ready for, helps explain how a program that costs the federal government $8 billion a year, and has run up more than $180 billion in outlays since its inception in 1965, could spend so much and accomplish so little. Liberals’ speeches and editorials routinely insist Head Start must be “fully funded,” which means Congress should appropriate enough funds for the program to permit every eligible child to enroll.6 But serious concern for the program’s ostensible beneficiaries—as opposed to concern for its

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.