Head Start fiasco

There's nothing in Head Start A 50 Year Flop? Say It Ain’t So, Joe to surprise anyone who's followed the evaluations of compensatory education programs over the years, especially programs of the "general enrichment" type like Head Start. Head Start does get the kids seen by a doctor and a dentist, and it provides a few jobs for people in the neighborhood, but that's about it. Cognitive gains? At most a small and very temporary "hot house" effect, nothing more than that.

The only programs that showed significant gains were the ones built around an intensive focus on directly and systematically teaching specific academic skills -- but those never could get the support of liberal child advocates, who consider approaches like that to be insufficiently touchy-feely and somewhat fascistic. The fact that drill-based programs actually produced measurable results was carefully ignored. In other words the compensatory education effort, and its funding, was hijacked very early in favor of diffuse approaches that never worked, do not work, and will never work.

(Aside: In my professor days I was always surprised to find college students who didn't know their basic arithmetic facts and had to stop and figure out 7-times-9. I recall my 4th-grade teacher, Olde Miss Macalester, standing imperiously in front of the whole class loudly rapping her ruler on the desk as we drilled the multiplication tables out loud, in lockstep unison. There were some pretty stupid kids in that class, but every one of them came out knowing their multiplication tables like they knew their own name. Later a coalition of child development and mathematics experts got together and introduced math teaching based on set theory. That kind of conceptual approach was fine for kids with higher IQs and some native math ability, but the rest ended up years later puzzling over 7-times-9. The only reason for kids not learning the basic stuff is the failure to directly teach it, and that's why Head Start is a failure and why, under its misguided philosophy it always will be.)   

Byron