EXCERPTS
Few other federal programs so fully embody the heady optimism and charge-ahead spirit of the War on Poverty as Head Start, envisioned 50 years ago as part of that sweeping presidential initiative and brought to life in the summer of 1965.
"Five- and 6-year-old children are inheritors of poverty's curse and not its creators," President Lyndon B. Johnson said in a May 1965 speech in the White House Rose Garden, announcing the creation of a federally funded preschool program for the nation's poorest children. "Unless we act, these children will pass it on to the next generation, like a family birthmark."
But the seeds of questions that Head Start has faced throughout its history were in many ways contained in its ambitious beginning.
Launched as an eight-week demonstration program with more than half a million children, Project Head Start would be expanded to a full-year program three months later. Over its nearly half-century in existence, the program has touched more than 31 million infants, toddlers, and other young children by wrapping them and their families in social, educational, and health supports intended to put them on a path out of poverty.
The program was ramped up so quickly, though, that there was no mechanism for carefully evaluating the community groups charged with providing the services at the heart of its broad mandate. Head Start and local school districts had an uneasy relationship in those early days, each keeping the other at arm's length as a result of political conflicts and differing missions.
And the biggest challenge of all: answering the ongoing question of whether the program succeeds in giving poor children the boost they need to be successful in school and later in life. Congressionally mandated studies of Head Start children have found that by early elementary school, they are academically indistinguishable from their peers who did not attend the program-a reason to drastically revamp or even discontinue the program, experts say.
Those who work in Head Start argue that problems attributed to Head Start are more properly the responsibility of the schools children attend once they leave the program. And those studies are sampling only a small part of the life of a child, overlooking the diplomas earned, the criminal records avoided, and the improved life prospects that come from being a Head Start child.
"Let's look at the whole picture here. We're looking at a snapshot and calling it everything, and I call that a little crazy," said Vanessa Rich, the deputy commissioner for children and youth services for the city of Chicago and the current chairwoman of the National Head Start Association, an advocacy group for providers, based in Alexandria, Va.
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