A Head Start They Deserve
by Lory Hough
Kristen DeAmicis, Ed.M.’05, remembers everything. The names of the kids in her class and the cubbies assigned to each young student. The lead teacher, Miss Cross, who had a soft voice. Ethel the cook. She even remembers Sharon, the bus driver with long hair and cool barrettes who picked her up every day at her house in Dennis, Mass., where she lived with her divorced mother and two siblings.
Considering all of this happened when she was three and four, it’s clear that DeAmicis has an amazing memory. But it’s also more than that: it’s a testament to the Head Start program she attended in the early 1980s, which is why she’s surprised when the federal program, up for reauthorization this year, is debated and criticized.
“I wonder how many of those critics went through programs like I did?” she says. “We’re all so focused on evaluation and showing results. The things Head Start helped me do are the things you can’t quantify on a test, like feeling confident later in school, feeling comfortable with adults, or learning how to take care of one another.” They also learned personal care like how to floss — what DeAmicis calls “survival skills.”
These are the kinds of things you can’t measure on standardized tests, such as the one that Head Start kids have been taking since 2003. Called the National Reporting System test, and promoted by the Bush administration, the test is given twice a year as a way to measure the academic progress of all four- and five-year-olds in the program. Prior to 2003, each local Head Start center conducted its own assessments. Some critics say the National Reporting System test, which includes sections on math, vocabulary, and letters, is developmentally inappropriate for young children. Others say focusing on an academic-style test shifts the focus of Head Start away from helping children learn “survival skills” or develop socially and emotionally — hallmarks of the program.
Julius Richmond, an emeritus professor at Harvard and Head Start’s first national director, wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed piece in July 2003 that this comprehensive “whole child” approach is one of the unique features of Head Start that needs to be protected.
“Health, including dental health and nutrition, are basic components” of the program, he wrote, “along with early childhood education, social services, and parent involvement. The recent attempt by the Bush administration to define Head Start as a literacy program denies the seamlessness of all aspects of the child’s early development.”
Head Start began in the summer of 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Under the direction of Sargent Shriver, then-head of Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, a task force of child development experts came up with a program that would help low-income preschoolers with school and life skills so that they didn’t show up for kindergarten far behind other children. What they came up with was Project Head Start, a pilot program that initially served half a million children for eight weeks during the summer of 1965. Today, more than 900,000 children attend 48,000 Head Start centers nationwide.
Deborah Ceglowski, Ed.M.’77, author of Inside a Head Start Center, and a supporter of the program, says there are legitimate concerns — some Head Start centers are poorly run, for instance — but instead of condemning the whole program, we should focus instead on ways to make positive change.
“One of the criticisms of Head Start is that children who attend the program make significant gains in developmental domains, particularly in the cognitive domain, but that test scores on standardized measures are still below national norms,” she says. “There are programs that are successful in raising scores of standardized measures for low-income children to the same level as the national norms. Head Start needs to re-examine its current curriculum and practices and align more closely with models that are highly successful with low-income populations.”
The program also needs to be funded properly, says Ceglowski, an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of a chapter on Head Start in the forthcoming book, Battleground School: An Encyclopedia of Controversial Issues.
“Head Start, since its inception in 1965, has been underfunded. The allocations are not adequate to provide high-quality services to all income eligible families and their children,” she says. “Current estimates are that 60 percent of income-eligible three- and four-year-old children are enrolled in the program. Income-eligible families earn incomes at or below the federal poverty guidelines, approximately $20,000 for a family of four.”
In addition, she says only 10 percent of income-eligible expectant parents or parents of infants and toddlers are enrolled in the Early Head Start program, which was created by Congress in 1994 as a way to promote prenatal health and target low-income babies until they turn three — years that are critical to brain development.
Funding is also an issue when it comes to teacher salaries, Ceglowski says. The current House version of the reauthorization bill requires that half of all Head Start teachers have bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education or a related field by 2013. By 2009, all new teachers would need to have an associate’s degree. The Senate version has similar language, but says the 50 percent mark is a goal, not a requirement.
Although improving teaching skills is essential, Ceglowski says the problem is that “there are no salary or training incentives included in the [House] bill. For Head Start to be successful in upgrading the quality of services, funds need to be available to hire and retain qualified teachers who today make an average of $26,000 a year compared to the average public school teacher’s salary of $42,000.”
When she was doing research for a paper she wrote about salaries, Ceglowski says administrators she talked to admitted that the money was bad but said it could be worse.
“Administrators were aware that salaries were low, and in [one] agency, turnover was high, 40 percent in one year, but they justified the salaries by comparing them to the even lower childcare center teacher wages,” she says.
In the Boston Globe op-ed, Richmond wrote that despite the program’s problems, Head Start has done what it was intended to do: give low-income kids what they need, early on. The program “could always be better,” he wrote, but Head Start has made a difference.
“The American people should be proud that 20 million children have graduated from the program,” he wrote. “These children have been better fed and nourished, have been properly immunized, have received appropriate medical care, have had visual and hearing assessments and treatment so that they arrive at school ready to learn, and they are less likely to need special education or to repeat a grade, representing a significant savings to the community. Head Start graduates have lower delinquency rates and go on to higher education more frequently than nongraduates.
“The stories of individual achievement are abundant,” he wrote. “Head Start graduates who are now young adults have become teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, and many other occupations. They are giving back to the community.”
DeAmicis, the Ed School’s assistant director of alumni programs, is a successful professional as an adult, in part, she says, because of the lasting impact of Head Start on her life.
“I think my positive experiences in education, experiences that were founded in Head Start, are part of the reason I feel so strongly about education and the mission of the Ed School,” she says. “Education is, in part, what has changed the course of my life and given me opportunities that would have otherwise been inconceivable. While I recognize that education is not the cure-all for all the inequities in society, I believe that programs like Head Start are essential in fighting the ‘good fight’ and in leveling the odds. I am not sure I would be where I am today without the confidence and comfort I found in school experiences like Head Start.”
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Photos by Tanit Sakakini
