HEAD START….IS NOT
By John Stossel 2.17.10
Consider Head Start, which politicians view as sacred. The $166 billion program is 45 years old, so it’s had time to prove itself. But guess what: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found no difference in first-grade test results between kids who went through Head Start and similar kids who didn’t. President Obama has repeatedly promised to “eliminate programs that don’t work,” but he wants to give Head Start a billion more dollars. The White House wouldn’t explain this contradiction to me.
Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Reform, said, “If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true.”
Choice works, and government monopolies don’t. How much more evidence do we need?
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My take:
This should prove that lots of tax $$$ and time cannot overcome awful parental values…should prove…but the “excuse police” are also the “avoid reality police. Free meals and babysitting are great vote-getters so do not expect the demo-socialists to act on real data over decades.
As I repeat often…”parents have only one job…to send a respectful child willing to learn to school”…and a high percentage fail.
Also teachers prefer respect and strong support for discipline plus less paperwork over a raise…they just never get that choice.

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