Posted on 01/28/2010 5:54:30 PM PST by neverdem
Head Start, the most sacrosanct federal education program, doesn't work.
That's the finding of a sophisticated study just released by President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services.
Created in 1965, the comprehensive preschool program for 3- and 4-year olds and their parents is meant to narrow the education gap between low-income students and their middle- and upper-income peers. Forty-five years and $166 billion later, it has been proven a failure.
The bad news came in the study released this month: It found that, by the end of the first grade, children who attended Head Start are essentially indistinguishable from a control group of students who didn't.
What's so damning is that this study used the best possible method to review the program: It looked at a nationally representative sample of 5,000 children who were randomly assigned to either the Head Start ("treatment") group or to the non-Head Start ("control") group.
Random assignment is the "gold standard" of medical and social-science research: It gives investigators confidence that the treatment and control groups are essentially identical in every respect except their access to Head Start. So if eventual test performances differ, we can be pretty sure that the difference was caused by the program. No previous study of Head Start used this approach on a nationally representative sample of children.
When the researchers gave both groups of students 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.
In fact, not a single one of the 114 tests administered to first graders -- of academics, socio-emotional development, health care/health status and parenting practice -- showed a reliable, statistically significant effect from participating in Head...
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“More proof that government CANNOT take the place of decent parents.”
the problem is that many of these kids don’t have educated parents
No way this program will ever stop. Politicians dont care that it does not work.
Look for a several billion dollar increase in funding soon.
The obvious solution is to spend more money on it. /dummiecrat
rofl!!
But that across the board decline is not simply Head Start. It is the the fact that at the same time Head Start began, the Federal Government inserted its very wide and totally incompetent ass into primary education -- setting rules, regulations, and kissing the ass of every educational union lobbyist and corrupt 'consultant' they could find as opposed to caring about education. (See Bill Ayres -- every illiterate we graduate is a victory for that rotten commie.)
Why should we be surprised that the system is screwed when a corrupt Congress and Federal bureaucracy try to dictate stuff they know nothing about.
So has Charles Murray, author of the excellent book, “The Bell Curve.”
Exactly. Charles Murray goes over all this data in great detail in “The Bell Curve.”
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