Pre-school in Texas

Get them while they’re young

An experiment with national consequences

See article

Readers' comments



Paul Marks in reply to supamark

The "positive effect" fades by the time the child has left school - that is the point I was making.

Not that a young child does not show any improvement from "Head Start" - but that by the time the child has left school (is not a child anymore) there is no difference between those who had "Head Start" and those that did not.

Rob S in reply to WXSWIAF

I read the executive summary of the book, WXS, and found that the focus was on the characterization of the problem. There were suggestions made as how to ameliorate the problems, but I saw no evidence presented that the approaches proposed here would be any more successful than HeadStart was.

The authors did suggest that charter schools had a positive impact, but that approach is clearly unacceptable:
1. It does not create a pre-school bureaucracy.
2. It weakens the power of the public school establishment.
3.It spends less money, not more.

We have to keep our priorities straight.

Rob S in reply to supamark

I note (again) that you neglect to spell out the long term improvements in education performance. And why so shy?

The stated purpose of HeadStart (and the program promoted here) is to reduce the learning gap between disadvantaged children and their peers.

Does the "Final Thoughts" on the page you refer to (not "executive summary") state that this was accomplished? No, it does not. The real "Overall Summary" states the opposite, on page iv-v. The authors found some positive social impact (and some negative results) but no significant long term improvements in education.

More grasping at straws. The lobbyists for the education industry are as persistent as any other lobby group and will say anything to protect the financial interests of their clients.

supamark in reply to Rob S

Dude, there are multiple links in the story to the information.

Also, in the final thoughts section of the HHS study you posted it says, "The study shows that providing access to Head Start led to improvements in the quality of the early childhood settings and programs children experienced. On nearly every measure of quality traditionally used in early childhood research, the Head Start group had more positive experiences than those in the control group."

I starting to think you suffer from cognitive dissonance...

Rob S in reply to Dialectic18

Ha ha ha ha

The contorted efforts to explain away and ignore unpleasant data have now reached the point of total absurdity.

Dialectic provides us with a parody of the education establishment. I rest my case.

Rob S in reply to Dialectic18

No, I did not forget it, I ignored it as irrelevant. Head Start was never established to "have a positive impact on children’s preschool experiences" or have a "positive impacts on several aspects of children’s school readiness during their time in the program." or have the claimed impact on 3 and 4 year old children.

Head Start was advertized as a tool to reduce the gap observed in school year children. That gap was not reduced. The program failed to meet its stated objective.

I ask the question of those of you who are so determined to ignore the results of this study as to why you want to persist? Is there anything in the article that refers to the failures of the Headstart program and how they will be remedied? All that is said is that there are some right wing conspiracy, completely neglecting the negative data.

Given that you, the writer of this article and the promoters of this scheme want to push ahead, neglecting past failures, I can only conclude that this activity is driven by its only identifiable success - the success in increasing the size of our already bloated education system - more classes, more teachers, more administrators.

It would be interesting to see an audit of this program. How many of those employed will actually teach in the classroom. My guess is that it will be about 50%, with those outside of the classroom having the higher salaries.

Rob S in reply to Omricon

The research to date on pre-school education shows it had no significant long term impact. You are over-generalizing other research carried out on other situations. This discussion is specifically about pre-school education.

"Some people are so stuck in their ideology that they are incapable of admitting that they were wrong. "

It is better to base decisions on data than ideological principles.

Rob S in reply to supamark

And don't confuse hypothesis with theory. Deming's theories were backed up by rigorous statistical analysis and by experience. It DID work for many cases.

The concept of early learning is a hypothesis. There is, as yet, no significant data to demonstrate that it works. All we have are explanations as to why it hasn't worked.

Rob S in reply to supamark

"(FYI, oriental refers to things, not people)"
Is that some recent PC ruling, supamark? Hard to keep up. Perhaps you need to provide us with a link to this update. Dictionaries (also out of date) refer to "Orientals" as people from the Orient.

So much for irrelevant quibbling. Can we get to the point?

Orientals/Asians I know associate the relatively poor performance of "American" students (they identify later generation Orientals as "American") with a lack of supervision by their parents. To them, it almost always has the desired results, lame excuses by the losers ignored.

Rob S in reply to Melissia

A strange conclusion from a simple assertion that the need for day-care (claimed by the poster I responded to) could be met by hiring people to provide day care.

And, coincidently, a wrong conclusion.

Rob S

I wonder if the promoters of this program have ever heard of the "Hawthorne Effect". Education innovations always seem to work when tried out by a highly motivated team working under careful supervision, in small numbers. But when these innovations are expanded for use by a large system, the purported advantages somehow fade away. Head Start, like this program had pilot studies that showed its value.

Rob S in reply to TexasJ

Affluent two income families spend their money in many ways to flaunt their wealth. Does any of this spending have a positive impact on the education of their children? I would say none of them do.

In Silicon Valley, such parents are considered a joke by single-income Oriental families, with children who dominate the classrooms.

Rob S in reply to Dialectic18

Only in the minds of liberals such as Dialectic would the LACK of improvement in education outcomes be rejected as an inadequate test of the value of a program. Instead, he changes the subject from the poor performance of past efforts in pre-school education to a rant against right wingers.



Products and events


Take our weekly news quiz to stay on top of the headlines

