Educating Our Youngest Citizens

Abstract

ANYONE who has spent even a little bit of time with a 3- or 4-year-old knows that young children are miniature learning machines. They seem to have an endless capacity to explore, to tinker with things, and to fill the time with their own fantasies, explanations for phenomena, and questions. Their awareness is developmental, researchers confirm. Like the constructivist learning that is fostered in formal schools, their new knowledge develops naturally from what they already know. Their brains, tiny sponges that absorb everything in the early months, are still maturing rapidly, and the experiences of these young children have an impact on how effectively their brains are wired. Most educators are familiar with this area of brain research, and most parents have an intuitive understanding of it. Without the benefit of such scientific research, though, almost 40 years ago, the pioneering Head Start program also put together principles for early childhood development, largely by means of intuition. From the beginning, the Head Start approach was comprehensive and family-oriented. The architects of the program showed an awareness of all the sensory influences on both the social and intellectual growth of young children. They also knew that the family must provide most of these early experiences. So the developers designed Head Start to rely on the creation of good feelings between parents and the programs so that children would have better chances to succeed in school. While much of the debate over the reauthorization of Head Start has focused on governance -- who will control the program and fund it -- the fear of proponents of the program, which serves almost 900,000 poor children, is that the proposed changes would upset the relationships that have meant so much to those served by Head Start. In an earlier column on this subject, I criticized the Bush Administration's move to evaluate Head Start programs on the basis of pre- and posttests of cognitive readiness. Not only are assessment tools for this age group still in the developmental stage themselves, but such a change also narrows Head Start's focus to just one of its goals, cognitive development. And the use of test results alone to decide whether to continue the support of particular Head Start programs can be seen as threatening and certainly undermines the ability of Head Start to develop trust with poor families. This test-based accountability is just another vestige of the one-model-fits-all attitude of the Texans who are in charge of our national education policy. Theirs is a model that apparently hasn't helped improve Texas' SAT scores; the 2003 scores were worse than five years ago and placed Texas near the bottom of the list of all states. To be fair, federal officials do have some statistics on their side that question the effectiveness of Head Start in preparing poor children for academic work in regular school. Compared to similar children not served by Head Start, those who have participated in the program do better on measures of vocabulary, letter recognition, early writing, and early math. In none of these areas, however, do they get out of the lowest quartile. Yet the Bush Administration's focus on a more rigorous curriculum for Head Start reflects the narrow, utilitarian view of education that the K-12 system is now grappling with across the country. Some of the other issues that arose in the debate about Head Start in Congress can be resolved without much controversy. Greater collaboration among state and federal programs would be welcome. (The General Accounting Office found 69 federal programs in nine agencies serving children under 5 years old.) No one disputes the need for better teachers or for successful Head Start programs to share their practices with others. …