THAT VARIATION on a cheery refrain could be the pint-sized equivalent of the pep rallies some schools hold on the eve of state test day. Go get those scores, kids! Attack those bubble sheets! Remember the tricks we told you! The Bush Administration will begin testing all students in Head Start programs next September, not just to find out who needs to learn how to hold a book right side up but to decide whether a Head Start center should continue to be funded. (The director denies this, while also criticizing the failure of Head Start to properly prepare youngsters for reading readiness.) Each year the pre- and posttests will provide data for making such decisions. Certainly, a problem exists. When youngsters enter kindergarten, the gap in cognitive skills is already evident between those from low-income homes and those from middle- and higher-income homes, according to the first results of a longitudinal study of young children that makes use of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). New kindergartners also come with different experiences, including good and poor Head Start programs, good and poor home care, and good and poor child-care facilities. President Bush's Good Start, Grow Smart initiative, which includes the Head Start testing, is aimed at bringing standards to this disparate field. In a few months, all states must have early learning guidelines aligned to their K-12 standards. Early grants for Reading First are taking the recently promoted national curriculum in reading (let's be frank about the matter) to lower levels of schooling, and there is some speculation that the early learning guidelines developed by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (which is responsible for federal child care and Head Start) will push the reading agenda widely into preschool experiences. Despite the understandable goal of ensuring that all children are ready to learn, this top-down strategy is troubling. Like the test-based accountability in No Child Left Behind, the context is missing. A very complex environment that is as much about values as about specific skills is being reduced to a test, to a common curriculum. And that reduction is minimizing other factors that ought to be part of the conversation, especially the conversation about young children. Why is no one concerned that the Bush Administration plans to cut Head Start and child-care funding, even though fewer than half of eligible children currently have access to Head Start programs? Would that federal officials were as concerned about the background of Head Start teachers as they are about the performance of the children. Most Head Start teachers have only a high school diploma and earn about half the salary of a kindergarten teacher. The low pay and high turnover rates in child-care programs for the poor exacerbate the unevenness of the playing field and so compound the differences in support received by children in low- and higher-income families. Why is so little attention being paid to differences in income as the dominant reason why there are differences in reading readiness? The study of NCES data, being conducted by Valerie Lee and David Burkam of the University of Michigan, found that race and ethnicity, family makeup, and home expectations for education account for far less variation in the readiness scores of kindergartners than does socioeconomic status. Another interesting statistic -- this one from a General Accounting Office report -- shows that three-fourths of the parents of Head Start children have high school diplomas, which should change one's image of this parent group somewhat. If their children own fewer books, take fewer trips to museums, and have fewer computers at home -- as the data clearly show -- it may not be because the parents are uneducated but because they must spend all their resources on survival. …