Head Start Work? Head Start

¶ … Head Start Work?

Head Start is thought of today as one of the most successful experiments in public programming that has ever been created and implemented in the United States to help children. Head Start has a 30+ year tradition of helping prepare children for school and it is especially focused on children in the noted socioeconomic high risk category, for failure in school, those who are considered to be living in poverty or below. The program is available in most areas on a sliding scale to those who exceed the federally determined poverty line.

The history of head start is one of a program created as part of the 1960s "War on Poverty" conceived of by President Johnson. The program itself was a reflection of the fact that there were early problems in the implementation of a program called CAP Community Action Program a grant provision program created through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the same legislation that created the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA a domestic peace corps) and the Job Corps, to provide job training and education to teenagers and young adults. The program itself was dedicated to creating projects and services at a local level to help poor people, get training and eventually employment and for the most part it focussed on adults or older children. Yet, near the end of the first year of the program (CAP) with the budget set for 300 million, allocated by congress and the organization only able to spend 26 million, the director of the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity), Sargent Shriver seeing the potential of loosing the funding in the future, for projects that could potentially really help in the poverty war, began to look for alternative programs to utilize the unused funding from CAP. The result was a study that indicated that almost half of those classified as poor in this nation were children and without helping children a war on poverty would be futile. (Zigler, and Muenchow 2-3)

The [distribution of poor] chart informed him [Shriver] that nearly half of the nation's 30 million poor people were children, and most were under the age of 12. "It was clear that it was foolish to talk about a 'total war against poverty,' the phraseology the president was using," said Shriver, "if you were doing nothing about children."

Zigler, and Muenchow 3)

Previously the fundamerntal issues of poverty were considered a problem among adults, that would be solved by helping those adults and their children would then be helped in turn through their parent's success. The fundamentally flexible manner in which programs were overseen and conducted during the time allowed a great deal more opportunities for change, than they do currently. (Zigler, and Muenchow 2)

Shriver had an inherent interest in helping children, through his own and his wife's professional histories (5) and Shriver also believed that poor children were a much more appealing cause to the general public, as they could not be accused of laziness or bad behavior and would likely not be a target for complaints with regard to the problems that the CAP program initially experienced.

Zigler, and Muenchow 4) After a little more research, Head Start was then begun to prepare children for school through programming and structures that teach pre-reading skills and classroom expectations. (Zigler, and Muenchow 2-3) Shriver structured and implemented the program after one he had visited that had been previously funded by the Kennedy Foundation..

As Shriver was thinking about how he could use the Community Action Program surplus for children, he recalled a Kennedy Foundation project he had visited near Nashville, Tennessee. Conducted by Susan Gray, a psychologist at George Peabody Teachers College (now part of Vanderbilt University), the Early Training Project served some 60 black preschool children who were at risk of educational failure. It was designed, according to Gray, to offset "progressive retardation." 4 The program gave the children an intensive period of stimulation experiences, primarily aimed at developing their intellectual capacity as well as their attitudes toward school.

Zigler, and Muenchow 4)

The part of the program that most stuck with Shriver was the fact that the program proved that it could actually increase the IQs of mentally handicapped children, significantly with the proper implementation of programs, a concept that was not accepted in academics at this time. (Zigler, and Muenchow 11)

The program used the same materials as a traditional nursery school, but in a manner designed to stimulate attitudes and aptitudes necessary for later school success. For example, the children loved to ride tricycles, but were only allowed to do so if they asked for them properly and identified the particular tricycle they wished to ride. Later on, the teachers set up the tricycles in a miniature traffic situation. The children learned to respond to traffic signs and to play traffic officer.

Zigler, and Muenchow 5)

One of the programs Shriver patterned Head Start after also emphasized early reading skills and read to children at least twice a day, from traditional reading materials, also encouraging them to dramatize the stories so they would be retained and their attitude about school and learning would hopefully continue to be positive. Shriver's intention was to reduce fear with regard to school and give at risk children a running "head start" for learning in the later grades. (Zigler, and Muenchow 6) The program also stressed access to health care (e.g. increasing immunization rates and screening for health disorders) and nutrition, a missing link in the lives of many of the at risk children it served. The program in conception and practice became a comprehensive one when the last fundamental of the system included a component that employed paraprofessionals, often the parents of the children at a high rate and also stressed parental involvement, allowing many opportunities for involvement. (Zigler, and Muenchow 7)

Head Start has since been implemented in nearly every community in the United States, retaining much of its original structure and expanding some mostly to meet the demands of new educational information.