HEAD START PROGRAM

Posted by: a teacher

Date: November 08, 2007 09:40PM
”Much more fair to the school. Many Dayton kindergarten students, 20-30%, (personal conversation with K teacher, May 2007...APA style reference) come to school already 2 to 3 years behind in readiness indicators. (Hard to believe and sadly, true) Now, we will "only" have to show that we helped them achieve one year of academic growth in one year's time. Hopefully, of course, do much more.”
 
MY REPLY
Now we are getting to the real meat of the educational problem.
”Now, we will "only" have to show that we helped them achieve one year of academic growth in one year's time.” I can’t believe you wrote this statement. Well, that’s an easy out for the teachers and parents and a total waste of my tax dollar. At this rate of learning these children will never be at grade level.
If a school was judged like a factory, with the test scores they are producing, you would never invest a dollar in this business. If a school was judged like a factory, they would be out of business within a year for producing an inferior product.
 
We have been told over and over again that the reasons that we need so much money to teach the children of the Middletown Schools are because the majority of students are from low income homes and they have so many special needs…Hmmm. Are you telling me that these students have a low IQ? I would really like to see proof of these numbers. Are you telling me that during the critical early learning years 0-5 the parents or others didn’t teach these children any basic skills to get them ready for school?…Hmmm.
Then I have even a greater problem with the Middletown School District. Are you now telling me that after spending millions of dollars on these children before they enter Kindergarten that they are still not ready for school? Then the schools, teacher and parents have failed these children NOT THE TAX PAYERS!

HISTORY LESSON: It’s time for us to remember 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson and the “War on Poverty”. Making poverty a national concern set in motion a series of bills and acts, creating programs such as Head Start, food stamps, work study, Medicare and Medicaid, which still exist today. In the early 1970’s “Title 1” and the “Head Start Program” ages 3-5 years were started and then later the “Pre-Head Start Program” ages 0-3 years. These federal and state funded programs were to give the children of low income families the enrichment they needed to ensure that they would be ready to start school on an equal footing with other children.
These programs were developed based on research like the Milwaukee Program listed below.
Our federal and state tax dollars are now supporting enrichment programs for these children 0-5 years here in Middletown.

QUESTION: What percentage of students, starting in our public schools, have been enrolled in these pre-school programs?
QUESTION: If we have so many students with learning disabilities in our public schools, why weren’t these problems addressed long before they started Kindergarten?
QUESTION: If these programs are working so well here in Middletown, then why are these students not ready for Kindergarten?
QUESTION: Are the children in the programs tested in any way to ensure they are ready for Kindergarten?
QUESTION: Why do we need so many psychologists in the school system since all these services are already available to all low income families?
 
 The Milwaukee Project

In the late 1960s, under the supervision of Rick Heber of the University of Wisconsin, a project was begun to study the effects of intellectual stimulation on children from deprived environments. In order to find a “deprived environment” from which to draw appropriate subjects for the study, Heber and his colleagues examined the statistics of different districts within the city of Milwaukee. One district in particular stood out. The residents of this district had the lowest median income and lowest level of education to be found in the city. This district also had the highest population density and rate of unemployment of any area of Milwaukee. There was one more statistic that really attracted Heber’s attention: Although this district contained only 3 percent of the city’s population, it accounted for 33 percent of the children in Milwaukee who had been labelled “mentally retarded”! 

At the beginning of the project, Heber selected forty newborns from the depressed area of Milwaukee he had chosen. The mothers of the infants selected all had IQ’s below 80. As it turned out, all of the children in the study were black, and in many cases the fathers were absent. The forty newborns were randomly assigned, 20 to an experimental group and 20 to a control group.

Both the experimental group and the control group were tested an equal number of times throughout the project. An independent testing service was used in order to eliminate possible biases on the part of the project members. In terms of physical or medical variables, there were no observable differences between the two groups. 

The experimental group entered a special program. Mothers of the experimental group children received education, vocational rehabilitation, and training in homemaking and child care. The children themselves received personalized enrichment in their home environments for the first three months of their lives, and then their training continued at a special center, five days a week, seven hours a day, until they were ready to begin first grade. The program at the center focused upon developing the language and cognitive skills of the experimental group children. The control group did not receive special education or home-based intervention and enrichment. 

By the age of six all the children in the experimental group were dramatically superior to the children in the control group. This was true on all test measures, especially those dealing with language skills or problem solving. The experimental group had an IQ average of 120.7 as compared with the control group’s 87.2!