Another Federal Program Fails

Head Start, the program that is supposed to "improve the lives of low-income children by providing quality comprehensive child development services that are family focused, including education, health, nutrition and mental health." To accomplish this, parents are supposed to get more involved in their children's lives. The reality is that the programs are used as free day care center's by they very low income families (though with single parents it's difficult to call them families) the program is meant to help.

In sum, this report finds that providing access to Head Start has benefits for both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the cognitive, health, and parenting domains, and for 3-year-olds in the social-emotional domain. However, the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole. For 3-year-olds, there are few sustained benefits, although access to the program may lead to improved parent-child relationships through 1st grade…

For this we spend 7 billion dollars a year. That money would be better off unspent, or if you have to have the spending, using it to pay off the the public debt. Of course, that sort of responsibility will never enter the present Congress' thought process.