Head Start: A tragic waste of money

Head Start, the most sacrosanct federal education program, doesn't work.
That's the finding of a sophisticated study just released by President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services.
Created in 1965, the comprehensive preschool program for 3- and 4-year olds and their parents is meant to narrow the education gap between low-income students and their middle- and upper-income peers. Forty-five years and $166 billion later, it has been proven a failure.
The bad news came in the study released this month: It found that, by the end of the first grade, children who attended Head Start are essentially indistinguishable from a control group of students who didn't.

What's so damning is that this study used the best possible method to review the program: It looked at a nationally representative sample of 5,000 children who were randomly assigned to either the Head Start ("treatment") group or to the non-Head Start ("control") group. Random assignment is the "gold standard" of medical and social-science research: It gives investigators confidence that the treatment and control groups are essentially identical in every respect except their access to Head Start. So if eventual test performances differ, we can be pretty sure that the difference was caused by the program. No previous study of Head Start used this approach on a nationally representative sample of children.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/head_start_tragic_waste_of_money_L7V5dJC333RDC8QT8UEWaO#ixzz1tTW9SfRR

Head Start Impact Study

Mandated by Congress in 1998 amendments to The Head Start Act, the Head Start Impacts Study evaluated he effects of Head Start on children and families through the childrens' first year of school. The study followed a nationally representative sample of nearly 5,000 children in 84 Head Start programs. Findings of the study, which began in 2002 and ended in 2006, were released January 13, 2010.

Read more: http://www.nhsa.org/research/head_start_impact_study