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Don't Cut Head Start
Congress is debating whether to slash more than $1 billion from Head Start to give trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest Americans and corporations.
The colors were brighter than any she had seen before. Shapes, letters, and lots and lots of colors adorned the walls. Around the room, children worked together building high rises with colored blocks and "reading" colorful picture books.
"I had never seen so much color," Angelica Salazar recalls of her first days as a Head Start preschooler in Duarte, California. She remembers her discovery of library books and spending hours curled up on the reading rug. Head Start provided her first formal English instruction. Her parents, who spoke mostly Spanish, enrolled her in the program knowing that their little girl would need to master English to succeed in school. 
Watch the interview at childrensdefense.org.
Salazar ultimately graduated from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She's now a juvenile justice policy associate at the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), where she helps us identify and change the policies that trap millions of our nation's children in a pipeline to prison every year. Before studying at Harvard, Salazar taught middle school English in an impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood as a Teach for America corps member. She believes her early childhood experience in Head Start put her on the path to academic success and nourished her commitment to serving others.
In an interview for the National Head Start Association, her father relates in Spanish how he never had the opportunity to finish elementary school. Their family was poor, and he and his wife could not afford to pay for preschool. Head Start was a godsend for the entire family, helping Salazar's immigrant parents become more fully integrated into their community. It allowed her mother to work outside the home for the first time while her children received safe, high-quality care.
Salazar is one among over 20 million Americans for whom Head Start has given a positive start in life since 1964. Today, 15.5 million U.S. children live in poverty, and more than 20 percent of children under the age of 5 are poor, including more than 40 percent of black children and more than 33 percent of Latino children. These are the kids Head Start is designed to serve.
More than 60 percent of students and 80 percent of minority students struggle to perform at grade level in fourth grade, eighth grade, and their senior year of high school. Readiness to begin kindergarten — especially for poor and minority children — is more critical than ever. But less than half of those children eligible for Head Start and fewer than 3 percent of those eligible for Early Head Start, a program for infants and toddlers, are enrolled.
Poor infants are already behind their higher-income peers in cognitive development at nine months old. The gap gets even wider for 2-year-olds. By kindergarten, poor children have to beat the odds to catch up — and as the testing shows, many never do. Quality, comprehensive child development programs are crucial for the physical, emotional, and educational health of all children — especially poor and at-risk children.
Early childhood programs significantly increase a child's chances of avoiding the prison pipeline that Angie now studies as a policy expert, and investments in quality early education can produce a rate of return to society significantly higher than returns on most stock market investments or traditional economic development projects.
Congress is debating whether to slash more than $1 billion from Head Start and to cut several other essential programs for young children. But that's just the beginning. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's proposed budget would dismantle Medicaid and other lifelines for poor children. The Wisconsin Republican, meanwhile, is pushing for trillions of dollars in new tax cuts that would benefit the richest Americans and corporations.
Where are our nation's values? We must stand up for programs that support the cradle-to-college pipeline. We simply can't afford to leave more poor babies, toddlers, and preschoolers behind.
Please watch Angela Salazar's story on the Children's Defense Fund website. And tell Congress: Don't cut Head Start.
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5 Comments so far
Show AllI have always admired Marian Wright Edelman's perserverance. She has never waivered from her commitment to children. One of my favorite quotes from her: “When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn’t say only rich children, or white children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn’t have a mental or physical handicap. He said, ‘Let all children come unto me.’”
--Joanne Boyer
www.wisdomvoices.com
It's plain to see that a small amount spent on children at an early age will not only reduce society's expenses, but create wealth in an exponential manner.
Unfortunately, the for-profit corporate/government system sees more money to be made (and concentrated in fewer hands) by exploiting the slow-motion disaster of societal disintegration, than by common sense investments in people.
And, here's a real looper for you:
The corporate "personhood" business form, from a realistic and anthropological point of view, is the modern-day, secular equivalent of what many Bible thumpers decry, but support with their votes and political contributions---
the "Anti-Christ". The entity that is anti-human, anti-natural and anti-legal, is responsible for all the societal ills we presently face and are soon to face...for the list, ref: Book of Revelations.
What? Did you think the Anti-Christ would be flesh-and-blood?
We are in the battle of our lives.
MWE is in the thick of that battle. Give CDF all the support you can.
Check it out on your own with clergy and referral to authors like Korten, Hartmann, Speth, Nader, among others.
We must be a nation in a serious mental breakdown with what we are doing to our own citizens and those of the rest of the world now. I have worked school fraud for the last 20 years and I am amazed at how bad it is getting on education and all other fronts in the last 10 years.
When you do not take care of young people and consider them important as they are the future you are on the path to destruction.
Kids are not stupid. If you will listen they are the best source of information on what is going on in a school. They know when they are being ripped off from their future. Do you blame some for being angry? We have statistics that show 150+ I.Q. are the leaders of the gangs. Can you blame them? They know that they are smart and when the schools do not show them a way out of poverty the draw of the gold and Escalade are too much. What a waste. At LAUSD that is 74% of about 5000 150+ I.Q. students. We should be sending them to the University not to prison.
We need to help all children from an early age no matter who. This is a real civil right.
“The earliest months and years of life are a crucial time when we build the foundation of children’s character, how they relate to others and how they learn.”
As reflecting the evidence of this principle; Head Start, as a program ,was established to serve children from birth to three years of age.
With so few responses to the article and its implications perhaps it indicates that there are few still who remember the inception of this wonderful program or that they or their parents, because of economic status never were aware or participated in it.
Within that that same time frame and coming out of Head Start seed funding for another forgotten wonderful program for children of early childhood age was begun- Sesame Street.
Thanks to all those creative and compassionate folks who were involved in forming these two programs. The fruit of your work lives on to this day as evidenced by the longevity of the programs and by my own off spring.
Slashing more than $1 billion from Head Start and to cut several other essential programs for young children, while the cuts going to the richest Americans and corporations indicates obviously that they see little need for such a program. One wonders how this squares with the military segment of the governing empire who promotes investment in education, child health, and parenting support _quote : “high-quality early education is not only important for the children it benefits but also critical to ensuring our military’s long-term readiness. . . . Investing in high-quality early education is a matter of national security.”
Perhaps the Generals can send funding from the Pentagon to make up the loss to Head Start .