DailySusan Humor Blog

Let’s Give Kids a REAL Head Start

(Scene: our house the other day)

Maddy (age 3 1/2):

Alexa wasn’t sharing with me today.

Mommy:

Uh oh. I hope you didn’t get into a fight.

Maddy:

No, we weren’t fighting. We were just talking madly.

It’s a shame, on Martin Luther King Day, to witness people “talking madly” about Head Start. It’s one of the government’s most prominent programs stemming from the 1960s and the civil rights movement that Dr. King led.

Head Start is the preschool program that was supposed to give disadvantaged children a level playing field for grade school. It’s the preschool equivalent of “free or reduced price” lunch subsidies in K-12 education. It was supposed to compensate for the lack of developmental activities that often characterizes homes in poverty.

Well, it has never worked – and it has cost taxpayers $66 billion. Pause for a moment and think about all that money. Wasted! It has been another example of pointless social engineering and unproductive government “make work.”

All over the country, people are “talking madly” as they find out Head Start officials are making salaries of $200,000 – and yet inner-city kids who received the supposed benefits of Head Start continue to fall farther and father behind non-Head Start kids academically.

I know that would make Dr. King “talk mad.” You can read more about it on:

www.heritage.org/Research/Education/BG1701.cfm

In Omaha, we have the specter of Head Start parents being used as political bargaining chips as the feds close down Head Start, suddenly, for lack of regulatory compliance. That leaves the low-income parents of more than 1,000 preschoolers scrambling to find alternative day-care. Meanwhile, all those tax dollars are down the drain, throwing more money at Head Start would just perpetuate the problem and make the rest of us madder and poorer, and worst of all, Omaha disadvantaged kids are even further behind their peers in the ‘burbs than in most cities.

Is this latest hassle all simply a political maneuver to shift that funding away from Head Start, traditionally controlled by liberal Democrats, and toward a different program controlled, perhaps, by the local public schools? That appears to be the end-game.

It’s just a shell game, though, if our tax dollars aren’t spent doing what it takes to make the kids able to read, write and figure to the best of their ability.

Until the pre-educrats and educrats admit that the Head Start philosophy and methods are counter-productive for disadvantaged kids, it’ll be something that caring taxpayers ought to be “talking madly” about.

That’s not only because we all want Dr. King’s dreams to come true for all Americans, but also because we’re footing the bill . . . and we want a good payback!

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Prayer request: Lord, raise up people who truly understand what makes children literate and numerate. Bring them into contact with the families of Head Start, and of all preschoolers. Educational foundations are so important, Lord. Work in us so that all children truly will have a solid “head start” toward success in school. (Zechariah 4:9)