Head Start, the early childhood development program, has lurched from crisis to crisis, but it’s always found a champion in Edward Zigler, who’s guided the program through every presidential administration since Lyndon Johnson.
Approaching its 50th anniversary, Head Start has been praised for lifting students out of poverty through education and wraparound services for health, nutrition, mental well-being and family cohesion. One longitudinal study of siblings, conducted by a Harvard professor in 2009, showed that enrollees benefited from improved test scores, higher high school and college graduation rates, fewer run-ins with the law and better health as an adult, compared with their brothers and sisters. Other studies, however, have found that educational advantages fade over time, as early as second or third grade, in fact.
In the second half of our interview, NationSwell spoke with Zigler about how Head Start can adapt to better serve its students for the next 50 years.
Q. So many ideas from the War on Poverty have been rolled back. Why has Head Start persisted after all this time?
A. First of all, people like the notion of Head Start. There’s no way to blame a preschool child for the poverty that he or she belongs to. Anything you can do to help that child has great appeal to the American public. Studies also show that it does indeed work. These kids are doing better. All of that kept Head Start in place, even after President Johnson left the White House. People forget that his first job was as a teacher down in the border between Mexico and the United States, so he personally loved Head Start.
The other thing that’s worth noting was that Lady Bird Johnson — LBJ’s wife — she was the honorary chair of Head Start, which gave the program visibility. I can still remember the first that anybody ever heard about Head Start, there was a meeting that Mrs. Johnson chaired in the East Room of the White House. People came to that meeting from all over the country, and she told everyone what Head Start was going to look like. These people went back to their homes, and then applications began pouring in. These people wrote to have a Head Start in their communities.
Q. Have we made progress since then?
A. Yes, I think we know more about poverty and its impact on children, and we know what works. A lot of it is common sense. These kids don’t get good healthcare or good nutrition. When Head Start was put in place, it included healthcare for children and improved nutrition component. We took all that was known by the birth of Head Start 50 years ago and incorporated it into the program. Since then, we’ve learned a lot more, and there’s been more independent money to study poor children.
Q. How do we judge if the program’s been a success?
A. One of the things that bothers me after all this time is that the Congress of the United States, in their latest reauthorization, they made the ultimate goal of Head Start school performance, which is like going back to what the pre-Head Start preschool programs were doing. I’ll probably stay alive long enough [for the next reauthorization]. I usually testify at these reauthorizations, and I will argue that they ought to have two goals for Head Start. The first goal is indeed school performance, but the second improvement is in the parents. Any improvements in the parents will boomerang in the child. That hasn’t happened yet, but Head Start spends so much money and time on parents that we ought to. We should see if they get jobs, get better education, all kinds of parent measures — whether they use corporal punishment on the child even. Are they, or do they talk to the child or explain what they’re doing wrong? There’s many measures so we should make parent performance part of Head Start’s success.
Q. How else can this program adapt for today’s students?
A. That first year, Head Start was only a summer program. Anybody that understands poverty or human development will ask you, “What can you get out of a three-month program?” After the first year, there were still some summer programs but not for very long. Most became full-year programs. Many who write about development will also ask you, “What can you get out of one year?” Many of us argue that to have a really good program for preschool children, you’d begin with Head Start as a two-year program. Then there would be a Head Start component from kindergarten to third grade, a continuation of some time and effort to spur their performance. Several of us have argued for much longer programs. It’s hard enough to keep Head Start alive, but really it should be longer.
By the way, just to show how far we’ve gone, I wrote a book called “A Vision of Universal Preschool Education.” President Barack Obama, about a year and a half ago, said that he wants to get universal preschool education in this country, and that’s a very good idea. One of the things I’d change if I could do Head Start again is that I’d put poor and middle class children together in the same classroom. I like the idea of a preschool education that’s mixed. The evidence is clear. It doesn’t do any harm to middle-class preschool children, and poor children benefit when it’s more than just poor children. That’s going to happen in this country. Obama and certain governors are moving in this direction. Thanks to Head Start, preschool is considered a success. They should be doing it with all children.
Q. Has universal preschool been proposed at the federal level before?
A. There wasn’t enough money. The argument is middle-class parents are putting their children into preschool automatically. If they can pay for it themselves, why should the government pay for it? It’s hard to make that argument we should pay for middle-class children. But we use the evidence, like putting them in can actually help poor children do better and doesn’t hurt middle class children anyway. It’s not a bad idea for middle-class children to at least rub elbows sometimes and understand what a poor child goes through.
And by the way, there are certain things that poor children do better than middle-class kids. They seem to be more creative. If you give them colors, they rub that paint all over the page, everywhere. A middle-class child will very carefully push the paint, a little here and there. It looks like the poor children may be more creative. The most valuable thing the middle-class kids have, though, is an appreciation for education, which many poor kids don’t have. We’re going to get to that vision of universal preschool, because as I say, Obama’s talking about it. I don’t know who’s going to follow him, I don’t know if he’s got time enough to do it now. We’ll see. I’ve heard a lot of promises in my time.
I’ve had an interesting life. I’m an old man now. I started when I was 35 and now I’m 85 years old. That’s my life, and that’s been Head Start.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
READ MORE: The Life-Changing Program Head Start Turns 50: A Conversation with Its Founder
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The Life-Changing Program Head Start Turns 50: A Conversation with Its Founder
Dr. Edward Zigler is often referred to as the “Father of Head Start.” For the last half-century, he’s been the driving force behind the early intervention program that aims to curb the detrimental effects of growing up in poverty. Since its inception in the summer of 1965, Head Start has served more than 30 million at-risk children and their families. The comprehensive model Zigler pioneered — focusing on every aspect of a child’s early development, not just math skills or reading ability — has been replicated by the Harlem Children’s Zone and other forward-thinking nonprofits, and it’s taking hold in school districts across the country, at all grade levels, through President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods.
Zigler’s also contributed a dense volume of research to the field. He founded a child development and social policy center at Yale University that’s now staffed by 40 faculty and 50 fellows. Zigler himself authored or edited more than 40 books and 800 scholarly publications. For his work, he was presented with the Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 2008, the highest honor given by the American Psychological Association.
At age 85, Zigler is an emeritus professor of psychology at Yale, where he’s taught since 1959. Speaking to NationSwell from his home in New Haven, Conn., he reflected on his experience founding a mainstay of America’s education policy half a century ago.
Q: A White House panel was convened in 1964 to find a way to help low-income kids. How did Head Start develop out of it?
A: The War on Poverty was put in place by President Johnson and Sargent Shriver, and the Office of Economic Opportunity was in charge of that effort. That’s when we had something called Community Action, but it was very much disliked in this country, and it got a lot of critical press and a lot of opposition. People wanted to be aggressive about making things better for poor people, but everybody finds out, if you fight City Hall, City Hall fights back. Sargent Shriver was faced with what to do next, and he decided on Head Start. Nobody can be angry at little children that are three or four years old. As part of Community Action, he created Head Start and people did indeed love it since its inception. But it didn’t mean that they became kind to Community Action.
At that point, though, nobody knew what Head Start was, so we needed a planning committee to establish exactly what it would be. Most of its members were in their 50s and 60s and rather well-established psychiatrists, social workers, pediatricians and child psychologists. As it turned out, I was by far the youngest member of the planning committee, at the age of 34. At the age of 40, I took over Head Start in this country and become responsible for it, so I’ve been intimately involved with Head Start for its 50 years.
Q: What did the original eight-week summer pilot project look like?
A: Actually before Head Start, there were some preschool programs, like Citizen Grace in Nashville and a program in New York, but the problem was that they were only interested in one facet of a child’s development: intelligence or school performance, both of which are highly related. On the planning committee for Head Start, we decided on two things that were different and that are still in place after 50 years. The first is comprehensive services. You wouldn’t just give the child I.Q. raisers and school performances enhancers; instead, you give the kids health services, give the family social work and give them things the child would need to escape poverty.
A second pillar was parent involvement. Head Start doesn’t raise small kids; preschool programs don’t raise children. Parents raise their children. So if you want children to do better, you try to get parents to be better socializers. Head Start is pointed as much as the parents as at the child.
Q: During the Nixon Administration, you developed standards for the program as the first director of the Office of Child Development (now the Administration on Children, Youth and Families). Why was that early work important?
A: At that time, I was the federal official responsible for Head Start. The first thing I did was stop Community Action. They already had their own plan for Head Start, and they had absolutely no use for the planning committee. We were essentially a group of scholars from a lot of different fields, whereas they saw themselves as poverty warriors. They didn’t know a lot about child development, but they’d fight to get a better life for poor people, like building a playground in a poor neighborhood. Well, that’s fine — I wouldn’t be against that — but that’s not the solution to what children need. And that’s where the planning committee came in.
We didn’t have enough money to serve all the children trying to get into Head Start, so instead of teaching people how to mobilize, I stopped that aspect of the program, and all the money went to optimizing poor children’s development, which was the planning committee’s only goal. That didn’t meet the satisfaction of a lot of people — self-proclaimed “poverty warriors,” who were getting paid through the program. They wanted to meet with me to see if they could change my mind. As a public official, I was glad to meet with them. As the meeting went on, the guy who was really the leader of the group at the opposite end of this long conferences table from me, stood up and said, “Dr. Zigler, you just don’t understand us. We are willing to give up a generation of our children in order to do our work.” And I remember at the time, I stood up at my end of the table and said, “Well you might be willing to, but I’m trying to help this generation of your children and to help coming generations of children. And this meeting is over.” And that was that.
Q: In the late 1980s you criticized some centers for not living up to their promise, telling The New York Times in a front-page article that one-third of the centers should be shuttered. Why was that rigorous emphasis on results important for Head Start’s success?
A: Head Start probably started too big. Instead of getting the 35,000 kids that Shriver and Johnson wanted, we put 266,000 into Head Start that first summer. The way it was being funded, we were running a lot of very poor, mediocre programs and hadn’t close any that were poorly functioning. When I came in, I emphasized only two things that would determine the effectiveness of Head Start. One is the quality of the program — are there good teachers in the classroom teaching these children? — and second was its length. The longer the program, the more impact it’s going to have.
Another good thing happened recently. See, for years and years, you didn’t have to reapply. Every five years, you automatically got a new grant. This practice has ended. What is in place now is a monitoring system in which Head Start is evaluated, and if the program is poor, its funding is taken away and somebody else gets it. The improvement in Head Start has taken way too long, but it’s in progress in a pretty satisfactory way now.
Q: You’ve worked with nearly every administration from Johnson through Clinton. Did you have a favorite one to work with?
A: I worked with all of them. After a new administration would come in, I was asked to be a consultant for Head Start. [long pause] Let me tell you a story about President Johnson and what Head Start meant to him. When he left the White House and went back to his ranch in Texas, he discovered a Head Start center nearby. His daughters worked in Head Start, and every day he would go to the center. Now, Johnson was a great, big tall man, and he would fill his side pockets with jelly beans. All the kids got to know him. They’d reach into his pocket and get the jelly beans. After a while, all the kids in the Head Start program were calling him Mr. Jelly Beans. He was so obviously in love with education.
Q: Have there been disappointments along the way?
A: Head Start has gone from crisis to crisis. The worst one happened about one week after I got to Washington, D.C. If you know Washington, you know the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) really runs the place. So during the first week, I was called to this meeting and a guy from OMB was there and he puts a piece of white paper on the table and said, “Here’s the plan. In the first year of Head Start, you will close one-third of the Head Start centers. The second year, you will close another third of the Head Start centers, and the third year you will close the remaining ones.” I was one of the founders of Head Start, but it was going to be gone in three years.
So the same day, I went to the head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare [now the Department of Health and Human Services], Eliot Richardson’s office, and told his secretary, “I must see the Secretary immediately.” Nobody says that unless they’re pretty damn serious, so she went in and of course he saw me immediately. He and I had hit it off. He was a great boss, a very smart guy. I told him what had just happened at this meeting run by OMB, and he looked at me in amazement. He didn’t know anything about it either — a Cabinet member in the Nixon administration and he didn’t know about it. He told me to go back to my office, do my work and forget that the meeting ever happened. He also said that he’d go to the White House and clear it up, which he did.
One of the things that always helps is that every time the reauthorization comes up, the parents with children in Head Start march in support of it. It’s been a very important factor in keeping the program alive. I don’t know of another children’s program that’s been alive for 50 years. On the adult side, we’ve got Social Security. But a program for kids? Kids don’t vote, but the parental participation helps keep it alive.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Ask the Experts: How Can We Fix Early Childhood Education?
Consider this: The future success of every child is in many ways determined before he or she turns 8. During those early years, how that child learns and develops — mentally, emotionally and socially — is critical. This isn’t a theory. It’s a fact, based on decades of research on the positive effects of quality early-learning experiences on children’s lives. It’s no wonder then that educators, politicians, researchers and families have honed in on early childhood education as a means to invest not only in the future of America, but also to help deter and improve any number of complex social issues.
But despite our ever-increasing understanding of the benefits of early learning, as well as the negative repercussions of neglecting it, high-quality early education programs are not mandated, which means they’re expensive and exclusive — and out of reach of most Americans.
So how can we expand and improve access to early childhood education? We can start by understanding more about it. With this in mind, NationSwell convened a panel of experts to discuss the issue in depth and explore possible solutions. Read on for their thoughts, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box below.
What is early childhood education, exactly?
The very definition of early childhood education varies greatly among organizations, schools and governments. The National Association for the Education of Young Children, the world’s largest advocacy organization devoted to early childhood learning, defines it as high-quality programs — emphasis on “high quality” — geared toward children from birth to age 8 (or third grade). Increasingly, many colleges are expanding their early-education programs to include learning techniques for infants and toddlers. However, many states, as well as the federal government, focus early-education initiatives primarily on preschool or prekindergarten (3- or 4-year-olds).
Currently, the education system in the United States does not support universal preschool, placing the financial burden on families. President Obama has pushed for more funding for early childhood education, and many states have taken the initiative to create programs that increase access to early education, especially for low-income families, but we still have a long way to go to ensuring equal access to all demographics.
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Why is early childhood education so important?
Research has shown that much of what you need to succeed in life is established before you enter kindergarten. During that time, the human brain undergoes rapid development; it’s a period when a child builds cognitive skills — the foundation for reading, math, science and academics — as well as character skills, social-emotional growth, gross-motor skills and executive functioning, which includes everything from impulse control to problem solving.
“There’s an explosion of activity in the first five years of life, more profound than any future years,” says Rhian Evans Allvin, executive director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “If we can capitalize on that and maximize the support and learning opportunities, then we really stand a good chance of setting young children on a trajectory of success.”
Academic achievement, of course, is one of the main benefits of early childhood learning. According to Libby Ethridge, president of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators, an advocacy organization, children who attend early-learning programs demonstrate higher levels of school achievement and better social adjustment than those who have no formal early education. They’re less likely to repeat a grade or be placed in special education classes, since learning issues can be identified and mediated early. Children who have had formal early-learning experiences are also more likely to graduate from high school.
Other benefits go far beyond academics. According to Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, an organization based at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., a lack of formal early-learning experiences has a negative impact on the entire country — economically and socially.
“We pay for failing to invest in our kids in terms of the high cost of school failure — one in 10 middle-income kids failed a grade and will repeat, and one in 10 doesn’t complete high school — the high costs of prisons and the criminal justice system, and the high cost of poor productivity in the workforce,” he says. “There’s even some evidence that we pay for it in the high cost of health, since health problems are often rooted in early childhood experiences.”
Experts agree that supporting early childhood education is a win-win for everyone. “It’s not just a cliché that we’re investing in our future,” Barnett says. “These are the people who are going to be paying for our Social Security. These are the people who will be defending our country.”
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What demographics benefit most from early-education programs?
Every child benefits from early learning, whether it’s practiced in a formal school setting or at home with parents or caregivers. However, research — most notably the HighScope Perry Preschool Study, which tracked the lives of 123 young children born into poverty — has shown that kids from low-income and disadvantaged communities have even more to gain from early education.
In this study, which began in 1962, 3- and 4-year-olds were divided into two groups: One received high-quality preschool programming and one did not. By age 40, those who had attended preschool had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not attend preschool.
Those are pretty remarkable results. And yet, according to Evans Allvin, low-income communities have the least access to high-quality early-learning experiences, despite the fact that many programs, such as Head Start and Educare, were designed to help this population receive preschool education.
“What’s important is that there are quality opportunities for all kids, and that’s really a huge barrier right now,” Evans Allvin says. “Arguably, the children who most need high-quality learning have the least access.”
The middle class also misses out on early educational opportunities. According to Ethridge, well-off families can afford to send their children to high-quality preschool programs or have the time to stay home and interact with their children. Low-income families, on the other hand, can take advantage of government-supported programs. But the middle class is often stuck somewhere in between.
“I’m not saying all the children in poverty’s needs are being met and serviced, but we’re making strides,” Ethridge says. “But children in the middle class, whose parents both tend to be working, are really struggling to find the money to pay for high-quality, early-education programs.”
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How can we make early childhood education more accessible?
Experts say that Americans are talking more about early childhood education than ever before. But so far the discussion isn’t translating to an increase in programs or attendance. According to The State of Preschool 2013, an annual report by the National Institute for Early Education Research, only 28 percent of the country’s 4-year-olds and 4 percent of 3-year-olds were enrolled in a state-funded preschool program in the 2012-13 school year — the same percentage as 2012. In fact, the actual number of 4-year-olds enrolled dropped by 9,000 between 2012 and 2013. Overall, the 2012 Current Population Survey found that nearly half of all 3- and 4-year-olds did not attend any preschool — public or private — between 2010 and 2012, a statistic that’s held steady since 2006.
So what do we need to provide families with more early-education programs? First thing’s first — money, and lots of it.
“The fundamental problem is one of economics and culture,” Barnett says. “Good early care and education requires a lot of adults — so there are not too many kids per teacher — who have a good education and are also reasonably well compensated, in order to get the quality you want. You put those things together, and it’s expensive. The idea that there is a cheap option here is just false.”
Some states have made significant strides. Oklahoma offers every 4-year-old free access to a year of high-quality, full-day, year-round prekindergarten, including home visits to some disadvantaged households. New Jersey has had Supreme Court-mandated preschool programs for 3- and 4-year-olds in the Abbott urban school districts since 1998. And New York City is gearing up to deliver on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise of universal pre-K by the start of the 2014-15 school year.
Ethridge, who is also a professor at the University of Oklahoma, says that in her state many of the public preschools still have extensive waiting lists. “Because it’s not mandatory, they don’t have to provide enough for every child,” she says.
Does that mean that universal preschool is the answer? The experts are torn. Barnett claims that it’s the only way to ensure that every child — regardless of demographics — gets access to high-quality early learning. But Barbara Bowman, the Irving B. Harris professor of child development at the Erikson Institute, a Chicago-based graduate school, weighs the pros and cons.
“There’s a group of people who say it’s better to make it available to everybody, like public education, so it’s easier to get funded,” she says. “On the other hand, some people say we should focus on the students who need it the most — low-income kids or those who speak another language or those with special needs.”
Whether it’s universal or not, there’s no doubt that early learning programs should be the country’s top educational priority — regardless of cost.
“The response is always we don’t have enough money, but the truth is it’s not that much money in terms of the government budget,” Barnett says. “What are our priorities going to be?”
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