Head Start Racked by Failure and Fraud

[Geee]

Human Events:



At his news conference last week, the President continued to say that when it comes to budget-cutting, the federal Head Start program is untouchable.

“There are going to be certain things that House Republicans want that I will not accept,” Obama told the White House press corps. “The notion that we would decide that, under the Republican budget proposal, to eliminate 200,000 Head Start slots that also would mean the layoffs of 55,000 teachers—that doesn’t make sense.”

Cutting Head Start doesn’t make sense? What really doesn’t make sense is that at a time when the President has said, “We’ve got to live within our means" and “get serious about managing our budget,” he then draws a line in the sand over an agency on which, Congress, without seeing any solid results, has spent $167.5 billion from its founding in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society until two years ago. Head Start, which was designed to boost disadvantaged children before they enter elementary school never had a thorough evaluation of its effectiveness until Congress mandated one in 1998.

“We are broke, everything the federal government does needs to be looked at for how cost-effective it is,” freshman Rep. Joe Walsh (R.-Ill.) told HUMAN EVENTS. “Head Start, as the vast majority of the research and evidence suggests, does not make an appreciable long-term difference in the lives of the children it works with."