Printer-friendly version Email story link

Head Start test gets ‘A’ for anxiety

Federal mandate puts 450,000 4-year-olds on the spot, including Joe

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Dec 2, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ADVERTISEMENTS

In a small room in east Portland, the world of standardized tests Ñ and of educational accountability Ñ has reached down and tapped Joe on the shoulder.

He’s 4 years old.

And as he sits across the table from the woman with the pencil and the score sheet Ñ counting the blocks on a page, trying to name letters Ñ he unwittingly finds himself at the center of a national debate.

About accountability. And about measuring the learning of 4-year-olds.

Education leaders in the Bush administration believe that many Head Start programs Ñ part of the 38-year-old national program that tries to prepare preschool children from poor families for kindergarten Ñ don’t do their jobs well enough. So, this fall, they are mandating standardized tests of the 450,000 4-year-olds in the nation’s more than 2,500 Head Start programs.

The result, federal officials hope, will be a better sense of what the preschoolers are learning and how the curriculum can be improved.

“This is a program for the children who got the short end of the stick,” said Craig Ramey, a Georgetown University professor who supports the tests and headed the panel that advised the Bush administration about them. “And we ought to be pushing ourselves as professionals to the absolute limit to be sure we’re getting everything these kids need to them, in a timely and effective manner.”

But many Head Start officials, including some at the three Head Start programs in Portland, say the tests are useless, at best, and could end up threatening the good work that Head Start programs do.

“It’s totally inappropriate to test 4-year-olds,” said Susan Brady, executive director of the Mt. Hood Community College Head Start, where Joe attends classes. Four-year-olds don’t reveal most of their knowledge or their learning abilities through such rigid formulaic tests, she said.

Samuel Meisels, a Chicago specialist in early childhood education, said the 20-minute standardized test Ñ formulated in a matter of months this year Ñ “is incredibly narrow É a very, very limited sample of children’s knowledge of vocabulary, letters and math.”

“For many 3-year-olds, their entire experience in Head Start now is going to be limited to learning what’s on the test for when they are 4 years old.” Because if the programs don’t do well, Meisels said, “they will lose their funding.”

‘There is not a conspiracy’

For educators, the Head Start debate has familiar refrains: about the mysteries of learning and the demands for measurable results, about educational hurdles and educational accountability. But now the debate has moved into new territory Ñ to children just learning to hold their crayons.

And some Head Start advocates see the testing requirement and other proposed changes still being debated in Congress as the Bush administration’s attempt to diminish the entire Head Start program. The program, which provides health and other services to children and families in addition to schooling, costs taxpayers $6.7 billion annually and has enjoyed bipartisan support.

“This is a political agenda Ñ it has nothing to do with scientific research,” said Ron Herndon, head of Albina Head Start in Northeast Portland and chairman of the National Head Start Association. “I think they want to get rid of Head Start.”

Albina Head Start is not administering the tests because the parents of each 4-year-old in the program specifically requested that their children not be tested, which the regulations allow them to do.

Federal Head Start officials say it’s ridiculous to think that they want to end Head Start.

“The idea that you would somehow dismantle, (or) signal that you want to dismantle the program, when you have proposed a $148 million increase in its budget seems contradictory,” said Windy Hill, associate commissioner of the federal Head Start Bureau.

“In terms of this being some grand conspiracy É there is not a conspiracy,” Hill said. “There is a commitment to make sure that the $6.7 billion that the taxpayers provide” is being spent effectively.