May 11, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
08:18
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance. | |
| Head Start, the government-funded enrichment program for poor children, is back in the news. | |
| Or at least, it's in the news if you know where to look. | |
| The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently published an evaluation of Head Start that Congress ordered it to carry out. | |
| The department sat on the data for four years, despite prodding from Congress. | |
| And finally handed in its report around Christmas. | |
| The Department looked at 4,667 children who entered Head Start in 2002 and compared them over a period of several years with a control group of exactly the same demographic characteristics that didn't attend Head Start. | |
| The report is 346 pages long, and it looks at the data from every possible angle. | |
| But the conclusions cannot be buried. | |
| During the first year, the children in Head Start performed better than the controls on a number of measures, although the report concedes that the effects were, quote, modest in magnitude. | |
| However, and I quote further, these early effects rapidly dissipated in elementary school. | |
| That is to say, By first grade, there were hardly any differences between the head starters and the controls. | |
| And by third grade, what tiny differences the researchers found favored the controls as often as they favored the head starters. | |
| In other words, head start might as well not have existed at all. | |
| The report holds out hope for what it calls"sleeper effects." Or benefits for which we see no evidence today, but might show up 20 or 30 years from now. | |
| Good luck on that. | |
| Head Start was part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and has been around since 1965. | |
| It is the quintessence of the belief that the only reason some people do well in life and others fail is because they have different environments. | |
| was to take poor three- and four-year-olds and give them special enrichment that would put them on an even footing with privileged children by the time they got to school. | |
| It was to be the Head Start that produced a dead-heat finish. | |
| Head Start began as just an eight-week summer program. | |
| Oh, what touching faith those early liberals had in the magical powers of government. | |
| But that wasn't enough. | |
| It didn't work. | |
| So it quickly became year-round, and most children are in it five days a week, nine months a year, many of them for two years. | |
| And it's supposed to be much more than daycare. | |
| The goal is to pump children full of early learning, feed them hot meals, make sure they go to the doctor, and even teach mom, and dad if there is one, how to be better parents. | |
| And of course, Head Start has become diverse. | |
| There are special variants for American Indians and for Alaskan Eskimos. | |
| There are what are called migrant and seasonal programs for the children of farm workers, and elaborate accommodations for what are called dual language learners, which usually means Hispanics. | |
| There's even a special version for homeless children. | |
| Nearly 30 million children have gone through Head Start at a federal cost of more than $180 billion. | |
| Every year, the Feds splash out $8 billion, and a 20% local contribution brings the annual cost to about $10 billion, or $10,000 a year for each of the 1 million participants. | |
| Head Start has staggered on for 48 years. | |
| Despite the fact that every evaluation reaches the same conclusion, it doesn't work. | |
| The first big study was way back in 1969 by the Westinghouse Learning Corporation. | |
| It found that any gains attributable to Head Start disappeared by the early grades. | |
| Large-scale federal evaluations in 1985 and 2005 found exactly the same thing. | |
| Even the New York Times once published an op-ed piece called"Head Start Falls Further Behind" that pointed out that the program has no lasting effect. | |
| It's almost startling to find that kind of sanity in the Times, but you can look it up. | |
| It was February 7, 2009. | |
| Now, as you know, our elected representatives claim to be trying desperately to prune wasteful spending. | |
| Anything to cut the deficit. | |
| But I can promise you, no one will lay a finger on Head Start. | |
| And for two reasons. | |
| First, the liberal belief in the magical powers of government has nothing to do with results. | |
| If you ask Democrats if Head Start gives children a permanent advantage, most will say,"Of course!" But even worse, If you proved to them that it doesn't, they'd support it anyway. | |
| Because liberals have a consuming need to believe they are doing something about social problems, even if it costs billions and doesn't do one bit of good. | |
| The other reason Head Start is immortal is that its $10 billion a year are spent overwhelmingly on non-whites. | |
| You'll sometimes see claims that 35% of the children at Head Start are white, but that's only if you count Hispanics as white. | |
| Hispanics are now the number one clientele, 37%. | |
| Next come blacks at 31%, mixed-race children, 7%, Indians and Eskimos, 5%, Asians, 3%, race unspecified, 17%. | |
| Probably fewer than 10% of the children are white. | |
| This latest Health and Human Services report hints at that, by the way. | |
| It broke the study samples and the controls into three groups. | |
| Black, Hispanic, and White and Other. | |
| That may be a classification we'll have to get used to as whites become a minority. | |
| White and Other. | |
| But it's not just the children. | |
| There are nearly a quarter of a million paid employees of Head Start. | |
| And though I couldn't find racial statistics on them, I suspect that not very many are white. | |
| So the Congressional Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus would be apoplectic at any hint of cuts. | |
| The NAACP and La Raza would bellow about racism. | |
| And since nothing scares Republicans more... | |
| Than to be called racists, there will be no cuts. | |
| On March 10, 2009, our President, Barack Obama, gave a major speech on education to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. | |
| He said that his administration, and I quote, will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars. | |
| It's not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works, unquote. | |
| I mention this only to add a note of humor to this serious subject. |
Export Selection