9486 in the collection
Bush is Winning This War!!!!
The good news is that standardized testing is removed from the Head Start reauthorization, but as Gerald Coles documents, there's plenty of bad news in the Homeland Wars against children.
O.K., Mission Accomplished hasn't been accomplished in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan remain strong, but let's give credit where it's due. The president has been fighting several wars at once and while his hands are full with his wars abroad, here at home his wars are going splendidly.
As Thom Hartmann documents in his book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class,Bush has achieved one victory after another against working people. Paul Krugman makes clear in The Conscience of a Liberal that Bush's wars against workers, unions, the retired, and the sick have much to brag about. And let's not forget the president's successful campaign against democracy and the Constitution, well-documented in John Dean's Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches.
Homeland wars also include victories against poor children. Bush persevered and successfully vetoed the S-CHIP legislation that would have provided health care for millions of uninsured children. And just this week he bundled together battles on several fronts against children in general and poor children in particular by vetoing increases in K-12 education, Head Start and child care. Regarded by some as a chicken-hawk who avoided military service in Vietnam, it's clear that he was saving himself for bigger hostilities.
It's impossible in one commentary to do justice to the Homeland Wars, but a sense is possible by focusing on one of his relentless struggles, the battle against Head Start.
Begun in 1965 during the Johnson administration, Head Start aims to be a comprehensive educational program that includes all areas essential for poor children's early learning and school preparedness: education plus basic medical, nutritional and emotional assistance. The benefits of this comprehensive approach have been supported by research showing that, compared with their peers, Head Start children are more likely to enter kindergarten ready to learn, have higher levels of achievement motivation when they begin school, be in the right grade for the right age and not in a special education class, have higher academic achievement, stay in school and complete high school, have higher levels of self-esteem, be physically healthier and have fewer delinquency problems.
This evidence of effectiveness does not mean Head Start is the perfect program for poor children. The above comparisons are heartening, but the children on average do not perform as well academically as those from more affluent families. This difference could be reduced considerably were there more resources for Head Start children, which brings us back to the Homeland Wars.
Continuing the valiant efforts of Nixon, Reagan and George Bush the First to underfund and strangle Head Start, Bush the Second reprised earlier battle tactics by attempting to turn Head Start over to the states in the form of block grants that would have required incessant drilling and testing of early reading rudiments and leave "optional" all the rest of the Head Start's comprehensive program! Unfortunately, the enemies of this plan -- the "Save Head Start" organization, not grasping the educational excellence that this decimation of Head Start would produce, managed to muster sufficient public and congressional support to beat it back.
But this failure has not discouraged the president. Although his continued budgetary efforts to underfund Head Start have been rejected by bipartisan support for funding increases, his antipathy to Head Start and his budgetary baselines of flat funding or minuscule increases have, until this year, set a standard for Congressional funding. While this funding has been a relative improvement over his initial budget proposals, it has been substantially insufficient for the program's needs.
For example, when inflation is factored into the small Congressional increases for Head Start during the last few years, the cumulative effect has been an 11 percent cut in federal support between fiscal 2002 and 2007, forcing more than half of Head Start programs to cut health and educational services for Head Start children and families! As documented by the Save Head Start organization, Head Start programs have had to reduce instructional time, classroom materials and activities; mental health, medical and dental services; and transportation for children and families.
Because of these cuts many children have dropped out of the program completely, absenteeism has increased, and family participation has been reduced. The cuts have resulted in reduction of staff and staff hours, and elimination of salary increases and benefits, a combination that has created high turnover rates and major disincentives for qualified teachers to work in Head Start.
Add to these war successes this accomplishment: more than 40 years after Head Start began, only about half of poor children eligible for Head Start are enrolled in the program. That means that each year about one million children are casualties of Head Start underfunding. Sadly for the president, after he vetoed the Head Start legislation for this fiscal year, Congress sent him a veto-proof bill that would increase funding from $6.8 billion in fiscal 2007 to $7.3 billion in fiscal 2008, an increase of approximately 8 percent. While more substantial than previous increases, it still would not make up for the 11% decrease accrued from 2002. And it still leaves approximately a million poor children without a Head Start program.
Overall, comparing this total damage to lives and program infrastructure with the Iraq war's casualties and infrastructure destruction, there's no question that the war-on-children president has done well here at home! It's not altogether "Mission Accomplished," but it's certainly a striking example of why he deserves the title Commander-In-Chief!
— Gerald Coles
The Pulse: Education's Place for Debate
2007-11-15
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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