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Babes in Test Land: Crayons Down!
The media has given little attention to the failure of the Bush program to test 4-year-olds. This ill-advised plan was billed as a major component of the administration's domestic agenda. Ziegler says conservative thinkers told him, "If we could bring Head Start down, we could bring down any government program." It was symbolic for them, but fraud, stupidity, and hubris got in the way.
by Stephanie Mencimer
If there is a creature more fickle than your typical four-year-old, it's hard to think of one offhand. One day they're buttoning their own shirts and uttering words of ancient wisdom, and the next they're pooping on the living room floor because monsters have invaded the bathroom. They are immune to logic and can barely sit still long enough to nibble a chicken nugget. In a nutshell, "standardized" and "preschooler" are not words you'd normally use in the same sentence.
President George W. Bush seemed to agree when, in July 2003, he took a field trip to a Head Start program in Landover, Maryland, to publicize an initiative aimed at reshaping the popular federal preschool program foro poor kids. "We want Head Start to set higher ambitions," Bush told the assembled children. He stressed the need for "accountability," while noting, "I fully understand a four-year-old child is not going to take a standardized test. That would be absurd."
But not too absurd for the administration to roll out precisely such a test a few months later. Known as the National Reporting System (NRS), it was to be given twice a year to 450,000 four- and five-year-olds in 1,700 Head Start programs around the country. Much as with Bush's broader election reform, the No Child Left Behind Act, the goal was to compare programs and intervene in those that did poorly, possibly by cutting off their federal funding. And as with NCLB, the initiative set off alarm bells in many quarters.
"You can't test four-year-old kids--it's unreliable," says Dr. Edward Zigler, a.k.a. "the father of Head Start," a psychology professor and codirector of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University. "Some of the kids' response was to pee their pants." Four years and $100 million later, the NRS is on the chopping block, the data it produced are unusable, according to government investigators, and the official in charge of implementing Bush's accountability agenda has left amid charges, that she defrauded her own Head Start program in Texas. . . .
For the rest of the article, see the January-February Mother Jones, pp. 20-22. . . or send in a donation, and I'll mail it to you. It's not sex, drugs, and rock and roll but it does involve fraud, stupidity, and hubris.
— Stephanie Mencimer
Mother Jones
-01-01
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