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Two Views on Qualifications of Head Start Teachers
Here's the opinion of USA Today editorial:
Better teachers give poor preschoolers best head start
Anyone watching the cheery faces of kindergartners filing into the first day of class would have a hard time believing what lies below the surface: Half of low-income kindergartners can't recognize the letters of the alphabet, according to an early literacy report released last week. Another third don't know that a printed page flows from left to right and from top to bottom.
The gaps arise from the lottery of birth. Articulate, middle-class parents are more successful at passing along literacy skills to preschoolers.
To counter the problem, the federal government spends more than $6 billion a year on Head Start preschool programs for 1 million children age 5 and younger. Even so, children enter Head Start scoring in the 21st percentile on early screening tests and depart only in the 24th percentile.
One reason for limited gains is the limited education levels of Head Start teachers. Only a quarter have a four-year bachelor's degree.
With the Senate expected to take up Head Start reforms this month, one solution is obvious: Provide young learners with teachers who are qualified to teach low-income students the skills they need to compete with other children.
But a proposal requiring half of Head Start teachers to have a bachelor's degree by 2008 is running into opposition from some Republican members of Congress. They argue it is too expensive and unlikely to work.
Their singular focus on how to implement the requirement ignores the payoff for the preschool students who should be central to this debate. Yet their objections don't stand up to scrutiny. Consider:
•Expense Yes, upgrading the education requirements for Head Start teachers is expensive. The tuition grants and higher salaries needed to implement the plan would run about $2.25 billion. But the money spent to improve students' education on the front end could be recaptured on the back end by reducing the amount the federal government spends on high school remedial and special education. Studies that tracked students from two high-quality preschool experiments in Michigan and North Carolina prove that early intervention produces savings later in academic life.
• Inadequate research. One of the most successful preschool programs in the country is Chicago's Child-Parent Centers, where all of the teachers have bachelor's degrees. University of Wisconsin researchers have concluded that the degrees are a primary reason for the centers' success.
Currently, middle-class children enter kindergarten knowing 20,000 words; low-income children recognize only 5,000. Students who fail to overcome that gap and still struggle in reading by the end of third grade have little chance of understanding math, science and social studies in later grades, according to federal research.
A well-educated Head Start teacher helps. New research released last week by The Trust for Early Education, a non-profit advocacy group, found that preschool teachers with bachelor's degrees are significantly more successful in passing along literacy skills to students.
Children entering kindergarten classrooms may look alike, but their academic performance can be worlds apart. Narrowing the gap requires addressing it as early as possible.
Here's a dissenting voice.
College Degree Unnecessary
By Douglas Besharov
How could anyone be against requiring Head Start teachers to be college graduates? That's easy. The evidence about the value they add is minimal at best, and the several billion spent hiring them could be better used to improve other parts of Head Start.
Notwithstanding the "research findings" cited by advocacy groups, no hard evidence shows that a college diploma makes Head Start teachers substantially more effective. The studies advocates cite cannot isolate convincingly the impact of teachers' educational credentials from the many other program, family and additional factors that influence children's cognitive and social skills.
Of course, a Head Start teacher's education is important. But a diploma from a four-year college is not needed. As a more careful reading of research indicates, it is sufficient to have a strong knowledge of child development, either gained through special training or a degree-granting program in, say, a community college. Head Start already seeks to have more teachers with two-year associate degrees. That ought to be our goal.
Imposing the college-graduate requirement might even be disruptive. Many Head Start administrators voice concerns about attracting and retaining college graduates, who, after all, will have career choices other than working part time in a high-poverty neighborhood. They expect college graduates to have higher turnover rates and lower career commitments to the program. And they expect fewer teachers to be black or Hispanic, as they are much less likely to have finished college; if they have, they tend to be in much greater demand for other jobs.
There are better — although less politically salable — uses for the money that would be spent on the higher salaries college graduates command. The spending priority should be on providing more resources for the most disadvantaged poor, because they gain the most from Head Start's child-development services. These children need longer hours and perhaps even a second year in the program. They also need more intensive curricula, smaller class sizes and lower child-to-staff ratios.
Some will say, "Do both." But leaders in Congress already have said they would pay for the college graduates by taking funds from these other improvement efforts. This puts the policy choice in stark terms.
Douglas Besharov is the Jacobs Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the University of Maryland.
— USA Today Editorial and Douglas Besharov
Two Views on Head Start
USA Today
2003-10-02
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20031003/5558640s.htm
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