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Head Start Test Off To Rocky Start
Edward, with eyelashes nearly as long as the brush he was using to stroke blue paint onto a white paper plate, is usually a happy boy -- if a bit sensitive. When he was taken aside in November for a one-on-one test with a teacher, the 4-year-old's smile turned upside down.
"The whole time he was crying," said Karin Ramirez, site director of the Watt and E Head Start center. In between sobs, he wailed that he wanted to go back to class despite Ramirez's bribe of a SpongeBob sticker.
Edward, whose last name was withheld by officials, was an unwilling participant in the first federal standardized achievement tests for youngsters in Head Start.
The tests concluded in November. The intent was to find out where the Head Start program is failing to prepare lower-income children for school.
"This is about two things: that kids get a quality Head Start and ensuring that the American taxpayers' $6.7 billion in tax money is having a good result," said Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
But Ramirez and others in the Head Start community dislike the tests, saying that 4-year-olds are too fragile to test and that the quiz was hurriedly and poorly constructed.
"Head Start needs to be accountable," said Sharon Neese, manager of SETA Head Start in Sacramento. "We receive a tremendous amount of money. But an unresearched, thrown-together test is not a way to find out if Head Start is working."
Two test questions that rankled Head Start providers ask children to identify and point to the pictures of a "swamp" and the expression "horrified."
"None of the kids have gotten horrified right," Ramirez said. "It's not a word that we use. Scared, maybe."
She said that "swamp" is unfair because "what kid around here has seen a swamp?"
By the time Head Start children leave for kindergarten, most know how to listen to the teacher, sit quietly and get along with friends. They learn shapes, colors, numbers, letters and how to spell their name.
Ramirez believes the test is a waste of time.
But Horn, a child psychologist, said President Bush is trying to "manage by results," meaning whenever possible it is imperative to "measure what our good intentions are producing."
Horn said the purpose is to identify local programs where more teacher training is needed. Federal administrators suspect some local programs are doing great and some not so well.
The test was developed in 18 months for 464,000 Head Start children. Horn said the Clinton administration allowed each local Head Start program to decide how to measure child achievement and did not require any federal reporting.
"What we wanted was consistency -- that programs were being measured the same way in New Jersey and California," he said.
The exam was field-tested, and a 15-20 minute battery of questions was devised for the first go-round this fall. The results will serve as a base line. At the end of the Head Start academic year in May or June, the test will be repeated.
"Then we will be able to determine how the kids advanced," Horn said. "If they did not, we will send in some experts to develop a more effective curriculum."
Head Start's goal is to help economically disadvantaged children begin kindergarten on a level playing field with their more well-to-do peers.
Local Head Start leaders say parents of low-income children generally don't have as large a vocabulary as middle-class parents. So it is unrealistic, they say, to expect Head Start children to match their middle-class counterparts.
Horn dismisses the notion: "What is astounding to me is that some who claim to be advocates say this is too high a goal. The president says that is nonsense. He says 'No Child Left Behind' does not mean just no rich child left behind. That is what the president is talking about when he speaks of the 'soft bigotry of low expectations.' "
Horn said Head Start has always been about developing rich vocabularies, and that entails knowing words that are not part of a child's immediate environment. "Just because there are no swamps in Sacramento, should we hide it from them? Should we only teach them words in their own environment?
"No 4-year-old has ever seen a live dinosaur, yet my guess is that there a lot of children who know what a dinosaur is."
He also said that worries about stressing young children are baseless: "My experience is that most 4-and 5-year-olds love to show off what they know."
Ed Condon, executive director of the California Head Start Association, said the test requirement has been burdensome.
"We are real concerned about how the data will be used," he said. "When you are testing 4-year-olds, you are going to get fairly unreliable test data unless it is highly managed. We think it will be used against programs."
Condon said a 4-year-old typically would be assessed based on observation by a teacher using a range of questions. As an example, the teacher could observe if the child can identify the front and back of a book, author's name, page numbers or how to sound out words.
In the test, said Condon, "you ask the child a question and the child either succeeds or fails on the question."
Condon said that through age 5, a child's knowledge is more evolving than specific.
"We support the ambition of moving children toward academic readiness but in a way that makes sense for their age, development and the world they exist in today," he said.
— Bill Lindelof
Head Start test off to rocky start
Sacramento Bee
2003-12-31
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/8024473p-8960587c.html
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