Amanda Moreno, Ph.D.

Why the Head Start Headlines Are Wrong

2013-01-24T18:53:30-05:00

If you take a bath on Friday, and get dirty on Saturday, this means the bath was ineffective. The preceding, clearly flawed, logic sums up the misguided hysteria over a recent HHS report showing that the positive effects of Head Start fade out by third grade. The early childhood field has grappled with the "fade-out effect" multiple times before. We seem to have no trouble understanding why people lose ground after weight loss, addiction recovery, or treatment for depression because we know intuitively that an intensive intervention represents an extraordinary divergence from the natural course of human difficulty. And so it is with children growing up in poverty.

But, you say, everyone knows that a bath's effects are supposed to be temporary. The very promise of Head Start is that it provides a long-lasting benefit to disadvantaged children. Plus, baths don't cost taxpayers 8 billion dollars every year. If Head Start can't protect children against the "dirt" they may encounter once they enter the public school system, then why continue to pay for it, right? In fact, it is the "de-fund immediately!" chorus that is engaging in magical thinking, and not the "self-congratulatory progressives," as Head Start supporters were dubbed by the Wall Street Journal.

Consider this: despite the fact that cognitive impacts were not sustained into third grade for the overall sample, children who received their Head Start treatment year when they were three years old and whose mothers were not depressed did sustain cognitive outcomes. Given the large size of this group, this equates to a full 34 percent of the overall three-year-old cohort not experiencing fade-out on these critical outcomes, five years after attending Head Start. This proportion should be considered remarkable given the fact that most of the control children still attended some type of formal early education program.

Compare this to an approximately 18 percent long-term weight loss for bariatric surgery -- widely believed to be the most effective treatment for obesity; an approximately 22 percent success rate inpatient drug rehabilitation treatment -- an intervention that cost taxpayers upwards of $9 billion way back in 2005; and the 14 percent success rate of magnetic brain stimulation therapy for depression -- called "an attractive therapy" by Scientific American. Yet, applying magical thinking unevenly to the domain of early education, headlines declare "Head Start: Still Useless" (Heritage Foundation), "Head Start's Sad and Costly Secret -- What Washington Doesn't Want You to Know" (Fox News); "The Head Start Ruse" (Tribune-Review); and "Head Start's Unfulfilled Promises" (Washington Examiner). On the other hand, kudos to the Media Matters piece entitled, "Media Cherry-Pick Facts to Falsely Label Head Start Program a Failure," which dispassionately lists multiple positive scientific findings from Head Start over the years, including those that extend into later life such as increased high school graduation rates and decreased crime.

Surely I too can be accused of cherry-picking one of the positive findings I described above, but someone had to, because as far as I can tell every commentator except for Media Matters stopped reading after the Executive Summary. The truth is that the findings are mixed: effects were positive post intervention (the standard to which most interventions are held) on a broad range of findings (a much higher standard than to which most interventions are held), but the control group mostly catches up after that. There were some lasting benefits into third grade (18 percent), lots of equivalences between Head Start and control group children (74 percent), and some negative effects too (8 percent where it appears that Head Start caused disadvantages.) The real truth is that the findings are nothing to jump for joy about, not because of public dings to anyone's pet program, but because the Head Start and control group children were doing equally poorly by the third grade, lagging behind their age-mates in reading and grade promotion rates. When treatment and control groups do equally well, that is evidence that a program is unnecessary; when they do equally poorly, that is evidence that 1) the program needs to be fixed or an alternative found, and 2) a greater degree of systemic coordination is needed, because no single approach can be a silver bullet, and comprehensive approaches are needed to solve comprehensive problems.

Why am I so stubbornly convinced that the solution is to fix rather than chop? Because I don't believe in magic, and because of research that indicates that higher resources and additional enrichments in elementary school lead to more long-lasting effects of early educational programs. Such an analysis hasn't been done yet for Head Start (and given that these data are available, it is frustrating that the fade-out results were released without looking into this obvious question), but it has been done for Early Head Start. A long-term follow-up of Early Head Start children through fifth grade showed, familiarly, that many of the broad impacts seen in early childhood had faded. However, children who had Early Head Start, plus formal care at ages three and four (which, in many cases was Head Start), plus a lower-poverty school at age five had superior outcomes on measures of cognitive performance seven years later in fifth grade to those students who had any two, any one, or none of these early educational experiences (and having any two of the experiences was also significantly better than having one or none.) This shows the critical importance of that ongoing force on the other end of the tug-of-war rope that gives children a fighting chance to combat the natural course of risk. If you throw disadvantaged children back into environments rife with their own risk factors and provide no further mitigating (let alone enriching) efforts, why would you expect any outcome other than a slide? Try to do something similar with obesity, addiction, or depression and then call their interventions ineffective, and you would be (or should be) laughed out of any room.

The biggest reason I will likely stay on the "fix it" side of this issue is that not a single critic seems to be able to identify specific explanatory flaws in the Head Start model, or any new ideas that aren't already being tried, with their own varying degrees of struggles and success. Casting aside the opinions of those who don't know any better, the most disappointing response to the Head Start findings came from someone who does: Russ Whitehurst. Currently at Brookings, Whitehurst is a highly accomplished early education scientist and the founding director of the Institute of Education Sciences. Whitehurst first makes the inaccurate comparison of the iconic Perry Preschool Project, a small-scale controlled study with a sample size of 123 to the federally scaled Head Start, the study of which had a nationally representative sample of nearly 5,000. Then, he makes a further unfair comparison to "sustained" effects found in an IES-led study of preschool curricula by writing that "the most effective programs at the end of the pre-K year continued to show effects on cognitive outcomes." He doesn't mention that 1) the sustained effects are measured only one year later; 2) they are only true for six of the 15 curricula evaluated and only on scattered outcomes; 3) these were all individual, small-scale studies; and 4) the sample was overall much lower risk than the Head Start population (e.g., 19 percent of mothers not completing high school vs. 40 percent in Head Start).

Whitehurst concludes by suggesting state control and parent choice in local early education centers as the alternative to Head Start. The problem with this logic is that Head Start quality is already well-documented as being superior to community child care on average, and mostly in the good or better range. For parental "shopping" to be a viable alternative to Head Start, Whitehurst would have to believe not only that broad-scale child care quality can be reached by transferring the money from one effort to the other, but also that without all the additional family supports provided by Head Start, attending a quality child care center would result in narrowing the achievement gap significantly into at least third grade. For what is the validity of an alternate proposal if it too would not be on the chopping block for failing to meet the same standard?

As for me, I don't have the answers either, but I take my hints from the following: Early Head Start's longitudinal impacts could be said to be somewhat stronger than Head Start's, and the three-year-old cohort within the Head Start study had somewhat more positive and sustained effects (20 percent) than the four-year-old cohort (15 percent). Furthermore, one of the strongest evidence bases for effects into adulthood of an early intervention is the Nurse-Family Partnership, which is a nurse home visiting program from pregnancy to age two. As part of the numerous statewide efforts to create coordinated systems of early childhood education and care, why not promote the co-location and full integration of programs that create a no-wrong door approach for families, starting with pregnancy? At a minimum, Early Head Start and Head Start should be integrated and co-located as a rule, and we have to continue to learn as much as possible from the Head Start Centers of Excellence, which are setting a high bar for quality early education in general.

As a society, we have larger issues to grapple with about why it should be that children, who by any measure were well-prepared for school, became unprepared for it shortly after entering. In the meantime, let's examine the obvious questions about the conditions under which positive early findings are sustained. Nothing else will be a greater detractor from the uneven application of the "inoculation expectation" to the realm of early education and care, and a greater contributor to finding ever more effective ways of narrowing the income-based achievement gap.

Killing Kindergarten

2012-03-29T13:31:57-04:00

I want you to know it took a lot of self-discipline not to title this post "Killing Kindergarteners." In addition to being an early education researcher, I am also a mother of a 5-year-old currently in kindergarten, so I can tell you that is pretty much the way it feels. All around this country, families are trying to figure out why their small children already dread going to a place that was supposed to serve as a gentle transition to formal learning. They are struggling with ambivalent allegiances, not wanting to be the over-protective parent who babies their child, but at the same time not being fully convinced that their child has a behavior problem just because they don't enjoy sitting at a desk, independently going through worksheets for a solid hour.

It has become axiomatic in my field to say that early learning expectations are a full year ahead of what they were 20 years ago. Alfie Kohn points out an even more critical piece of this puzzle when he says that "The typical American kindergarten now resembles a really bad first-grade classroom" (italics mine). Somehow I don't think Robert Fulghum's list of essential lessons learned in kindergarten would have the same ring to it if among "share everything" and "play fair" appeared "100 sight words," "command of capitalization and punctuation," and "compose and decompose numbers 11-19." Cynicism aside, a year's worth of additional expectations isn't in itself the biggest problem if you have a highly skilled teacher who can individualize to suit just about any learning style, and can make just about any learning task age-appropriate and engaging. That is a huge if, I would guess, according to most kindergarteners today.

Is teaching 5-year-olds really that complex an enterprise? It is true that little kids are like sponges in that they absorb discrete pieces of knowledge daily, naturally, and without effort, such as new vocabulary, locations of things in their house, how specific toys work, and what their family dinner and bedtime routines are. But in formal learning settings -- at least as they are on average in the U.S. -- the game completely changes. For better or worse, the "great divider" in formal learning settings may be whether the learner can decide to tackle new tasks or problems, not because she wants to but simply because she is being asked to. Is it OK for my 5-year-old to learn about Native American history and culture? Sure it is. The parts of the eye and inner ear -- why not? But there is no intrinsic motivation when the lesson emphasizes the proper spelling "Tlingit" or "cochlea" and there never will be. No, the kindergarteners who do well with this kind of task are the ones who have already developed the ability to override their intrinsic motivation. This takes more than compliance -- it takes executive function, which is in part attention and memory, and in part the ability to inhibit a pre-potent response. You know, like my daughter's pre-potent response to color with the crayon that most attracts her eye, rather than limiting her choices to the browns, yellows, and oranges that were actually found in traditional Native American garb, as the curriculum required.

This sounds awful -- like the only successful kindergartener is one with a broken spirit. It wouldn't have to be this way if the educational system were structured to accommodate the natural, normal, and highly variable rates of development that occur in early childhood. All typically developing children acquire the basics of executive function eventually. So universal a finding across cultures is this, that it came to be known as the "5-to-7 year shift" -- and it is the reason why formal schooling starts around this age worldwide. In this country, the word around makes all the difference. Given the range of ages at which children enter kindergarten (there is about a 25-month spread between the youngest and oldest students), and the three-year age range within which executive function skills begin to become more adult-like, children can be anywhere between preschool and third grade when the complex set of abilities required to decide to learn comes online sufficiently well. Even after controlling for age, kindergarteners still show greater variability in executive function than either fifth graders or preschoolers, indicating there is something unique about the cognitive reorganizations that take place during this period of life.

Our educational system is not equipped to support the application of this kind of knowledge.
John Medina has said, "If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom."

In early childhood, when children are just beginning (and did I mention, at highly individualized rates?) to acquire the ability to focus under non-optimal circumstances and learn anyway, this is not only unproductive (as it is for learners of all ages), it is dangerous. For young children for whom intentional learning isn't even on the radar screen yet, every day they spend sitting at a desk and filling out worksheets is like being in a foreign language immersion program with a teacher who believes they're fluent.

This is not a debate about exploratory vs. direct instruction in the early grades, or play vs. structure, or creative learning vs. traditional academics, or any other label for this false dichotomy. Research supports both, depending on the group of children studied and methods used. While I staunchly believe that play is a human right, you don't fix the misguided question of how to stuff knowledge into a 5-year-old's brain simply by doing it "through play." Similarly, when people tell you direct instruction "works," ask them what it worked for. If the answer was standardized tests, then you merely have an unsurprising match between method and outcome. Either way, bad teaching will be the result if a kindergarten teacher practices (or is forced to practice) any style in the extreme, and without an arsenal of creative tools for individualizing to children. For those brilliant kindergarten teachers who do possess such a toolbox, the standards and testing craze has tamped their best instincts into hiding.

I agree with Holly Robinson who says that, from a parent's perspective, the immediate answer lies in finding the right fit for your child -- a process we are right in the middle of with our own daughter. Unfortunately, good options are not nearly plentiful enough, and those that exist are not accessible enough to families and children that likely need them the most. In the meantime, my colleagues and I are trying to do our part by speaking out for differentiating education reform efforts for young children, incorporating modern child and brain development principles into teacher and principal prep programs, and consulting to early education initiatives about how to answer to the pressures of accountability without "killing kindergarteners" in the process.

Four Myths of Education Reform Nobody Is Talking About

2011-08-03T11:37:24-04:00

Back when I was a graduate student, I would have been kicked out of my program for playing fast and
loose with words and data the way that so many in the education reform debates do. These falsehoods
are debasing what should be meaningful conversations about helping kids, teachers, and our public
school system do better.

Myth #1: Teaching is the only profession whose employees are not held accountable for results.

The argument goes: Teachers never get fired, they are treated like widgets even though some are better
than others, and this is outrageous since obviously "every other profession" pays, promotes, and fires
their employees based on their "results," right? On the contrary, teaching is the only profession for which
laws are popping up almost daily, that seek to evaluate employees based on creating complex changes in
another human being. If student achievement is a crisis in this country as it is claimed to be, certainly
health, addiction, and obesity are national crises as well. So where are all the laws limiting pay raises to
only those doctors who cause their patients to stop smoking, eat healthily, and maintain a healthy
weight?

I am all for reforming the tenure process and making it easier to fire incompetent teachers. But if we
could so easily achieve change in socially complex behaviors by using monetary rewards and
punishments, we would have already been doing so in other professions, and the countries whose
achievement records we so often tout would be doing so in their education systems, but we don't and
they aren't.

Myth #2: We haven't gotten our money's worth in the education system, because investment has
increased, yet achievement scores have remained flat.

Bill Gates himself penned an article in the Huffington Post charting education investments against NAEP
scores (National Assessment of Educational Progress). This chart, and every conclusion that could be
drawn from it, range from the misleading to the patently false. Most importantly, the NAEP trends are
not flat. There have been modest but statistically significant improvements of a size that would be
expected due to real improvements in achievement. Can we also agree on the ridiculousness of depicting
one number in the thousands in the same chart as another number in the single and double digits? It's
like comparing two travel distances when one map is zoomed in and the other is not. Something tells me
that Bill Gates might be pretty good with numbers and therefore has no trouble understanding this.

The question of whether an investment vs. test score gain comparison even makes sense in the first place
is another matter. A more meaningful question might be about educational investment vs. the drop-out
rate. According to the Institute for Education Sciences the drop-out rate has declined significantly since
the early 1970's for all income groups. If you are concerned that today's rates or remaining disparities
between the races and classes are still unacceptably high, you get no argument from me. But to say that
we have not achieved a return on investment is downright mythical.

Myth #3: Anti-testing advocates think the status quo is fine, don't care about results or kids, and only
care about protecting teachers and unions.

This myth is based on overlooking the simple fact that statistical errors always cut both ways. That is, value-
added estimates can overestimate teachers just as easily as underestimate them. One of the founders of
value-added modeling admits, "Can you distinguish within the middle? No, you can't. Not with the
most rigorous and robust value-added process you can bring to the problem." Research has confirmed

this caution, showing that a full one-fourth of teacher ratings will be wrong -- in either direction. Thus,
you might even say that test-based evaluation is "soft on accountability" since it protects many ineffective
teachers.

Test-obsessed reformers have my greatest fear exactly wrong. I am not worried that hoards of qualified
teachers will be fired, but rather that the uninspired ones will be left alone. Although the Gates study is
conducting observations in classrooms, the youngest grade examined is fourth. Thus, despite having no
evidence that our children will be protected against a "by any means necessary" approach to teaching,
new laws in several states like Colorado and Missouri mandate that teacher evaluations based on student
achievement growth extend down to kindergarten or even preschool. Don't believe anyone who tells you
that the non-test based portion of the evaluation provides such protections. After all the exaltation of test
scores as the only objective measure of teacher performance, do you really think disciplinary actions for
teachers with good test score growth but poor teaching practices would pass the sniff test?

Myth #4: Since the system is broken, and teachers are so important, they must have broken it.

I have no doubt that the top 10% of teachers are so skilled at their craft that they are producing
achievement gains despite dwindling resources, increasing class sizes, and no mentoring support. The
others may deserve to be subject to a watchful eye or even dismissed, but this is not reform so much as
yelling the old rules more loudly. Reformers need to get their argument straight: Is the system broken
and therefore needs a radical change, or does the system work just fine as it is so long as you add more
enforcement?

Yes, ultimately, innovation and quality control will both be part of the solution, but blaming teachers for
the problem only makes sense if the system has given them every possible opportunity to succeed. A
recent New York Times op-ed piece made this point well when they compared teachers to soldiers,
explaining that when military endeavors fail "we don't say 'it's these lazy soldiers and their bloated
benefit plans!'" but rather we look to bigger-picture infrastructure and higher-up leadership for the
reasons for failure. We also don't say that the success of some soldiers proves that that the unsuccessful
ones are at fault. We also don't create unnecessary competition among soldiers, leading them to
withhold their good ideas from their platoon.

We don't say or do any of these things because, as techniques for creating positive change, they are not
only mythical, they are absurd, ineffective, and immoral.

I know, I know -- I'm just a whiny myth-debunker with no solutions. For some good ideas about what to
do instead of perpetuating myths, see Kevin Welner's column about his and Carol Burris'
recommendations to Arne Duncan. In future columns, I'll be writing about innovative, evidence-based
practices being used in preschool and the early grades to increase the quality and rigor of early education.