It is an axiom that teahadists have no sense of humor. To prove this, one teahadist started a cartoon about a conservative duck. The cartoon is most unfunny, but provides a short list of recent Republican talking points. The latest meme to the cartoon is that Head Start Doesn't Work, is a waste of taxpayer money (unlike unused battleships and subsidies to oil companies) and should be stopped. Didn't realize the Tea Party hated little kids, did you?
I checked around and found the study all the yelling is based on...
It's the THIRD GRADE FOLLOW-UP TO THE HEAD START IMPACT STUDY
FINAL REPORT OPRE Report 2012-45, dated October 2012, by Michael Puma, Chesapeake Research Associates and a list of othersfound here
Here's a summary:
end of 3rd grade, there were no remaining impacts for either age cohort. Finally, with regard to parenting practices, the impacts were concentrated in the younger cohort. For the 4-year-old cohort, there was one favorable impact across the years while there were several favorable impacts on parenting approaches and parent-child activities and interactions (all reported by parents) across the years for the 3-year-old cohort.
In summary, there were initial positive impacts from having access to Head Start, but by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts found for either cohort in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.
In addition to looking at Head Start’s average impact across the diverse set of children and families who participated in the program, the study also examined how impacts varied among different types of participants. There is evidence that for some outcomes, Head Start had a differential impact for some subgroups of children over others. At the end of 3rd grade for the 3-year-old cohort, the most striking sustained subgroup findings were found in the cognitive domain for children from high risk households as well as for children of parents who reported no depressive symptoms. Among the 4-year-olds, sustained benefits were experienced by children of parents who reported mild depressive symptoms, severe depressive symptoms, and Black children.
Questions: Does anyone know why Head Start kids do well for a period of time, but show little improvement by the third grade?
Has anyone tried keeping up Head Start type intervention beyond preschool?
What is more expensive: Head Start or the juvenile injustice system?
And lastly: Does anyone give a damn about poor children? Certainly not Republicans.