Edward Zigler.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: The Progressive Interview - One of the founders of the Head Start program

Dr. Edward Zigler, often called "the father of Head Start," is a Yale psychologist known for his groundbreaking research in child development. In 1964, Zigler was one of a panel of experts enlisted by the White House to come up with a program to help low-income kids. Thus was born a summer pilot project called Head Start. Thirty-seven years later, Head Start's preschools have served more than twenty million low-income children and their families, providing education, nutrition, and health care services to two generations of young Americans, and managing to survive a steady retreat from almost every other arena in the war on poverty.

Through savvy politics and a pragmatic style, Zigler has fought various efforts to eliminate the program over the years. Though he helped found Head Start under a Democratic Administration, he was named by President Nixon to be the first director of the Office of Child Development (now the Administration on Children, Youth and Families), and chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau. In 1987, when Head Start was basking in bipartisan popularity, Zigler publicly criticized the program for not living up to its promise. Quality was so low in some centers that they should be closed, he announced in a headline-making statement. More needed to be done for kids besides rapidly expanding a program that didn't have sufficient quality controls. This taboo-breaking criticism led to tougher standards for Head Start centers and an effort to give more than lip service to developmentally appropriate care for disadvantaged children.

My mother, Dorothy Conniff (who runs the office of child care and other community services for the city of Madison, Wisconsin), and I interviewed Zigler in his office at Yale as part of our research for a book we are writing about child care in America. We covered everything from the greatest disappointment of Zigler's career--when Nixon vetoed the bill that would have created a universal child care system in America--to his current project of getting the public schools to take on the care of preschoolers and older children.

Zigler, seventy-two, is a wry, friendly man. On his office walls there are photos of Presidents he's served under, as well as a smattering of Senators and Representatives from both sides of the aisle. He is about to become an emeritus professor at Yale, where he founded the prestigious Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy.

Q: Is the Bush Center named for George Bush?

Dr. Edward Zigler: That's why I've got to change the name. I'm working on it. No, there's a small foundation in St. Paul named for the Archibald Granville Bush family there. Too many people think it's associated with the politicians, especially since both Bushes were here at Yale.

Q: We thought it might be a politically pragmatic choice.

Zigler: I'm not that pragmatic! There's still a little honor left in me. Bush was here recently, you know. He made many of us unhappy. You know what this man told our graduating seniors? Don't worry if you're a C student because you can grow up to be President! [Laughs.]

We spend our lives trying to get young people to be all they can possibly be, and the President gives a commencement address and says, you know, a gentleman's C is the thing to shoot for. Yeah, if you're George Bush's son and you've got many millions of dollars! So it wasn't a happy-making experience.

Q: What do you make of Bush's push to have literacy testing in Head Start programs?

Zigler: I'm not thrilled by all that testing. I don't think if you take somebody's temperature a lot that will make them well. What they really need are good teachers and smaller class sizes, which are good for younger ages. But all Bush seems to care about is literacy and testing. There's so much more to human development than being able to decode these words. That doesn't mean you comprehend what you're reading. So I'm not thrilled by it. Further, we know that the test scores of preschoolers are notoriously labile. Thus, the validity of any such test score is open to serious question.

Q: Why do you get annoyed at efforts to link better I.Q. scores with better child care? .

Zigler: This nation has always had this love affair with I.Q. and we don't understand its limitations. And that's why I'm having this fight with the Bush people right now with Head Start. They say it's a social program. They want a literacy program. If you go to school you better have the social skills. You better not grab that other little boy's blocks. You better do what the teacher says. So it's what I call the whole-child approach: A kid's emotions and personality are just as important as I.Q. But there's something about this country that we like...