Hard lessons from Head Start.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Brief article

Congress recently passed a bill to expand Head Start containing a "reform" that strikes me as pathetic. It requires at least half of the Head Start teachers to have a bachelor's degree in education, but postpones the effective date of the requirement until 2013.

The tragedy of Head Start from its inception is that a great idea was too often ruined by too many incompetent and marginal teachers. Behind the problem was an insistence by community-action theorists of the 1960s that Head Start instructors must come from "the community." If the community was largely uneducated, or the victim of third-rate...