A head start to nowhere? Four decades and $66,000,000,000 after Head Start was launched, "the school readiness gap between poor children and their middle-class peers remains stubbornly large ... Perhaps ... no government program ever can compensate for what a hard life takes away.".

• Author: Kafer, Krista
• Position: Education

ON AVERAGE, poor children enter school with far fewer vocabulary, literacy, math, and social skills than their middle-class peers. They start off a step behind and never catch up; the gap in academic proficiency follows them to the end of their schooling.

Since 1965, taxpayers have spent more than $66,000,000,000 on Head Start to provide comprehensive health, social, educational, and mental health services to low income children. Currently, the $6,600,000,000 program enrolls more than 900,000 three- and four-year-olds at a cost of roughly $7,000 per pupil. The Department of Health and Human Services directly funds Head Start's 19,000 centers, which are operated by community and faith-based organizations and local public schools. Evidence suggests that the program provides short-term cognitive benefits for poor children who might otherwise enter school even further behind.

Since its inception, Head Start has enrolled over 21,000,000 individuals. Recommended by a panel of child development experts in 1964, the program initially enjoyed an eight-week summer stint when run by the Office of Economic Opportunity--with a goal of meeting the social, educational, emotional, health, and nutritional needs of preschool children. Four years after its inception, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) took over its implementation. Today, most Head Start operations serve children for a half or full day of school eight or nine months a year. Around 25% operate full-day, year-round programs.

However, nearly four decades since Head Start was launched, the school readiness gap between poor children and their middle-class peers remains stubbornly large. On average, low-income youngsters enter kindergarten with a vocabulary a fraction of the size of their middle-class contemporaries'. They also are less likely to know the letters of the alphabet or even how to follow words left to right across the printed page.

This gap persists into high school. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as the "nation's report card"), low-income students score substantially below their middle- and upper-income counterparts, at all three testing grades--fourth eight, and 12th--in all subjects. In math, science, and history, three to four times as many middle- and upper income students receive "proficient" scores when compared with low income pupils, who are much more likely to be rated as "below basic,"...