Academic

OOPS: ?Head Start?: The $166 Billion Fed Ed Failure. ?Head Start,? the flagship pre-kind?

By Glenn Reynolds

OOPS: ?Head Start?: The $166 Billion Fed Ed Failure.

?Head Start,? the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That?s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An earlier iteration of the study, published in 2005, had found a few modest improvements in the language skills of participating students while they were enrolled in the program. But by the end of the first grade, even those few effects have disappeared, according to the follow-up released this month. Out of 44 separate cognitive tests given to former Head Start students at the end of the first grade, only two showed even marginally significant effects. The other 42 showed no statistically significant effect at all.

This study has gotten surprisingly little attention.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 22, 2010 (boomark / email).