Head Start Studied as Model for the Future : Education: Struggling to find ways to revitalize a failing school system, leaders turn to what may be America’s best-loved social program.

Herlinda Vasquez traces her turnaround to a recruitment poster she saw in her neighborhood market a quarter-century ago. It was her introduction to Project Head Start, a then-revolutionary new preschool program aimed at giving the nation’s poorest children a better chance to succeed.

“Head Start made all the difference--for my children and for me,” said Vasquez, a high school dropout who married at 16 and seemed destined to raise her 10 children in poverty. But involvement as a Head Start parent led her back to school. She earned a master’s degree and became a principal in the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos and now works for Los Angeles County’s Head Start program.

One of the remaining major components of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Head Start--which provides preschoolers with educational activities, medical and dental care and nutritious meals, and offers services for their families--enters its 25th year as perhaps America’s best-loved social program.

The anniversary comes at a time when social scientists and others are trying to learn more about Head Start’s precise impact on poor children and to plot a course for its future. As educators and business and political leaders struggle for ways to revitalize a failing system of public education, they are focusing on reaching children at earlier ages. And Head Start’s programs have provided some natural models for how to do that.

President Bush has called on Congress to increase Head Start’s budget next year by $500 million, to nearly $1.9 billion--enough to enroll 70% of the nation’s eligible 4-year-olds.

Yet the budget proposal, while widely applauded, has focused attention on the program’s longtime problems. Supporters of Head Start note that fewer than 20% of the nation’s poor children, about 450,000, can now be accommodated and they worry that a sudden leap in enrollment would damage the program’s quality and results.

Although some studies of Head Start have challenged its effectiveness, many of these findings have been rejected because they unfairly compared Head Start youngsters to middle-class students. The first comprehensive, long-term analysis of Head Start is scheduled to be released later this month. But educators now generally agree that programs such as Head Start clearly improve youngsters’ chances of finishing school, gaining good jobs and becoming productive adults.

Rep. James H. Scheuer (D-N.Y.) before opening a recent congressional committee hearing on Head Start’s future, said the program represents “the greatest return on investment of any U.S. social program”--but added that it will take between $5 billion and $10 billion a year to reach every child who needs it.

“It’s a big step to get $500 million, but we have . . . serious concerns about the President’s proposal,” said Helen Blank of the Children’s Defense Fund. Her group is calling for an increase of $1 billion in the coming year and pushing for enough to cover every eligible child by 1994.

Don Bolce of the National Head Start Assn. cites a litany of problems: low staff salaries, a shortage of facilities for Head Start centers, lack of funds for transporting youngsters to the centers, and, when inflation is taken into account, a declining amount of money spent on each child (the nationwide average is $2,664).

“It is a bitter irony that Head Start’s success in the War on Poverty has been built upon staff who are paid poverty wages,” said Bolce, noting that 47% of Head Start staff members earn no more than $10,000 a year. Average Head Start teachers with a bachelor’s degree earn $15,043 annually, while their counterparts in a public school system average $28,085, Bolce said.

In Los Angeles County, where about 15,000 youngsters attend Head Start centers run by social service agencies, school districts, nonprofit corporations, some cities and even a university, the problems are no less acute.

“We could probably triple the enrollment if we could just get the facilities,” said Suzan Vanpelt of the county Office of Education, which oversees one of the largest Head Start programs in the nation. There are centers for little more than 13% of the county’s 81,520 eligible youngsters, Vanpelt said.

Martha Rinaldo, director of the Foundation for Early Childhood Education Centers, which runs Head Start programs in community centers and housing projects throughout Los Angeles’ inner-city neighborhoods, said she has spent five years looking--unsuccessfully--for additional space in Echo Park alone.

But lack of space is just one of many problems the program faces, said Rinaldo, who has been with Head Start since it began in the summer of 1965.

“In a sense, (Head Start) has built its reputation on the backs of its employees . . . and it is getting harder and harder to attract good teachers,” especially with a recent explosion in the demand for preschool teachers, she said. “People are not willing to enter a field that pays such low wages.

“The funding has never kept pace with the costs and numbers of children,” Rinaldo said, adding that she has found it harder and harder to find doctors, dentists and others willing to see her young clients for what Head Start can pay. “To add more children now without addressing (other problems) would be suicidal.”

Each child who enters Head Start gets a physical and mental health screening, and a detailed history of the family is taken. Staff members make home visits whenever possible and all parents are strongly encouraged to participate in some way, despite problems that can include drug addiction, physical abuse and prostitution.

Many of Head Start’s longtime hallmarks--parental participation, reaching a child early, linking a child’s family with medical and social services--are now being touted as ways to improve the nation’s troubled schools.

For example, as part of a radical plan to take over and remold the foundering schools in Chelsea, Mass., Boston University President John Silber promises to establish a network of “family schools” offering preschool classes, nutrition services for infants and pregnant women, child care, English classes and job-training for parents.

Some of Head Start’s key concepts have surfaced in the California governor’s race. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) has proposed tying social service programs into the public schools, while the Democratic contenders, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein and state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, have backed proposed legislation to expand the availability of preschool education.

Head Start programs exist now in every state, as well as in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Pacific Territories, according to the national association. With more than 35,000 youngsters, California has the biggest Head Start enrollment. Like many other states, it also runs its own preschool network to help needy children not reached by the federal program.

Some other states add their own money to the Head Start pool. Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt recently proposed closing the gap in federal funding. If the Legislature concurs, Oregon will become the first state to provide Head Start for every eligible child.

Supporters of Head Start say its impact extends beyond the children to the parents as well.

“Head Start is one place low-income parents can go and feel good about themselves,” former Head Start parent Vasquez said. “It teaches you that you can help your child, that your input into the program is important (and) that you can better yourself.

“I’ve even seen parents who have learned to read and write by working (with their children),” added Vasquez.

At the center in Echo Park, a third of the staff began as Head Start parents, said teacher Fran Hermann.

On any given day, parent volunteers can be found alongside the four teachers at the small but generously stocked “temporary classroom” building, working with small groups of children engrossed in activities around the room or outside on the playground.

“We let the children be outside if they wish, even on cold days,” Hermann said on a recent chilly morning as she watched youngsters painting, hammering pieces of wood or building a toy railroad. “Many of these children have no place at home where they can be outdoors, and they want to be here.”

Echo Park’s four-hour program begins with breakfast shortly after its 32 children arrive at 8:30. Then they choose from among a dozen or so play activities that provide “indirect instruction” that includes an adult at every activity station and plenty of individual attention.

About mid-morning, the children have group “talking time,” a period that also includes singing and the dispensing of fluoride tablets.

The children then move into four “story groups,” divided by their level of development and fluency in English, until time for lunch.

When the youngsters leave at 12:30, the teachers stay another four hours, evaluating the day’s programs and planning for the next. On some afternoons, there are parent meetings.

“The changes you see in these children are just monumental,” Hermann said. “They walk out (at the end of the year) such different children than from when they walked in.”

Over the years, the parents, staff and community social agencies that have been brought into contact with Head Start have provided a strong constituency that kicked up a fuss whenever the program seemed threatened.

“Right now, everybody loves Head Start, so people tend to forget it had a kind of ‘Perils of Pauline’ existence for years,” said Edward Zigler, Yale University psychology professor and one of the architects and early administrators of the program.

An early crisis came just a few years after Head Start began, with the 1969 publication of a study that showed many of the academic gains made by its young charges disappeared after a few years. Political support dipped.

A later study found that Head Start children were held back or placed in remedial courses more often than their middle-class counterparts, and they tended to score lower on standardized tests.

Zigler said people simply expected too much from Head Start.

“Do you really think you could put on a program for poor kids for one year and expect them to look like middle-class kids 15 years later? The question is, do they look better than non-Head Start poor kids, and they definitely do,” said Zigler, referring to a growing body of research that shows that comprehensive, high-quality preschool programs, including Head Start, do have a lasting effect on school performance and in other areas, too.

Zigler said the center of debate now is why--not whether--Head Start works. A group of experts has been at work on a comprehensive assessment of the program for nearly a year, and their preliminary report will be delivered at a National Head Start Assn. conference in San Antonio at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, many educators point to a study by David Weikart of the High/Scope Foundation in Ypsilanti, Mich., as providing the most solid evidence that preschool programs such as Head Start work.

Weikart tracked poor youngsters in a comprehensive preschool program that began three years before Head Start was launched. Compared with children from the same background, those with preschool experience stayed in school longer, had a greater tendency to complete job training programs or attend college, had lower teen-age pregnancy rates, made less use of the welfare system, held jobs longer and were more law-abiding.

“What we found is that if you provide a high-quality program (to poor youngsters), you can make a lasting difference in their lives,” Weikart said. “For kids who don’t have a lot and have needs to be met, Head Start provides an excellent way of doing that.”