LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Edward Zigler : Head Start’s Architect Reflects on Building Achievements

CHICO, CALIF. —  Edward Zigler shakes his head when he thinks about the civil unrest in Los Angeles. One of the architects of the Head Start program for pre-school children, he feels that so much could be done to give young people a stake in society if they received attention early--if they had health care, if they had good educations, if they had hope that they could achieve.

“Where does this violence and all the horrors that you saw start? It doesn’t start when these kids are teen-agers,” says Zigler, who is Sterling Professor of psychology at Yale University and director of Yale’s Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy. He is committed to putting his knowledge to work in the community, and it’s clear to him that such violence “starts very, very young. . . . If you really want to do something about rioters, the solution is not to arrest thousands of people. It’s too late then. . . . It’s those early years that we have to impact.”

Zigler worked on planning Head Start when it began as a hurry-up summer program in 1965, as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Later, as chief of the children’s bureau in the Nixon Administration, Zigler helped save Head Start when it was targeted for extinction in 1970, after a critical report questioned its effectiveness. He still champions the program, which now enrolls 621,000 children and costs the federal government a little more than $2 billion a year. With co-author Susan Muenchow, Zigler has just written “Head Start: The Inside Story of America’s Most Successful Education Experiment,” recently published by Basic Books.

He lives outside New Haven with his wife, Bernice. His son, Scott, 29, lives in New York. At 63, Zigler travels extensively to speak about providing child care and family services through the nation’s schools. Although he says he considers his work his avocation, he does confess to considering himself a “very proficient poker player” as well.

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Question: What would be the single most important thing that President Bill Clinton could do for Head Start?

Answer: Create a Head Start program for children from 0-to-3 years old. We have to get away from this inoculation model of Head Start--the idea that if children are in a program for one year, that will be enough to make their lives better. No program, no matter how good, is sufficient in one year to affect the growth trajectory of children. Children are growing up in much more cruel poverty today than they were when Head Start began.

We should have not a one-year program, but a series of programs that dovetail. Why should we wait until children are four years old, as we do now? We should invent a brand new Head Start.

. . . You could have one program with prenatal care and early education; then the Head Start we have now, and then, when children get to school in kindergarten and first and second grade, you should have a follow through with the same variety of services--health care, parental involvement and so on.

Q: What else should the President do?

A: Quit playing a numbers game with Head Start, in thinking that you assess it by what percentage of the children that are eligible are in the program. Head Start should be assessed by the quality of the program. . . And unfortunately, after 28 years of Head Start, we still have not brought every center up to some minimum level of quality. We started it too fast. We started it too big. We’ve tried to get on top of the quality issue. The Reagan Administration starved Head Start for many, many years. President George Bush, to his credit, championed the program and put money into it, but, look, Head Start was always a program for 3- to-5 (-year-olds), but because they’re so committed to what they call “full funding”--well, the easiest way to full fund is to say, “We’ll only give it to 4-year-olds.” What happens to the 3’s? What happens to the 5’s?

Q: Should Head Start be a universal early childhood education program?

A: ...What I’d like to see is universal programs for all children, and then do something extra for poor people who need an extra hand up. . . . We’ll get in there with an earlier program, which we already have called parent and child centers (for babies up to 3 years old.)

Q: Is there money to do this on a universal basis?

A: There is not enough money. . . . What we have to probably do during these tight times is . . . introduce a fee system. . . . Let the government pay for poor kids, and let middle-class people have the services if they want them, calibrated to their income.

But where are our priorities? We keep saying you have to invest in human capital. Do we want to compete with the Japanese and West Germans or not? Investing in human capital means good health for our young children. It means preschool education for all our children.

. . . The people who are making the best case for what I’m talking about is the private sector. They’re the ones who are worried about competition and how productive each and every worker is going to be. . . . It’s the private sector that’s going to make this happen.

Q: What works to get parents involved in this? It’s obvious that if they are involved, their children do better in school. But so many have to work and don’t have the time.

A: It’s become harder. If you don’t always think that you have to give them lectures, if you’ll have a room where they can come after work to have a cup of coffee and talk to each other, and have a safe place in which they’re welcome, they will come.

. . . One of the mistakes we made early in Head Start is we decided what every poor mother wanted to hear was a big lecture on child-rearing. But if you have them come and say, “What would you like to do?” So, they want to have a potluck supper. They want to buy a washing machine to do their washing somewhere--so you buy a washing machine in Head Start. If you really make the program a bottom-up program instead of, “We want to tell you what’s good for you,” then they’re ready to listen to what good parenting is.

Q: What are the elements of a successful Head Start program?

A: . . . You have to have good health services. You have to have a good nutrition component. You have to have good social services to help the family. . . . We thought originally that you could take the child out of the family. . . . What we learned is you can’t do that. The child is embedded in the family, and you have to work with that entire family. The family is the unit of intervention, not the child.

. . . Look, we don’t know any pedagogy that’s so wonderful that we can make a sick child learn. You have to first take care of that child’s health problems. Remember, we’re still living in a society where 8 million children have absolutely no health insurance, so these children show up at Head Start with anemia. We have hundreds of thousands of poor children who never see a dentist in the first five years of their life.

Q: Does this make Head Start one of the biggest health-care providers for children?

A: It is probably the biggest. . . . If we hadn’t done anything more for these children than fill the cavities in their teeth, given them some good nutrition for the year they were in the program and given them health services, the program was worth what we were spending on it.

Q: So you think it would be better to serve fewer children longer?

A: The fact is, a child grows from stage to stage, and each new stage the child enters, he needs certain environmental nutrients to grow through that stage. Having a one-year Head Start program is like telling parents if you’re good parents for one year, your child will be forever wonderful. That’s ridiculous. You have to have a long enough time span and give the children the environmental nutrients they need.

What the evidence looks like to me is that one year of Head Start by itself has enough effects to make it cost effective, so people like Clinton and Bush, who both argued for the program, are right. It’s a valuable program. But it still is the inoculation model. . . . At the end of Head Start, the Head Start children are better on everything than are the comparison group. But then they both go to school. And the groups come together.

. . . You have to follow Head Start with a program in the schools to keep those gains going, so they’ll snowball. Now, we have got data that indicate that (you can help maintain the gains) if you will follow Head Start with four more years of the same kind of program in the school where you have both good curriculum--the education component--the health, the parental involvement.

It’s harder today. . . (But we do) have the biggest program of all, which is Chapter One, which was started in 1965. That program spends $6 billion a year. Now, what I’m going to be arguing is, Look, the evidence is in. The impact you’re going to have in an intervention is going to be commensurate with the intensity and length of your intervention. It’s that simple.

The question is where do we get the money. The money is in Chapter One. It is a non-program. It’s essentially a pork barrel for educators. They take this money and spend it anywhere from preschool through high school. They spread it very, very thin. . . .

Q: Everybody wants their school districts to have Chapter One money.

A: Exactly. That’s why it’s so popular. . . . But why don’t we turn Chapter One into a real program, not a hodgepodge of different activities at different ages? Let’s point all of that money in a very intensive way on poor children in kindergarten, first, second and third grade. Just take the money that I think we’re wasting and spend it well.

. . . I don’t hate every Chapter One program. I’m just saying that you have to make priorities. We all know that if that child is not reading at grade level by the end of grade three, you’ve lost the child. So we have to get in there earlier. . . .

Q: What can you do politically to get people to make that shift?

A: I see two forces: One arrayed against me, and one with me--and I don’t know who’s going to win. There’s going to be a lot of people who say they’re perfectly happy with Chapter One. They get the money, and they can spend it any way they want. They don’t want anybody to tell them what to do with it. . . . Those people are going to fight my idea tooth and nail. But I travel around the country and a lot of people who run Chapter One are telling me what I’m telling them . . . (that) where you do see some Chapter One effect is when the money is spent on very young children.

Q: Do you think that most people have any sense that this debate is going on over how best to expand Head Start?

A: No. They don’t. They’ve heard so much about Head Start. They think that Head Start is a homogeneous program. They don’t know that it’s 1,300 programs: some great, some mediocre, some rotten.

...What’s bothering me is that other countries are making this kind of investments in their children and we are not. I think that what this is going to do in terms of our competitive posture down the track, over time, is going to be terrible.

Q: Not to mention where it leaves the children.

A: That’s the mistake we always make--and (when) even people like me begin sounding heartless, I’m afraid. We always say what’s going to happen to the country, where are these children going to be 20 years from now, will it help them or not help them? The fact is we have hundreds of thousands of children who have no childhood.

. . . These children are not getting health care, hunger is reappearing. . . . These programs and these efforts ought to be not just about whether we make somebody more productive 15 years later, they ought to be what are we doing about the quality of life of children today.