House Republicans unveil effort to overhaul Head Start management

Republican members of the House Education and the Workforce Committee Thursday unveiled legislation to reauthorize Head Start, the 38-year-old federal preschool program for the poor. The legislation reflects a reauthorization plan proposed by President Bush last year, but differs in some important ways.

The bill-the 2003 School Readiness Act-tracks the Bush proposal by altering Head Start performance standards to emphasize the teaching of early literacy skills. It would also require that all new Head Start teachers have an associates degree within three years, and that at least 50 percent of Head Start teachers hold a bachelors degree by 2008. The legislation would boost funding for the program to $6.87 billion, a 3 percent increase.

Head Start serves more than 900,000 three-, four-, and five-year-old children in families living below the poverty line.

On the most controversial part of the Bush proposal-a plan to offer states the ability to apply to administer Head Start funding-the House Republicans offered a compromise that would allow the demonstration project to go forward with several strings attached.

Under the House bill, states would be required to maintain their own spending on early childhood programs, and would not be allowed to divert the federal funds for other uses. They would also have to maintain the same level of educational, health and nutritional services currently provided to Head Start children. Finally, the program would remain inside the Health and Human Services Department. President Bush's proposal that it be moved to the Education Department met with stiff resistance from Head Start directors nationwide.

Even so, the National Head Start Association, the Northern Virginia group that represents the directors, announced in a news release that the bill was "dead on arrival," calling it an "extreme legislative attack" on Head Start.

Ron Herndon, chairman of the group, said the association opposed even the scaled-back state demonstration project. "It makes no sense for Congress to recklessly mortgage the success of Head Start by turning over its funding to cash-strapped states," he said. Despite the House bill's assurances otherwise, Herndon said he fears states would not offer the same type of comprehensive services that Head Start currently provides.

In April, the Head Start association launched a lobbying campaign and Web site opposing the state demonstration project, and at a forum earlier this month sponsored by the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said he would oppose the proposal.

But the committee's chairman, John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the bill would set up incentives for states to maintain their own funding of early childhood programs, even as most states are currently cutting such programs to alleviate massive budget deficits.

"If states are willing to make a commitment to funding early childhood education and maintaining high standards, then the federal government should be willing to give them the ability to coordinate Head Start with their own early childhood education programs," he said.