Well-Read or Well-Fed

usan Landry likes to show a chart at the end of her lectures. It features two lines: One traces the expected literacy gains of the average child as he grows older, the other the gains for at-risk children-those with disabilities, eligible for free or reduced price lunches, or for whom English is a second language. The lines start together, but separate quickly and grow farther and farther apart. The Education Department reported last year that by fourth grade, nearly 40 percent of American schoolchildren read at a "below basic" level. A disproportionate share of them are at-risk children.

Landry has dedicated her career to closing that gap. In 1999, First Lady Laura Bush cut the ribbon opening Landry's Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education at the University of Texas in Houston. Since arriving in Washington, President and Mrs. Bush have followed Landry's lead in formulating a plan to dramatically refocus Head Start, the federally funded preschool program for poor children, on teaching children to read.

"If you look at those lines back at age 3 or 4 when they are barely separated, it's just a small gap," Landry says. "And there is documentation that we can overcome it." Still, Landry's work is controversial in academic circles. Many early childhood experts and Head Start directors fear that Landry's literacy-focused curriculum ignores other equally important aspects of child development, such as social and emotional health, and that testing kids on their knowledge at such an early age-another element of Landry and Bush's strategy-provides inconsistent results at best.

Bush's plan to refocus Head Start on literacy marks a high stakes gamble that teaching the more than 900,000 children under age 5 in Head Start the rudiments of reading will eventually boost literacy rates among older schoolchildren as well. But the president's team has plowed ahead full bore. Since taking office, Bush has urged Head Start staffers to attend literacy training courses sponsored by Landry's center, and more than 3,000 have.

Landry's methods focus on introducing children to letters and words, and to the sounds they signify. In her lectures, she tells teachers to play games with alliteration, and rhyming sounds, to read books to children, and to encourage children to work on their own writing. She also asks teachers to introduce their children to basic mathematical concepts. Many of the teachers who have taken her course say they have come back to their classrooms re-energized. "The training is excellent," says Elizabeth Sears, an education specialist at a Texas Head Start program. "It's not 'drill and kill' or rote learning. It's sound, child development-based activity."

At the same time, the Head Start bureau at the Administration for Children and Families, the federal agency charged with overseeing the 38-year-old program, has refocused on literacy, adjusting accordingly the technical assistance it offers the nation's nearly 1,600 Head Start programs. A team of experts convened by President Bush designed a biannual testing regimen-set to be in use by this fall-that will gauge how well Head Start programs are teaching children to read. With Congress set to reauthorize the Head Start program this year, other changes may be in store, such as a new set of literacy-focused performance standards, and tougher education requirements for Head Start teachers.

The Bush administration's changes have sparked a mixture of fear and anticipation among Head Start directors and early childhood researchers. Head Start directors, who are highly protective of the program, fear that Bush's focus on literacy will come at the expense of the comprehensive health and nutrition services now offered by Head Start. But Bush's focus on early literacy-and his willingness to revamp a revered program like Head Start-also has impressed many child development experts, who, like Landry, believe that intensive intervention in a child's early years will yield lasting benefits. The president's "bent is to use evidence to drive policy and practice," says Reid Lyon, a former Northwestern University professor who has advised Bush since the president was governor of Texas. In 2001, Lyon was allotted $50 million to oversee a five-year project to develop new curriculums aimed at improving literacy. And last November, Bush signed the Education Sciences Reform Act establishing the Institute for Education Sciences at the Education Department. The institute is charged with evaluating preschool curriculums.

With the nation gripped by the war on terrorism and concerns about the economy, the Bush team's work on early education has flown under the radar. But from its earliest days, the administration, led by Laura Bush, has laid the groundwork for its current push. In July 2001, the First Lady hosted a White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development featuring experts from across the country, as well as important policy-makers such as Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, Education Secretary Rod Paige, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., a critical player on education issues from the Democratic side.

President Bush then assembled a team of experts to serve as advisers, including Landry; former State University of New York professor Russ Whitehurst, who now heads the Institute for Education Sciences; University of Michigan professor Susan B. Neuman; and Lyon, chief of the child development and behavior branch at the National Institutes of Health. Also involved are Wade Horn, the assistant secretary for children and families at the Health and Human Services Department, who is responsible for overseeing Head Start; and Windy Hill, a former Texas Head Start director who now leads the Head Start bureau at HHS.

They say that the president's commitment to using solid research in developing early childhood curriculums is a refreshing change. "Frankly, the quality of the research on what works and what doesn't [in the Head Start program] is pretty darn scanty given the age of the program and the resources that have been put into it," says Lyon. Head Start's current budget is nearly $6.7 billion, and House Republicans have proposed an increase of $203 million or 3 percent for fiscal 2004. Overall, Head Start funding has doubled in the last seven years.

Few disagree that Head Start has had positive benefits for children. When he was governor of Texas, Bush proposed that the state spend its own resources to expand the Head Start program there. And the program enjoys widespread bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. At the same time, there are disagreements among the parties about how best to improve the program. Democrats, led by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., argue that any effort to improve Head Start must start with an infusion of resources. They point out that Head Start programs are able to serve only 60 percent of eligible children.

Republicans on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, which is considering legislation to reauthorize the program, favor the president's proposal. "The current system is giving these children a head start, but it isn't giving them the best start possible," says Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., who modeled his reauthorization bill on the president's proposal. Castle's bill, dubbed the School Readiness Act, would change the Head Start performance standards to emphasize literacy. It also would require that all new Head Start teachers have at least an associate's degree within three years, and that at least 50 percent of Head Start teachers hold bachelor's degrees by 2008. "The simple truth is that children in Head Start are learning, but they aren't learning as much as they deserve to be learning," says Castle.

But even as Bush and House Republicans have emphasized child development research in proposing changes to Head Start, some in the academic community argue that the GOP's focus on literacy ignores other research that proves that different aspects of child development-such as social and emotional health-are equally important. "The fear among some is that the heavy-handed emphasis on the part of the administration on early literacy will come at the expense of other aspects of the curriculum that teach children to learn [how] to learn," says Samuel Meisels, president of the Chicago-based Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development. Meisels agrees that early literacy is an important component of a good preschool curriculum, but it's only one component, he says.

He worries that Landry's literacy-focused program might not allow children enough opportunity to explore their own interests in the classroom. And Meisels says that Landry's program might not sufficiently take into account the social and emotional components of early childhood development. A good "curriculum looks for interaction and the development of a relationship between teacher and child, and wants both teacher and child to contribute to the curriculum," Meisels says. "It's important not to adopt a curriculum that hands teachers a script and expects children to respond." Landry denies that her program fits that description or that it fails to account for children's social and emotional needs. Rather, she says, it is meant not as a complete curriculum, but as a "framework that adds a strong language and literacy focus" to existing curricula.

So even as the Bush team emphasizes academic research, Bush adviser Lyon acknowledges that the academic community remains divided over the best approaches to teaching preschoolers. "In early childhood [circles], there has been a long-standing tension between social/emotional development and cognitive development," he says. But the caustic nature of that debate can be misleading, he says. Almost all researchers, he points out, agree that social, emotional, and cognitive development are important. The battles rage over which component receives the most attention.

Surprisingly, despite these fierce academic clashes and many small-scale research projects, no comprehensive study of outcomes for Head Start children has ever been done. The 1998 congressional reauthorization of the program required that the Health and Human Services Department do such a study, but it remains several years from completion. Critics of the program argue that the existing Head Start studies, all limited in scope, seem to show that Head Start students, after a few years of elementary school, demonstrate no better academic performance than similarly situated children who did not attend the program. Proponents argue that Head Start's comprehensive services, which include everything from healthy meals to dental and medical checkups and immunizations, provide undeniable benefits. Head Start should not be blamed for the poor state of the elementary schools that Head Start children later attend, they say.

A 2000 report by the nonpartisan RAND research organization-which collated data from previous studies-found that Head Start seems to have some positive benefits for its white participants, including an increased probability of completing high school and attending college. But according to the RAND study, most benefits for the 300,000 black children in the program fade away by the time they reach third grade. A separate study in 1996 published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Hispanic Head Start students, who make up nearly a third of the total, showed improved test scores and a lesser likelihood of repeating grades.

The reason for the mixed academic performance, the Bush team argues, is that most Head Start children enter the program about a year behind their more affluent peers in literacy skills. Then, because many Head Start programs do not focus on literacy, the children fall even further behind. Says Bush adviser Whitehurst: "Children who are failing at reading at the end of the first grade have an 80 to 90 percent chance of being failures at the end of fourth grade. The die is cast at a very early age."

Some scholars, however, say that the problems for poor children are far more deeply rooted, and that it will take more than early literacy training to solve them. "Achievement doesn't depend [just] on education," said University of North Carolina professor James Gallagher at a May forum hosted by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "It depends upon an entire cultural background. If you're not going to deal with the heart of poverty in the society then I don't think you're going to get an even playing field."

But other scholars, such as RAND's Lynn Karoly, are more optimistic. She argues that a well-designed curriculum with intensive services could significantly narrow the literacy gap between children of different economic backgrounds, at least for a while. She bases her belief on three previous experiments in early childhood education: the Carolina Abecedarian Study, the High/Scope Perry Preschool Study, and the Chicago Child Parent Centers.

The Abecedarian Study, begun in 1972, placed 112 disadvantaged children in a childcare center from birth to age 5, providing them with 40 hours a week of intensive educational, health, and nutrition services. Researchers followed up with the children when they reached age 21, and found that when compared with a control group, the Abecedarian children reported higher test scores, an increased possibility of attending a four-year college, and higher earnings. Craig Ramey, a Georgetown University professor involved with the Abecedarian study, headed the Bush committee that this year developed the new testing regimen to gauge how well Head Start programs are teaching literacy.

The Chicago Child Parent Centers, which provided another intensive preschool program, tracked to age 20 nearly 1,000 children who completed kindergarten in 1986 and found long-lasting educational benefits. The Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., during the 1960s provided intensive services to 58 children. The children have been tracked to age 27, and-like those in the Chicago and Abecedarian programs-the Perry children have reported positive benefits such as reduced criminal arrests, higher earnings, and an improved high school graduation rate, when compared with a control group.

In each of those cases, cost benefit analyses, after tabulating increased earnings of the participants and their reduced use of government services, have found that the programs were well worth the investment. Even so, each of the programs had a higher cost per child than Head Start does, and far fewer pupils. Karoly argues that Head Start would have to receive substantially more funds in order to make a fair comparison.

Still, many local Head Start directors agree with Meisels that the new focus on literacy will lead programs to disregard the special social and emotional needs of developing children. The directors also recoil from the charge that they are not doing enough already to teach their children to read. They argue that they have long taught literacy skills in an age-appropriate way and need no more advice from the federal government. Thus the National Head Start Association, a group based in Virginia that represents Head Start directors, urged its members to boycott Landry's literacy training seminars. Many attended the classes anyway, and came away pleased. Jim Powell, an Alabama consultant to Head Start programs calls Landry's program "the most impressive" he's seen in 20 years of reviewing Head Start curricula. But some were far less enthused. Jesse Rodriguez, an Arizona Head Start director who's been involved with the program for 27 years, said he sent staff to Landry's seminar but was disappointed. "They came back insulted," he said. "What they did there had no relationship with the children we are working with."

Still, even as they complain about literacy training, most Head Start programs have redoubled their efforts to teach children to read, says Lawrence Schweinhart, who develops Head Start curricula for the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation in Michigan. "The Bush administration has been enormously influential and there has been a strong effort [in the research community and among Head Start directors] to accommodate and adapt to [its] thinking." Whether that will lead to the huge literacy gains the Bush team is counting on, remains to be seen.