House approves overhaul of Head Start management

By a razor-thin 217-216 margin, the House early Friday passed legislation to revamp Head Start, the 38-year-old federal preschool program for the poor.

The bill, called the School Readiness Act and sponsored by Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., passed on a party line vote. Not a single Democrat voted for passage, while 12 Republicans voted against the bill.

While Head Start has long enjoyed bipartisan support, a provision in the legislation that would set up a pilot project to allow up to eight states to take over management of the program drew most of the controversy.

Democrats, led by Rep. George Miller of California, argued that cash-strapped states were in no position to take over the program. Numerous interest groups, including the National Head Start Association, which represents local Head Start program directors, and antipoverty groups such as the Children's Defense Fund, also opposed the pilot project. Republicans said the proposal would allow only states with strong state-run preschool programs to participate in the pilot project. By combining state and federal funding, they would be able to serve more children, Republicans argued.

But Miller said that the GOP-backed bill would allow states "to cut services, weaken oversight and accountability, and decrease money for training and curriculum development." An amendment to repeal the state pilot project failed on a vote of 229-200.

Miller said that Democrats supported provisions in the legislation that would require half of all Head Start teachers to hold bachelor's degrees by 2008, but noted that the bill "provides no money to improve teacher quality." The bill would raise the Head Start budget by 11 percent over five years to $7.4 billion. The small increase was worked out as a compromise between moderate Republicans and more fiscally conservative members, who have opposed recent large budget increases for Head Start. The program's budget has tripled since the early 1990s.

Still, moderate Republicans badly wanted to give President Bush a victory in the House. The president has made early education a priority of his administration. A team of experts assembled by the administration has focused on Head Start's failure to boost reading levels of pupils in the program when compared with their more affluent peers.

As a result, the Head Start bureau within the Health and Human Services Department has retooled Head Start performance standards to focus more on literacy, and is in the process of rolling out a new biannual testing regimen to gauge the progress of Head Start pupils in learning to read.

"For the first time in nearly 40 years, we are addressing the readiness gap that separates Head Start children from their more advantaged peers," said House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Boehner said that the legislation contains strong protections to ensure that all states that participate in the pilot program provide services that are at least as strong as those currently provided by federal Head Start centers.