The Head Start Debates - Softcover

The late Jane Knitzer, Ed.D. was Director of the National Center for Children in Poverty, and Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York.

In addition to her work with the National Center for Children in Poverty, Dr. Knitzer was also a Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. As a psychologist, Dr. Knitzer focused her own research on improving public policies related to children's mental health, child welfare, and early childhood. Her work on mental health included the ground-breaking policy report, Unclaimed Children: The Failure of Public Responsibility to Children and Adolescents in Need of Mental Health Services (Children's Defense Fund, 1982). Most recently, she was a leader in calling attention to the importance of addressing social and emotional issues in young children. Dr. Knitzer was on the faculty at Cornell University, New York University, and Bank Street College of Education. She was a member of the New York State Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children and a past president of Division 37: Child, Youth, and Family Services of the American Psychological Association, and a member of the American Association of Orthopsychiatry. She was the first recipient of the Nicolas Hobbs Award for Distinguished Service in the Cause of Child Advocacy from the American Psychological Association.

Craig Ramey, Ph.D., is the creator and founding director of the Abecedarian Project and its replicants including Project CARE and the Infant Health and Development Program. His program of research centers on the role of early experience, especially education – across the human lifespan - in the development of competence and robust health. His approach relies largely on experimental interventions in education, psychology, and pediatrics that provide rigorous tests of plausible developmental mechanisms of stability and change within dynamic, multilevel ecologies.

Arthur J. Reynolds, Ph.D., Professor, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 51 East River Parkway, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55455. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study, one of the largest and most extensive studies of the effects of early childhood intervention. He also studies the effects of early childhood intervention on children's development from school entry to early adulthood and the family and school's influences on children's educational success.

Excerpted from Chapter 1 of The Head Start Debates, edited by Edward Zigler, Ph.D., & Sally J. Styfco

Copyright © 2004 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Early Educational Interventions and Intelligence: Implications for Head Start

Intelligence is a complex, undeniably important, and controversial topic, especially within the arena of the Head Start policy and practice. Considering intelligence from an historical perspective and in light of emerging scientific evidence is informative for future deliberations about the direction of Head Start programs, their performance standards, and evaluation of their success. To what extent can Head Start programs contribute positively to the development of intelligence in young children and increase the likelihood of their academic and social success in school?

Reviews of the research evidence agree that when children from low-income, multirisk families and communities participate in intensive, high-quality, preschool programs, the children show benefits. These benefits are apparent in their developmental competence, most notably in the areas of general intelligence and language development (Burnett, 1995; Bryant & Maxwell, 1997; Guralnick, 1997; Haskins, 1989, Karoly et al., 1998; S.L. Ramey & Ramey, 1999a, 2000; Yoshikawa, 1995). In studies that have followed children's development through the primary grades — and sometimes far beyond — continued benefits often are documented. These include improved test scores on standardized assessments of reading and mathematics, markedly reduced rates of grade retention (grade repetition), and lowered rates of placement in special education (Barnett, 1995; C.T. Ramey & Ramey, 1998).

In this chapter, we first make the case that improving children's intelligence is an important program goal for early intervention programs, especially for Head Start in the 21st century. Second, we present a review of the key findings from evaluations of the Abecedarian Project conducted since the 1970s, which has provided evidence of multiple, practical developmental benefits that last into adulthood. The Abecedarian Project is the first randomized, controlled trial of early educational intervention that started when children were infants and provided continuous supports to children and families for at least the first 5 years of life. Thus, this project provides and exceptional opportunity to understand the extent to which an intensive, multiyear, educational, and health support program can make a lasting difference in children's intelligence and overall well-being. Third we summarize the principles of effective early intervention programs — that is, the factors that appear to be essential in order for children to benefit from their participation. Fourth and finally, we discuss key issues for policy and decision making in the arenas of Head Start, education, child care, and parent and family support programs.

HEAD START IN THE EARLY YEARS: A COMMITMENT TO IMPROVING CHILDREN'S EVERYDAY INTELLIGENCE

When Head Start began in 1965, its national vision was to improve children's everyday or real-world intelligence prior to entering kindergarten or first grade. The method for achieving this goal was to offer children from economically impoverished homes some of the wealth of learning opportunities that their more advantaged peers had prior to entering public school. Educators and developmental psychologists who had worked with low-income children in preschool settings knew how quickly and eagerly children from all walks of life learn when they are in a safe and supportive setting with adults they can trust. They also saw firsthand the tremendous inequities in the lives of many economically poor children compared with economically advantaged children in terms of home-based learning and developmental encouragement. These inequities led to later developmental delays in those who had restricted learning opportunities and were readily noticed in children's speech and vocabulary, their everyday problem-solving abilities, and their tested intelligence (IQ scores). For many children who lived in extreme poverty, their most apparent delays related to their knowledge about the larger world and were pronounced in the areas of language and reading readiness (preliteracy skills), numbers and numeracy, and reasoning abilities. Without a doubt, the founders and leaders of Head Start in the 1960s, along with many middle-class volunteers who eagerly helped with Head Start programs throughout the country, believed that Project Head Start would increase children's everyday intelligence and their subsequent academic success in school.

Intelligence Defined: Everyday versus Academic Definitions

In the everyday sense, intelligence is widely accepted to be an indicator of a person's broad array of skills and knowledge. More (rather than less) intelligence is viewed quite positively — with only slight skepticism from some segments of society about the value of having extremely high levels (that is, genius-range intelligence). Intelligence is not considered a hidden trait but rather something that shows itself actively. Examples include how well a person handles real-life issues, such as planning, analyzing, information gathering, decision making, and generating new ideas and solutions.

In the academic and scientific world, however, the definition of intelligence is far from resolved. There are numerous competing theories and many hotly debated issues about how best to measure intelligence and whether intelligence itself is a stable lifelong trait versus something that can be modified by experience or affected by the testing situation itself (Ceci, 1991; Zigler & Butterfield, 1968). May of the superb academic treatises about the nature of intelligence are laden with terminology from statistics, learning, theory, genetics, and developmental and evolutionary biology. Some of the most celebrated new theories promote an exciting vision of intelligence as a multifaceted representation of diverse human talents. Howard Gardner (1993) proposed a theory that there are "multiple intelligences," including interpersonal, linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, musical, and intrapersonal. Robert Sternberg (1995), in his "triarchic theory of intelligence," posited three distinct types of intelligence: creative, practical, academic. Academic intelligence, of course, is the one primarily measured by traditional standardized tests of intelligence. Critics complain that such all-encompassing ideas about intelligence are not testable or refutable, whereas fans appreciate the recognition of multiple pathways in life that cannot be reduced to just what is taught and tested in traditional school settings.

We endorse the view that children benefit immensely when they have school readiness skills related to reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as a solid language foundation and general knowledge about many things in the world. We know that standardized tests of intelligence and school achievement are important indicators of children's developmental progress but are woefully inadequate to tap the full range of their skills and learning. Ideally, there will be major advances in how to assess children's skills and knowledge more fully and fairly. Improved assessment techniques should also help educators realize their goals of providing the best individualized instruction to each child at each stage of development and increasing the opportunities for children's multiple types of intelligence to shine in the school setting.

The Heated Controversies Surrounding the Use of Standardized Intelligence Tests in Head Start

To understand why the Head Start community has been so strongly divided about whether intelligence should remain an important outcome goal for Head Start programs, or whether it even be measured at all, it is informative to consider the use and misuse of intelligence tests in our country. (See Gould, 1996, for a highly readable and far more extensive history.) In the early 20th century, formal intelligence tests were developed as a way to help predict which children would do better (or worse) in a formal school setting. These standardized tests evaluated children's skills in many different areas that were closely associated with the kinds of tasks encountered in school, such as following a sequence of instructions, listening to stories and retaining key details, performing basic number operations and detecting similarities and differences among objects. These "intelligence tests" were never intended to measure the full range of human range of talents and skills.

Further, any careful historical or current analysis of the content of the items on the most widely used intelligence test reveals that children with an increased fund of knowledge and more learning experiences were more likely to earn higher scores. Indeed, this is why these tests have been so good at predicting how well groups of children would perform in school. The predictive power of the tests eventually was treated as much stronger than ever intended.

All too often, the scores a child "earned" based on his or her responses to the items on a standardized intelligence test, known as an intelligence quotient or IQ score, were considered to be a true and valid indicator of the child's real intelligence — both current and future. As a result, educators often used children's IQ scores to decide many matters related to what, where, and how children were taught. Many teachers trusted that the IQ test could accurately measure a child's "true potential" and "innate ability" for learning and later school success. Further, the test manuals that provided guidelines for professionals about how to interpret the IQ score implied that a child's intellectual potential could not be fundamentally challenged. Thus, until the passage and enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (PL 94-142), many children were doomed to a label of "less intelligent" and were excluded from many of many interesting and important academic learning opportunities, all because of their performance on a single standardized test of intelligence.

Regardless of the fact that the IQ test scores of large groups of school-age children can predict their general school performance, many educators, psychologists, and parents have realized that there are so many individual exceptions. Some children with low or average IQ scores seem to soar academically; such children have often been labeled as "overachievers." Children with high IQ scores who do not do well in school have been called "underachievers." Other children with very low scores, below 70 or 75, are labeled as having mental retardation, even though some of these children seem to function reasonably well in their everyday worlds. These seeming mistakes in judging a child's intellectual competence may be rare, but the consequences for individual children and their families are unfortunately, severe and often lifelong.

Another seriously disturbing aspect of intellectual assessment is that children from lower socioeconomic classes consistently perform below children from middle- and upper-income families. Further, there almost always have been significant ethnic and racial differences in test scores. These differences among groups of children have been interpreted by many scientists, policy makers, and the general public as representing genetic or inherited qualities, thereby constituting evidence that some children are destined, by their genes, to be either inferior or superior. A simplistic and once widely held view was that these qualities were inherently unalterable.

In the 1970s, McCall, Appelbaum, and Hogarty (1973) provided compelling evidence that IQ scores of individual children do fluctuate dramatically over the preschool and school-age years: ages3 to 17. Individual children typically have IQ scores that differ, on average, by 28 points — more than the amount needed to place a child in the gifted versus average IQ range or the average versus mental retardation range. Although this important longitudinal study could not pinpoint all of the reasons for these fluctuations in IQ scores at different test occasions, the investigators did show that parenting practices were likely to be a significant influence on the children's intelligence growth patterns.

One of the most controversial and highly publicized scientific papers on intelligence appeared in the same decade that Head Start was launched. In a 1969 monograph in the Harvard Educational Review, Arthur Jensen reported that African Americans had average IQ scores about 15 points lower than Caucasians and strongly implied that this difference was a trait that could not be altered. This paper appeared in the midst of our country's vigorous Civil Rights Movement, which drew attention to the extreme disparity in how African Americans were treated in all areas of life, including education, housing, employment, health care, recreation, and citizenship rights. The reality of long-term, systematic racial discrimination was undeniable — and its consequences were far-reaching. In academic and political circles, there was an outcry against Jensen and the potential harm that was likely to result from his monograph.

Scholarly analysis and criticism of Jensen's position continue. The essence of his early ideas was reenacted and expanded in a highly popular book in 1994, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structures in American Life, by Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray. They claimed that they were academic mavericks, unfairly rejected and criticized by liberal colleagues who refused to face up to the "true facts" that confirmed that some peopleare fundamentally and unalterably less capable than others. Their book had the aura of a scholarly tome, with hundreds of pages and numerous, highly detailed scientific tables and graphic displays of data. Despite the fact that the scientific community, once again, found serious flaws with statistical analyses and the reasoning in this book, as well as the facts that the authors systematically excluded published evidence contrary to their thesis, their central ideas received tremendous public attention. To a large extent, Hernstein and Murray affirmed the belief of many laypeople, politicians, scholars — namely, that differences in intelligence are real, and in line with the social order of the world. That is, people on the top of the ladder earn this right largely because of their natural superiority, whereas those at the bottom are truly inferior and their performance cannot be much raised.

Not surprisingly, such a nativist position is at odds with the Head Start program's intent to give children early opportunities to learn, which in turn are expected to increase their readiness for school and their later life achievements. About two thirds of the children served by Head Start are from ethnic minorities, and almost all are economically impoverished. Thus, the position of unalterable innate abilities places the majority of Head Start children and families i...