Mayors Anthony Williams (D.C.) and John DeStefano (New Haven) think the Bush administration is off-base on Head Start.
Mayors from cities large and small are paying more attention—and devoting more budget resources—to early childhood education and quality child care issues, according to a study released on October 24, 2003 by the National League of Cities.
“If you launch a rocket, the earliest stages are critical in getting it off the ground,” said Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams. “It takes an enormous amount of effort to keep it going in the right direction. Once it’s in orbit, it’s much easier to work with. It’s the same thing with the life of a child.”
Mayor Williams was a featured speaker at a press event highlighting community leaders’ responses to the survey. The results show that many U.S. city leaders believe early childhood development to be a top priority in ensuring the future success of their communities.
Asked to list the three most critical program needs in their communities, 24 percent of survey respondents cited child care. Only housing was mentioned more often, by 28 percent. And 11 percent cited the overlapping area of early childhood education as one of their top three concerns.
The survey was conducted from November 2002 to March 2003, and included responses from 501 cities nationwide—about one quarter of all cities to which it was sent. The League mailed questionnaires to 1,981 elected city officials. Surveys were sent to all cities with populations of 50,000 or more, and also to a random, representative sample of cities with populations of less than 50,000. Each survey was addressed to the mayor or the highest elected official of the cities, and a cover letter asked that an elected official complete the questions.
“One-half of the communities have increased funding for such programs (over the past five years) despite the state and federal budget deficit crisis,” said John DeStefano, who is president of the League and the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut. “Forty percent of the cities that responded are already investing in early childhood education, which was unprecedented just a few years ago.”
The officials surveyed gave a number of reasons for investing in early childhood development, including the expectation that children who enter school healthy and ready to learn will be more successful in school and have fewer behavioral problems; and that children who have positive experiences early in life are less likely to become juvenile delinquents.
Until relatively recently, direct involvement in providing early childhood education has not been a function of municipalities. For some local leaders, increased involvement has brought increased appreciation for the federally-funded and regulated Head Start program.
“This press briefing is not held in DC just to announce the survey results,” said DeStefano. “We are also lobbying [for] Head Start to be kept local and run by folks who know the kids they’re working with.”
The Bush administration supports legislation that would allow some states to receive money in the form of a block grant to run their own early-childhood programs, in place of Head Start programs that are funded and regulated through the federal government, but with strong local community input.
Some local leaders, including Williams and DeStefano, feel that the block grant plan undermines local efforts to increase their support of programs that operate according to the federal model, which has been in place for almost 40 years and is widely considered to be beneficial and successful.
Mayor Williams argued that the Head Start program is an important tool in filling the gaps in early childhood education, which is not addressed by the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act. “Since the 1965 inception of Head Start, 20 million kids have benefited from it,” said Williams. “The proposal to block grant Head Start would put this successful program in jeopardy.”
Williams said that many city leaders oppose block granting Head Start because they believe that the high standards defined by communities and coordinated nationally would be negatively affected. He also argued that localities would have less money to spend on direct services under the Bush proposal, because each state would need to establish an administrative structure to regulate the programs—something that is now a federal responsibility.
In Williams’ view, all levels of government need to work together on issues surrounding Head Start, but he remains perplexed about the federal government’s latest proposals. “Why go and break something that’s fixed,” he asked. “I just don’t know.”
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