By Fareed Zakaria
Some of the criticism of Obama's program has come from people who worry about the government’s track record in early childhood education. They point to Head Start, the long-standing program that provides this education to disadvantaged children. The Department of Health and Human Services released a study of Head Start in 2010, which was updated in 2012, that concludes that the program’s positive effects begin to fade within a few years. This has led many to call it a failure and urge the government not to throw good money after bad.
But critics are jumping to conclusions about a very complicated subject without really understanding the study – or the limitations of social science research. Three scholars from the University of Chicago and University of California, Davis, have painstakingly explained why it is premature to reject Head Start. They note that many factors may have intervened to erode the early gains in scores. For example, there have been sharp rises in single parent families, rises in non-English-speaking households, and rises in severe health problems like childhood obesity and diabetes. Most important, some studies show that though test scores level out, children who have been through early education do better in their professional lives.
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