Education Week - August 7, 2013 - 28

28 EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 7, 2013 www.edweek.org
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Head Start Shake-Up Yields Little Turnover
MAKING THE CUT
Few new providers
join program’s roster
By Christina A. Samuels
The first competition for federal
funds in Head Start’s history
was a sea change for the
more than 120 grant recipients
deemed low-performing that
were asked to go through the
process—but it didn’t result in
many new organizations entering
the program.
Only eight of the 153 agencies
to come out of the recently completed
competition with funding
will be new to providing Head
Start services this year. Many of
the grantees are organizations
that had served as “delegates”
to larger Head Start programs,
meaning they provided early education
services, but did not directly
control their own funding.
That the Head Start shake-up
has yet to result in many brandnew
providers does not negate
the worthiness of the competition
process, which is part of other
major changes in the federal program
aimed at making centers
more accountable for child outcomes,
said a spokesman for the
program.
“All of the selected awardees
successfully demonstrated their
ability to raise the quality of
Head Start services,” said Ted
Froats, a spokesman with the
children and families administration,
the division of the Department
of Health and Human Resources
that oversees Head Start.
Even though the competition
produced little in the way of new
faces among awardees, a Head
Start shake-up was needed and
overdue, said Ron Haskins, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution,
in Washington, and the
co-director of its Center on Children
and Families. He served as
a member of an administration
advisory committee on re-designation
of Head Start grantees.
“The biggest flaw is that in
order for the strategy to work,
you’ve got to have good competition
at the local level,” and so far,
that seems to be lacking, he said.
But Head Start providers, even
those that do not need to compete
for funds, are now focused on improving
their quality, he said.
“This is still worth doing, because
Head Start wasn’t providing the
results it could have.”
First Wave
Head Start and Early Head
Start, a separate program
launched in 1994 to serve pregnant
women and toddlers, served
about a million children and
pregnant women in fiscal 2012,
at a cost of about $7.6 billion.
Automatic federal budget cuts
under what’s known as sequestration
will force some centers to
reduce their enrollment.
During Head Start’s 48-year
history, grantees were allowed
to hold on to the money indefi-
As part of Head Start reforms announced by President Barack
Obama in 2011, 125 grantees that failed to meet quality benchmarks
were required to reapply for federal funds. As a result, some large
programs were split among several providers, leading to 153 winners
at the end of the process.
Bennett’s Fall
Likely to Ignite
Policy Debates
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27
statement: “Leadership is doing what
is right, knowing the results will follow.
The data is clear; thanks to Tony’s
leadership, children are better prepared
for success.”
On the same day Mr. Bennett
stepped away from the Florida job,
the Indiana affiliate of the American
Federation of Teachers called
for Indiana’s grading system to be
suspended.
In an analysis of how Christel
House Academy’s grade was altered
by Indiana education officials on Mr.
Bennett’s watch, Anne Hyslop, a policy
analyst at the Washington-based
New America Foundation’s education
policy program, determined that
without any of alterations to the A-F
system that ultimately led to Mr.
Bennett’s departure from Florida,
the school would in fact have earned
a B, not the C grade Bennett’s chief
accountability officer, Jon Gubera,
identified in an email.
The lesson from what Mr. Bennett
and his staff did to alter Indiana’s A-F
system, she said, is that if such officials
believe the right accountability model
is in place, it should not be subjected to
personal considerations.
“My hope is that policymakers are
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
nitely, unless they committed
a serious violation. But, facing
concerns that the programs
were not adequately preparing
young children for kindergarten,
Congress required in 2007
that those not meeting a set of
quality benchmarks would be required
to compete for continued
funding against other interested
organizations in their communities.
The rules for competition
were announced by the Obama
administration in 2011.
A second competition is under-
way, and all grantees, even those
that are not required to compete
for continued funding, will be on
a five-year funding cycle. One of
the new grant recipients is the
Kalamazoo Regional Education
Service Agency, which provides
support to nine school systems
in Michigan, the largest of which
is the 12,000-student Kalamazoo
district. The region had been
served by a county community
services organization.
“Over the years, we’ve seen the
rising standards for kindergarten,”
said David Campbell, the
superintendent of the regional
service agency. Also, he said that
statewide, there’s been a move
toward having the regional service
agencies, with their exclusive
focus on education issues,
take a larger role in providing
Head Start services. The agency
will serve 594 4-year-olds, with
part of the money coming from a
newly expanded funding stream
from the state.
San Antonio represents an
example of one area where delegate
agencies stepped up to
receive money directly from the
federal government. Instead
of one agency overseeing Head
Start citywide and in surrounding
Bexar County, there are now
six. They include Family Service
Association of San Antonio,
which has been providing Head
Start services to about 1,600
children.
Localized Control
That organization decided to
seek direct funding because “you
have more control of the programming,”
said Todd R. Greaves,
the director of early-childhood
and Head Start services. “When
a program is not so large, you
have a better understanding of
what your community needs.”
And though they receive funding
separately, Mr. Greaves said
that the six agencies, which will
serve about 6,800 children, plan
to meet regularly to discuss common
needs.
Hudson Guild, a community
organization serving the Chelsea
neighborhood in New York
City and Manhattan’s West Side,
is counted as a new provider of
Head Start services, even though
it previously had provided earlychildhood
services as a delegate
agency of the city’s children’s
services administration. The city
had cut funding to Hudson Guild,
saying the community it served
was too affluent. Ken Jockers,
the executive director of Hudson
Guild, said that housing for
the working poor in the neighborhood
is right next to luxury
buildings.
That funding cut prompted
the organization to apply for a
grant, he said. The program now
plans to expand to add 142 more
children, for a total of 320, paid
for through Head Start and city
money. “For us, what drove the
decision was the need to provide
care for low-income children who
would not have access in this
area,” Mr. Jockers said.
But some grantees say the
touted benefits of Head Start
competition have yet to be seen.
Keesha Woods, the director of
the Head Start program at the
Los Angeles County Office of
Education, is a so-called “supergrantee”
that has seen its $212
million in federal funding shrink
to $115 million, both through the
competition process and cuts related
to sequestration. The number
of children served through
the county office’s delegate
agencies will shrink from about
22,000 to about 11,500. Former
delegates will receive direct
funding from the federal government,
but the transfer process
will be complex and take about a
year, she said.
“I don’t think there’s any way
to say yet that breaking up LACOE
as a grantee will be more effective,”
Ms. Woods said. “I know it’s
going to increase bureaucracy.”
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obtained by the Associated
Press.
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paying attention, and that they don’t
sort of use this [controversy] to either
scrap the systems entirely, or attack
the notion of school accountability in
and of itself,” Ms. Hyslop said.
Mr. Bennett’s exit from Florida
shows that accountability isn’t ultimately
based on numbers, but the
individuals who control them, said
Marc Porter Magee, the president and
founder of 50CAN, a K-12 advocacy
group based in New York City.
“In the end, it’s an ethical effort, not
a scientific effort. ... Do you trust the
state chief and his team? If you sever
that trust, the most important job
going forward is to try to rebuild that,”
he said.
Unfinished Business
When Mr. Bennett resigned last
week, he was working to maintain political
support for the Common Core
State Standards in Florida, and also
grappling with whether to keep the
state in the Partnership for Assessment
of Readiness for College and
Careers, or PARCC, a testing consortium
developing assessments aligned
to the new standards.
Florida Sen. Dwight Bullard, a
Democrat who said he supports the
common core in principle and who
called for Mr. Bennett’s ouster after
the story broke, is among the state
Democrats suggesting that the resignation
should lead Florida to change
its constitution to once again require
state education commissioners to be
elected.
“If nothing else, the voters should
have a choice. The system that we
have now is a deluge of political appointees,”
Mr. Bullard said.
1,600
TOTAL NEW GRANTEES
AFTER ROUND 1 COMPETITION:
•
•
St. Anne’s
Maternity Home,
Los Angeles
Calvert County
Public Schools,
Prince Frederick, Md.
•
•
•
St. Mary’s County
Public Schools,
Leonardtown, Md.
for fiscal 2013
Genesee County
Intermediate School
District, Flint, Mich.
•
Kalamazoo Regional
Educational Service
Agency,
Kalamazoo, Mich.
TOTAL GRANTEES NATIONWIDE:
1.1 million
CHILDREN AND PREGNANT WOMEN SERVED:
in fiscal 2012
$7.5 •7 billion
•
HEAD START FUNDING, INCLUDING SEQUESTER CUTS:
Hudson Guild,
New York City
YMCA of Central Ohio,
Columbus, Ohio
South San Antonio
Independent School
District, San Antonio
(most recent year for which complete
figures are available)
Numbers are rounded.
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Education Week - August 7, 2013

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