The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

Opinion

Discussion

February 14, 2013

Your View: One of the bunch

By Duane Eberhardt Special to The Globe

JOPLIN, Mo. — Glory be! Finally a government agency that recognizes how much good it is doing. In this age of skepticism, it is refreshing to see that at least one government agency is honest and truthful.

That agency is the Head Start program, and its evaluation of the 2008 program has shown that it is worthless. What was done was to compare pairs of children who have similar backgrounds (e.g., race, marital status of adults, income, etc.), with each pair being one child that participated in Head Start and one who didn’t. Their own evaluation showed that by the second grade there is no difference between a child who has been in Head Start and one who has not. (In case you are wondering, they got the same result in 2007.)

Thus, the $180 billion we have spent has gotten us ... nothing. Of course, now that I have attacked it, I have earned the title “racist,” and that sort of attitude appears to be correlated with the fact that no one seems able to kill this worthless program. What has happened is that the Head Start people keep saying, “Just give us more money and it will work.”

I think they are Tinker Bell people who think money will buy them a magic wand. I believe that one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping the result will be different.

Of course, Head Start isn’t the only insane program, just one of the bunch.

Duane Eberhardt

Joplin

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