Date: 2003-07-24
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Chairman. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman. tonight we have a choice. We have a choice about whether. or not we can build upon the continued and improving success of the Head Start program. and whether or not we can provide the kind of quality assurance and performance standards that this generation of children. of impoverished children. of many children who have not had opportunity up until the day they walked through the door of a Head Start center. whether we can provide that kind of quality program and performance standards to assure that they will. in fact. have the opportunity to exercise the education that they will be given. The gentleman from Delaware pointed out the chart that showed these children were improving a few percentiles during their time in Head Start. then he suggested in his earlieg remarks. not in these remarks but in the earlier remarks. that these children were performing so poorly that for all intents and purposes. they are done educationally. Well. that obviously does not jive with some of our colleagues who talked about their own success as Head Start students and our own experiences in our congressional districts. nor does it jive with the rest of the study which the gentleman from Delaware cited. which is. by the end of kindergarten. these children are performing at about average. What does that suggest to us? It suggests to the researchers that Head Start. in fact. did lay down the foundation. did lay down the basis by which these children. compared to other children in kindergarten. are able to achieve in that 1 year the average of those children. That is against all children in that kindergarten. How does Head Start work against their peers. other poor children who do not have the opportunity? We see that these children have substantial gains. IQ gains over the children who did not get to participate in Head Start. Their reading. writing. and math skills are superior to those children who did not get to participate. a much higher level of high school graduation. They are not doomed because they are not doing as well as we would like in Head Start. they are doing better than their peers. Special education. many fewer held back in school. and fewer put into special education and. of course. a lower incidence of participation in crime. So it is working against their peers. and it is providing them an educational opportunity against the average children. We have already agreed. and we have said on both sides of the aisle. that there is much improvement in this legislation. But again we go back to the fundamental principle that the improvements that we make in title I. the improvements in the performance standards and in the law. are then undermined by the block grant. It is interesting that the gentleman from Delaware. and I can understand his experience. because his State has basically adopted the Head Start performance standards for State preK programs. as has Ohio. the chairman. and I guess. apparently. of Oregon. But in this block grant. the very things that strengthen and provide for the success that the gentleman from Delaware talks about are not included. because when you say it is extensive. you do not have to take the body of regulations that have provided the quality and the continuous improvement of this program over 35 years. The States do not have to take that. and that is the big difference. And that is what we see when we talk about the erosion that the block grant leads to. We can take the block grant and we can reduce program hours. We can exclude 3yearolds. We can increase childteacher ratios. We can provide unproven curricula. We have spent a fortune trying to get Head Start doing something with the massive amounts of research that we have been involved in. and yet we can cast that aside and go out. to some vendor who promises us something for these children. We can run halfyear programs and we can serve more children by running the halfyear program. These are the core elements that have separated Head Start from so many other Staterun programs where they do not have the quality and they do not get the results. That is why there is such a strong adherence by our communities to the Head Start program. That is why there is such strong adherence by the Members of Congress to the Head Start program. because we understand that they are being measured by their compliance. by their compliance to those standards. Yes. many of them are out of compliance in one fashion or another. but we also know that many of those are just minuscule. tiny. tiny factors that they are out of compliance with. Because in that same study. again. 85 percent of them were high quality. And then it comes to the question of the comprehensive services and the direct access. and the body that we have built up. services that are not provided in many of the State programs. That is why we ask our colleagues to accept this bill and all of the hard work that has gone into title I and to reject title Finally. let me say that all of this improvement and all of these children that are supposed to be served are all essentially going to be served with less money in a few years because of the capped authorization in this legislation. For the first time. this Congress will reauthorize a bill that will not allow for the expansion over the period of that reauthorization of this program. That is the first time any Congress has done that. and that is the first time any administration. Republican or Democrat. has suggested that that is the right way to go. We know it is not the right way to go. We are only serving 60 percent of the children. and yet we are going to knock out in the next few years some 5.000 to 10.000 of those children because the authorization does not provide sufficient funding. Mr. Chairman. I urge the adoption of this amendment. and rejection of the block grant and the undermining of the Head Start program. Mr. Chairman. I yield back the balance of my time.