Failing Our Kids Again - The Massive Fraud That Is Head Start

A week or so ago we pointed out that the Pentagon has the Defense Department to look after its needs, companies have the Commerce Department to look after their needs, labor unions have the Labor Department to look after their needs and energy companies have the deep pockets of the cronyism infested Energy Department to look after their needs. But there is no Department to look after our kids’ needs. Consider the abuse our kids are constantly subjected to:

• In the very worse possible scenario, they are killed be an insane lunatic that shoots and kills over two dozen people in a school. Rather than immediately secure our schools and our kids inside them, politicians grandstand their own positions on gun control, leaving the other 132,000 schools no safer than before (even though we have already shown how easy it is to secure them: http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-about-more-hate-control-before-more_18.html)

Our public schools continue to under educate our kids, with the kids in dozens of other countries constantly outperforming U.S. kids on standardized tests.

We continue to subsidize tobacco growers and farmers that grow far too much corn than is needed, resulting in cheaper than needed tobacco products and cheap corn fructose. This in turn results in kids that smoke and kids that are obese because it is so inexpensive for it to happen via government subsidies.

Millions of kids are physically and sexually abused every year and thousands die as a result of this abuse.

With a $16.4 TRILLION national debt, we have subjected our kids and our grandkids to lives burdened with paying off the wasteful and sinful overspending of our generation.

Yes, we have not and are currently not taking care of our kids. And the latest government analyses and reports on the famous, or now infamous, Federal government Head Start program prove that we are not taking care of our pre school kids in particular, relative to what the political class and the Federal government it operates are supposed to be doing.

Before we discuss this latest scandal, let’s review a little history of the Head Start program:

• Officially, the Head Start program “promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development.”
• Furthermore, “Head Start programs provide comprehensive services to enrolled children and their families, which include health, nutrition, social services and other services determined to be necessary by family needs assessments, in addition to education and cognitive development services. Head Start services are designed to be responsive to each child and family’s ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage.”
• The program began as a small summer program under LBJ in 1965.
• Since then, the American taxpayer has spent about $180 billion on the program.
• The just released study of Head Start’s effectiveness involved the rigorous tracking and testing of over 5,000 kids over time, from their Head Start preschool days through third and fourth grades, and across over a hundred measures of success/failure.

And what have we gotten for this $180 billion? Apparently not much, according to the latest government analyses:

• The Health And Human Services study concluded that “by third grade, the $8 billion Head Start program had little to no impact on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting practices of participants.”
• Additionally on a few measures, access to Head Start had HARMFUL effects on the children enrolled in the program.
• For example, one subset of kids that were tracked had lower math skills than their peers who did not attend Head Start, all other factors controlled for.
• But it was not only book learning where Head Start failed since researchers found Head Start also had little to no effect on the other socio-emotional, health, or parenting outcomes of children participating in the program.
• In other words, we have paid $180 billion to provide a Federal babysitting service.

But all of this should not be surprising since in 2010, the Health and Human Services Department did another extensive tracking study and found that Head Start provided no positive impacts for kids once they entered first grade. Given those results, it should not be a surprise that there were no positive results or takeaways from Head Start by the third and fourth grades.

So, we have another Federal government program that has failed miserably in delivering on its goals. But the failure in the class room is not the only atrocity of this program. In 2010, the General Accounting Office (GAO) did an undercover audit of the program and found there is massive fraud and abuse of the program by those people benefiting from taxpayer wealth in funding the local operations:

• The GAO conducted thirteen undercover eligibility tests based on fictitious families to determine the practice of Head Start grantees, those operating Head Start centers with taxpayer funding, were enrolling children not qualified to attend the program.
• The fictitious families were all above the income limits and had other disqualifying characteristics, as established by the Office of Head Start.
• The GAO found that in eight of the thirteen eligibility tests, the fictitious families were told by Head Start staff that they were eligible for the program and encouraged to attend class.
• In each of these eight cases, Head Start staff directly told the fictitious families to misrepresent their eligibility for the program.
• In seven cases, Head Start staff deliberately overlooked some families’ income to make these families eligible for participation.
• In at least four of the cases, the GAO was sent phony eligibility documents that excluded income information, originally provided to the Head Start staff;
• In two cases, Head Start staff designated on application forms that one parent was unemployed, even though the GAO presented documentation of both parents’ income.
• In one case, Head Start staff promised the fictitious family that no one would validate the income information submitted was correct.
• The GAO concluded that their undercover investigations “highlight the ease with which unscrupulous parents could fabricate documentation designed to make it appear as though their children were under-income or otherwise eligible for the program. At no point during our registrations was any of the information contained in fictitious documentation submitted by our parents verified, which indicates that the program is vulnerable to beneficiary fraud in addition to grantee fraud.”

Now, this was obviously not as rigorous a test and analysis as the 5,000 kid tracking study. But it is probably indicative of the overall operations of the program, ineffective in teaching and improving the lives of our kids and fraudulent, criminal, and wasteful in its execution.

Just as an aside, let’s think about what we could have done with that $180 billion, in light of the Newtown school shooting tragedy. In previous posts we documented how there are about 132,000 schools in the country and that the average salary for a trained police officer is about $55,000.


If we take these three numbers, number of schools, cost to put on police officer in each school to protect our kids, and use the wasted $180 billion to fund the process, we could have secured every one of our schools for 25 years, more than half the life of the Head Start program. In other words, every school could have had a trained police officer on sight to deter violence against our kids since about 1988.

Instead, we have spent our taxpayer dollars on a massive government bureaucracy that does not come close to fulfilling its relatively simple goal and is laced with fraud to boot. Disgraceful.

But not unexpected. The Federal government never does a “spring cleaning” of its programs to determine if they are worthy of taxpayer wealth. For over four decades we have been funding this program for no benefit in return. I am sure that there are many other dead end programs that are on autopilot, receiving funding year after year with no review on whether it is a worthwhile expense. And this is one of the many major reasons why we have a $16.4 TRILLION national debt, unnecessary Federal spending.

That is why some steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” are so important if we are ever to inject sanity into Federal spending:

1. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending 10% a year for five years into order to squeeze unnecessary programs and projects out of existence since the funding to support them would no longer be available.
2. Step 34 proposes a process that would hold Congressional members accountable for their actions, removing them from committee posts for dereliction of duty. Spending $180 billion and getting nothing in return would certainly count as dereliction of duty.
3. Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federal politicians since the current set of politicians have proven they are incapable of doing a “spring cleaning” of unnecessary federal spending items which in turn results in a $16.4 TRILLION national debt with nothing to show for it in return.

But expecting the Washington political class to fix itself is probably not going to happen. In fact, it is pretty obvious than many politicians in Washington cannot even identify these types of problems and their root causes.

Consider a statement from an official White House publication from 2011, the year after the Obama administration’s own Health And Human Services Department proved that Head Start program is a failure in actually giving American kids a “head start:”

“Studies show that children in early childhood education programs are more likely to score higher in reading and math, more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, more likely to hold a job, and more likely to earn more in that job. For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health care costs, and less crime.” – President Barack Obama, March 10, 2011, President

If you cannot even recognize the problem, e.g. Head Start is a complete failure in preparing kids for life and DOES NOT pay the American taxpayer back in a 10-to-1 ratio, the chances of terminating or fixing the failed effort or program is next to nil. That is why Obama Care is shaping up as an epic failure, an inability to define the true problem and the true underlying root causes. That is why the 40 year “War On Drugs” is a lost cause, an inability to understand the root causes of addiction and the need to use drugs. The list of failure to understand the resultant wasted taxpayer wealth goes on and on.

Which is why the three steps above are needed to stop the insanity that is Washington’s cult and heritage of failure.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w