‘Father’ of Head Start says it’s not lived up to potential

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Mar 26, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:20 a.m.

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The man often described as the “father of Head Start” told a Baton Rouge audience Tuesday the 43-year experiment with a federal system of child care has failed to live up to its potential and is being slowly superseded by a patchwork of state-run preschool programs.

“Things are as bad in child care as they were 30 years ago,” retired Yale University professor and child psychologist Edward Zigler said.

Zigler, 77, is promoting School of the 21st Century, a program of school-based community centers aimed at filling the gaps left by Head Start and similar programs. The new program, overseen by a policy center at Yale named after Zigler, is in 1,300 schools across the country.

Zigler, however, has not given up hope for universal child-care available from birth, and urges young people not to either. France and Italy already have universal child care and there’s no reason this country can’t either, he said.

“Eventually, we’re going to get it right,” he said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but it’s going to happen.”

Zigler came to LSU as part of its Department of Psychology’s 100th anniversary celebration. He gave a speech Monday night at the LSU Union, visited a Head Start center Tuesday morning, and then spoke to a luncheon audience at the Lod Cook Alumni Center.

Zigler served on the original panel whose recommendations served as the basis for Head Start, and then ran the program in the 1970s during the Nixon administration.

Zigler said he’s written four books on Head Start and is writing yet another, giving rise to the common description of him as the “father of Head Start.” Zigler, however, said he is not the original father, but rather father of the second phase of the program.

When he became director, Zigler said, he had to rectify some early, nearly fatal mistakes made at the outset of the program.

For instance, Head Start initially tried to organize parents to “fight the system” by getting involved in community and political battles, even though most of them simply wanted good day care for their children, he said.

In 1970, Zigler said, he ended such activism, sparking a backlash from community organizers who were “making a good living” off of Head Start.

He said he also devised the program’s first performance standards. For its first decade, Head Start centers operated independently, running the gamut from wonderful to terrible, he said.

While quality improved, Head Start remained basically a jobs program — with centers valued more for the jobs they provided than the quality of their child care, Zigler said. That was the case until the 1990s when the Clinton administration closed more than 100 Head Start centers, the first centers closed in the history of the program, he said.