Since its inception, Head Start has enrolled over 21 millionchildren at a cost of over $66 billion, but there is littleevidence of long-term impact, and poor children enter kindergartena step behind their middle-class peers and never catch up. Congressshould focus on improving Head Start programs by enacting higherstandards, requiring stronger accountability, and spurringinnovation.
central florida preschoolers will pay the price. this is one of the 3-year-olds that love to learn. what s that you re making? cookies. but because leaders in washington dragged their feet and shut down the government, destiny s head start school could shut down too. the head start program provides services for 625 students. they still have a job, but come friday our teachers will be out of a job, our students out of a place to learn. what do you say to the parents of those preschoolers, congressman, in your district? first of all, we have some good preschool programs, some of head start is excellent and some of it needs to be contented a lot of it needs to be shut down and privatized. many are not given the opportunity and performance levels are not high enough. i ve tried to work to get people with the highest level of degrees to work with our kids that have the highest level of
settings, the better he or she does down the road. we all end up saving money. unfortunately today fewer than 3 in 104-year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. most middle class parents can t afford a few hundred bucks a week, in additional forecast, for these kind of preschool programs, and poor kids who need it most lack access. and that lack of access can shadow them the rest of their lives. we all pay a price for that. every dollar we invest in early childhood education can save more than $7 later on. boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing incidents of violent crime. again, i m not the first person to focus on this. governor bentley has made this a priority in alabama. governor snider is making it a priority in michigan. governor tomlin made this a priority in west virginia. even in a time of tight budgets republicans and democrats are
well despite the recent scrutiny on spending, president obama pushed for more of it in tuesday night s state of the union address. just so happened to fall on the same day as mardi gras. well next guest has started a campaign called show us your cuts. taking a bourbon street approach to the out-of-control spending now in progress in washington, d.c. joining us executive director of public notice. gretchen hamel. gretchen, welcome, you heard the president say we need to invest in this, that, and the other thing. investment is different from spending though, right? oh, no. it s no different at all. investment is just a good word, a good spin on what more spending is. and the president on mardi gras announced that he wanted 20 new programs and said it wasn t going to cost more than a dime. so let s take a look at some of the things the president proposed. these investments which you rightly point out which, of course, are spending. minimum wage increase from 7.25 to 9 bucks. expandi