A Tilt Toward Literacy

This is the fourth in a seven-part series on the future of Head Start. Please join us for a web chat on this topic on Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 12:30 p.m. EDT here at EarlyEdWatch.org. We invite you to email us questions to get the chat rolling.

What a difference a decade makes. Ask experienced Head Start teachers and administrators about how things have changed over the past 10 to 15 years, and many of them will talk about differences in how, or whether, they taught the A, B, Cs or even posted the letters on their classroom walls. "I was forbidden to teach letters," wrote teacher J.M. Holland just this week in an Early Ed Watch post reflecting on his experience in 1995.

Leery of putting undue attention on literacy instruction, Head Start’s proponents have always argued that a comprehensive approach to supporting young children’s development is the strategy most likely to yield long-term learning gains for the impoverished youngsters Head Start serves. Head Start was designed at the outset to promote the development of the whole child, mentally, socially, cognitively and physically. It is a program that offers health services — including dental screening, nutrition, and other services that alleviate the effects of poverty — as well as education.

September 8, 2009: Competing, Collaborating and Evolving
September 9, 2009: Seeking Signs of Change Since 2007
September 11, 2009: Checking Assumptions on School Readiness
September 15, 2009: A Tilt Toward Literacy
September 17, 2009: The Case for ‘Comprehensive Services’
September 18, 2009: The Benjamin Buttonization of Head Start
September 21, 2009: Where is Head Start Heading? Three Potential Tracks
September 22, 2009: Live Chat: The Future of Head Start

But to some critics, Head Start’s emphasis on comprehensive services is a sign the program has little interest in preparing children to read. That’s the argument Douglas J. Besharov, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, made last February in an op-ed against investing stimulus funds in Head Start. Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, devotes an entire chapter in his book Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut to "The Problem of Head Start," arguing that Head Start does too little to prepare poor youngsters for success in school. Finn spends a large part of the chapter describing how Head Start’s founders worried, several decades ago, about placing too much importance on children’s cognitive development. But he ignores more recent policy decisions — most noticeably improvements to Head Start’s early literacy standards in 1998 and 2000 — that increased the program’s focus on early literacy. He also glides over several findings from the 2005 Impact Study that do show participants making improvement on several, albeit not all, indicators of early literacy skills.

The truth is that a lot has changed since the days that Finn writes about. Head Start continues to be a comprehensive program (the case for continuing this comprehensive focus will come in tomorrow’s post), but Head Start has taken a 180-degree turn on teaching pre-literacy skills. Alphabet letters are allowed — indeed encouraged — not just on the walls but throughout Head Start classrooms. Teachers are required to more directly introduce early reading skills, including the identification of letters and the singling out of printed words on signs and in books.

Today, more and more early childhood experts — including many in Head Start programs — agree that 4-year-olds should have exposure to some kind of pre-literacy instruction. New research published throughout this decade is persuasive, and some of it is based on gains made by Head Start children. (Watch for a helpful summary of this research in the forthcoming report titled "America’s Early Childhood Literacy Gap," to be released on Thursday by the non-profit organization, Jumpstart.) Those who criticize Head Start for not being interested in early literacy haven’t been paying much attention to the program lately.

Instead, the more pressing question today is not whether literacy should be taught in Head Start classrooms, but how. What are the most effective and developmentally appropriate approaches? For example, Susan Neuman, an early literacy expert and professor of education at the University of Michigan, worries that Head Start programs are relying on rote memorization strategies. "There is this false sense of satisfaction that we may be doing the right thing now," Neuman said. "But I worry that we may not be doing the right things, that we aren’t focusing on the things that bring achievement."

The tilt toward literacy dates to the 1990s. Throughout the administrations of the Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Clinton, when efforts to improve Head Start quality gathered steam, new research began to emerge on the importance of foundational literacy skills. As early as 1992, one of Head Start’s first directors reflected on the tension between the program’s comprehensive approach and the desire to prepare children for academic work in school. Edward Zigler, professor emeritus at Yale University, described it this way in Head Start: The Inside Story of America’s Most Successful Educational Experiment: "In an effort to ensure that Head Start was a comprehensive program, particularly one that downplayed cognitive development, we may have paid too little attention to the educational component," Zigler wrote.

In the 1998 reauthorization, Congress mandated that the Head Start Performance Standards be expanded to include "print and numeracy awareness." To measure this, the law required "that children know that letters of the alphabet are a special category of visual graphics that can be individually named, recognize a word as a unit of print, identify at least 10 letters of the alphabet, and associate sounds with written words."

Helen Traylor, associate commissioner of the Head Start Bureau at the time, laid out these requirements in Head Start Bulletin on curriculum in 2000. But she maintained that Head Start teachers should not veer from developmentally appropriate teaching. "This does not mean," she wrote, "that we drill children on the alphabet or enforce rote learning!"

Also in 2000, the federal government established the Child Outcomes Framework, which defines a set of skills and developmental milestones that children should reach to be prepared for school. Literacy is named as one of eight top-level domains. For example, a child should show "a growing awareness of beginning and ending sounds of words" and "recognize a word as a unit of print."

"We’ve seen some real progress in the last decade," said Susan H. Landry, founder and director of the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Landry has led efforts nationwide to include more literacy instruction in the early years. "It took a lot of work over the years to convince both the federal Head Start folks and the Head Start Association to make this adjustment in their philosophy, " she said, "And it slowly but surely happened, in some places more quickly than others."

In 2003, during President George W. Bush’s first term, the administration rolled out a National Reporting System (NRS) that was designed to test young children’s ability to recognize letters, among other things. The system was criticized for being hastily designed and inappropriate for young children and was scrapped three years later as part of the 2007 reauthorization of Head Start. But some of its data remains available in the Department of Health and Human Services performance reports. In NRS’s last year, 95 percent of Head Start children could identify at least 10 letters.

Other data, from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), show improvements in children’s letter identification even earlier than 2007. One of its studies compares sample groups of children who attended Head Start in 1997-98, 2000-01 and 2003-04. The children surveyed in 2003-04 were able to name more letters after a year in Head Start than those who attended four years before them. (See chart below.)

It would be wrong, of course, to rely entirely on letter identification as a measure of pre-literacy. Head Start observers want to see more growth in vocabulary and language use, for example. Equally important is an examination of which early literacy skills are most helpful to children in the long run, up to and beyond third grade, when comprehension becomes more important than simple decoding of words. We need more independent research projects that help to answer these questions.

One area for improvement, urged by many literacy experts and championed here at Early Ed Watch, is the teaching of actual content instead of word and letter drilling. An important report, Preschool Curriculum: What’s In it For Children and Teachers, published by the Albert Shanker Institute earlier this year, showed the dearth of rich content provided for 3- and 4-year olds.

Timothy Shanahan, the chair of the National Early Literacy Panel, a group that has come under criticism of its own for focusing too narrowly on decoding skills and letter naming, agrees that there is room for improvement – not just in Head Start but in early education generally. "I do think right now we’re at a stage where there is a lot more literacy instruction going on in preschools than there was five years ago, but that also means there is a lot more bad instruction than was going on five years ago as well," he said.

The root of the problem, he said, is that "you have a work force that hasn’t had a lot of training."

In other words, how do we ensure that teachers are using the most appropriate methods when many of them do not have post-secondary degrees related to early childhood development, do not have time or money to get these degrees, or do not have strong communication skills of their own, in part because they never went to college? As we reported in an earlier post in this series, changes in Head Start laws have upped the ante for teacher credentialing, with half of all Head Start teachers required to have a bachelor’s degree by 2013. Will this help to improve pre-literacy instruction? Is it enough?

As we contemplate the next steps for Head Start, these issues of how to help children gain early literacy skills need to become an important part of the discussion. They are wrapped up in many of the sticky issues surrounding teacher training, credentialing, professional development, curricular choices, early learning standards and developmentally appropriate assessment. Many of these same issues are shared by state-funded pre-K programs. If we are to build a system of early education that provides pre-literacy instruction – a goal that the research shows us to be essential – we have to think about how to move both state pre-K and Head Start onto stronger, more effective pre-literacy tracks.