In Los Angeles, A Glimpse of Possible Changes to Head Start

This month, the Office of Head Start announced a new plan called the “Roadmap to Excellence” to improve the quality of its programs, and Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, the director of the Office of Head Start, has been making the rounds to promote it.

 

The roadmap outlines the steps that the office says it will take to promote higher standards and better integration with other early childhood systems. The plan brings together some new ideas with some initiatives that were mandated by the reauthorization of the Head Start law in 2007. For example, the 2007 law requires that underperforming Head Start grantees will have to compete with other local agencies for the renewal of their federal grants. “If Head Start programs, even with the strongest standards and appropriate support, are not providing high-quality services, HHS will look for other providers that can,” the roadmap says.

 

Sanchez Fuentes talked about the roadmap in a recent visit to the the Los Angeles County Office of Education. I caught up with Sanchez Fuentes there to learn more about any changes in store for Head Start under her leadership.

 

With roughly 22,000 children in Head Start and Early Head Start, LACOE is the largest grantee in the country, and so was a fitting site for Ms. Sanchez Fuentes to visit. She toured the adjacent Plaza de la Raza Head Start program, where she worked with Play-doh at a table of friendly preschoolers and sat on the carpet with a group of toddlers reciting the rhyme about monkeys jumping on the bed.

 

At Plaza de La Raza, teachers converse with children in both English and Spanish, said supervisor Sylvia Aguilar. When children enter the program in the fall, they are taught primarily in Spanish, but by this time of year most of them, she said, are well on their way to being bilingual. Because the site also houses an Early Head Start program, the children know the teachers almost from birth, making it easier to assess and respond to the children’s language and learning needs, she added.

 

“The teachers bond with the families, so the transition is a lot easier,” Aguilar said.

 

Sanchez Fuentes told me she wants this type of environment to be the norm at all Head Start programs, and that’s why the “roadmap” also includes a new parent engagement initiative—in effect a re-emphasis of Head Start’s original message of empowering parents so they can better support the development of their children.

 

The roadmap also calls for the revision of the guidelines that govern Head Start – known as the performance standards. As these standards are revised in the coming months, Ms. Sanchez Fuentes said, she doesn’t expect them to specifically address Hispanic children or English learners in general, but she stressed that the guidelines should consider the individual needs and characteristics of programs.

 

She added that her approach to improving quality overall will focus on holding programs to high standards, but also allowing programs to have more freedom in how they meet those standards.

 

“We’re looking at flexibility,” she said, noting that she has long heard concerns about the “very prescriptive” nature of the performance standards, and how they can stand as a barrier to collaboration with other early-childhood education providers.

 

The “roadmap” also includes a strengthening of the state training and technical assistance system and the development of five national centers. Operating similar to the Department of Education’s clearinghouses, the centers will provide information on research and best practices that can be implemented in Head Start classrooms, but also benefit the early childhood community in general.

 

One of the five—the National Center on Cultural and Linguistic Responsiveness—will hopefully begin to answer some of the many questions, highlighted in this blog last November, over how best to build English language skills while also encouraging children to continue developing the language they speak at home.

 

Currently, Head Start doesn’t have firm data on the English language development strategies used by grantees.

 

“I feel like we don’t have a good handle on what’s going on,” Sanchez Fuentes said. “The center will help us learn what kinds of models we’re using.”

 

Obviously, more details will be needed in the coming months over which areas programs might be allowed some leeway. Flexibility is a message that many Head Start directors and teachers are likely to welcome. But at the same time, practices that are found to be effective at one program should be shared across the Head Start community.

 

One last note about Sanchez Fuentes’ visit:  She was joined here at the Los Angeles County Office of Education by Juan Sepulveda, who directs the White House Initiative for Excellence in Hispanic Education. The two of them came together to answer questions from local school district officials and to hear their thoughts on some of the Administration’s initiatives, including the Race to the Top competition.  Their joint appearance is another hopeful sign of much-needed cooperation, which Early Ed Watch has written about before, between the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services at the federal level.