On the Weekly Wonk: Reflecting Back on My Head Start

Editor’s note: This essay by New America’s Media Relations Associate, Jenny Lu Mallamo, originally appeared on our new digital magazine, the Weekly Wonk. A new edition of the Weekly Wonk comes out every Thursday.

“Did anyone here go to Head Start?”

It was an innocuous question, asked by my statistics professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.  It might have been a rhetorical question, too, as the professor didn’t seem to expect anyone to speak up.

But I did, providing an empirical data point in our graduate seminar that was looking at the correlation between Head Start participation and academic success later in life – an academic discussion for everyone in the room but a personal one for me.

In 1990 and 1991, I attended a Head Start program in Lincoln, Nebraska, that offered classroom learning as well as home visits.  As a little girl of four, I thought that “Head Start” was the name of my pre-school. It was only later that I learned Head Start was a federal program that specifically prepares children from low-income families for school.

Like generations of families who have come before, my family’s early years in America were not easy. My father’s graduate school stipend – around five hundred dollars each month – made up the bulk of our income. To help support our family, my mother bused tables at a local Chinese restaurant. She had been a teacher in China, but because she did not speak English, waiting and busing tables were the only jobs available.

Yet she never complained. To this day, she remembers how proud she felt when she made her first American dollar. And she remembers how indignant she felt when my father asked for her that dollar so that he could put it in the bank. And save it. Because, saving, that was what we did. That is what we still do.

Continue reading over on the Weekly Wonk.