The Fairbank Report...(如意報告)
**NB: Signed articles represent the opinions of the respective
authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of THE FAIRBANK REPORT/RUYI BAOGAO (如 意 報 告).
30 June 2015
27 June 2015
The $8 Billion Head Start Boondoggle
The only “lasting impact” of the Head Start program is on taxpayers’ wallets.
Those too-clever-for-words folks over at the Department of Health and Human Services have yet again tried to put one over on us. Using the oldest PR trick in the book, they released information to the media that they hoped no one would notice — on a Friday when people are too busy thinking about and planning their weekends. And because the report is very politically embarrassing, DHHS doubled down and went public on a Friday before a long holiday weekend.
So right before Christmas, on Friday, December 21st, we were hit with the results of the third and final phase of the federal government’s Head Start study. (Established by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, Head Start is the pet project of the early education crowd, which consists of spendaholic types aided, abetted and financed by the teachers unions, which love nothing more than expanding their roster of dues paying members. And President Obama is complicit member of this unholy alliance.)
The problem with the latest results is that they match those of the second phase of the study published in 2010, which revealed that basically Head Start has been a $180 billion (and counting) boondoggle. Lesli Maxwell in Education Week explains,
In the first phase of the evaluation, a group of children who entered Head Start at age 4 saw benefits from spending one year in the program, including learning vocabulary, letter-word recognition, spelling, color identification, and letter-naming, compared with children of the same age in a control group who didn’t attend Head Start. For children who entered Head Start at age 3, the gains were even greater, demonstrated by their language and literacy skills, as well their skills in learning math, prewriting, and perceptual motor skills.
The second phase of the study showed that those gains had faded considerably by the end of 1st grade, with Head Start children showing an edge only in learning vocabulary over their peers in the control group who had not participated in Head Start.
And now, in this final phase of the study, “there was little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group,” the researchers wrote in an executive summary. (Emphasis added.)
After the second phase results came out, Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell blogged,
The just-released large-scale random assignment study of Head Start confirms once again that the $7 billion a year federal preschool program provides meager benefits to children at huge costs to taxpayers.
In other words, it’s a very expensive and wasteful federal babysitting program. The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke elaborates:
… This federal evaluation, which effectively shows no lasting impact on children after first grade and no difference between those children who attended Head Start and those who did not, should call into question the merits of increasing funding for the program, which the Obama administration recently did as part of the so-called “stimulus” bill.
Snell continues,
In the past the Obama administration has been criticized for sitting on a study and releasing it on a Friday when it showed solid evidence that the DC Opportunity Scholarship program worked. The administration did not release a study that might have influenced policy decisions about reauthorizing and funding the DC school choice program. On the other hand, the Obama administration also sat on a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that showed meager impact for children in Head Start. The study was complete and the information was available, but the Obama Administration went ahead and significantly increased Head Start funding through the stimulus act to the tune of more than $2 billion. The hypocrisy cuts both ways. (Emphasis added.)
Snell also quotes Douglas Bresharov in the New York Times,
…to keep a child in Head Start full-time, year-round, costs about $22,600, as opposed to an average cost of $9,500 in a day care center.
In a rare moment of candor, the mainstream media joined the naysayers when in 2011, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein weighed in,
You take the million or so poorest 3- and 4-year-old children and give them a leg up on socialization and education by providing preschool for them; if it works, it saves money in the long run by producing fewer criminals and welfare recipients…it is now 45 years later. We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program’s effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.
Undaunted by a mountain of data, the National Education Association still proclaims its support for Head Start because
it maintains high quality classrooms and teachers, and effectively prepares our nation’s most at-risk children for school.
No better is the American Federation of Teachers. On their website, it crows that it
is gratified to see the Obama administration’s continued focus on the quality of early childhood education. As the president said during a recent visit to a Pennsylvania Head Start center, early education is “one of our best investments in America’s future.”
In any event, it is time to say no to the unions and any other special interests that only care about their selfish agendas. And for the rest the Head Start true believers, apparently all they have is evidence based on what Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby refers to as the “cardiac test.”
We just know in our heart that this is right.
Whatever their feelings may be, this shameful, wasteful spending must stop immediately.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
15 June 2015
So Sad :--(
Four Chinese siblings, aged five to thirteen, were found dead of apparent suicide. The children drank pesticide, the common method of suicide in rural China. The siblings were members of the large and growing legion of "left behind" children whose parents have left for work in faraway cities.
Chinese media speculate that they were either physically or psychologically abused. Several village government officials in charge of child welfare have been sacked or disciplined.
06 June 2015
WHY HONG KONG GEESE ARE REAL ASSHOLES
FROM THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
No wonder undocumented boy Siu Yau-wai wants to leave Hong Kong
Twelve-year-old boy Siu Yau-wai and his grandmother Chow Siu-shuen returned to the Shenzhen after seeking voluntary repatriation. Photo: K.Y.Cheng
In the sorry saga of Siu Yau-wai, the 12-year-old boy who has lived in Hong Kong without identity documents for nine years, the government turns out to be the only party that has behaved with a measure of humanity and legal propriety. It's so rare for such a thing to happen it deserves to be taken notice of when it does.
The case came to light thanks to unionist legislator Chan Yuen-han calling a widely covered press conference to highlight the boy's plight. Chan might have had a good motive, but she failed to anticipate the levels of anti-mainland sentiment the case would provoke. In retrospect, that was not that hard to predict. Yet, the ugly backlash surely must have contributed to Yau-wai and his family's decision to leave Hong Kong and go back to the mainland. Chan clearly bears direct responsibility for the hasty manner in which she exposed the child and his grandmother to a media maelstrom.
Xenophobic groups organised rallies to condemn the family. Some protesters carried photos of young Yau-wai to denounce him as a criminal. They also criticised the Immigration Department for issuing a temporary permit to Yau-wai and protested outside a school that helped assess his scholastic standards, claiming he deserved no right of abode or a local school place. The elementary fact that he wasn't offered the right of abode or a school place seemed to have completely escaped the protesters.
If nothing else, those xenophobes bring out the worst and ugliest of Hong Kong people. So it was left to officials to take care of the kid with some measure of humanity. The temporary permit was given to him as a way to make sure he wouldn't be arrested in the streets. His grandmother was arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting others in breach of condition of stay and granted bail. A probe was opened to determine whether there might be a basis to allow Yau-wai to stay in Hong Kong.
Now that he has decided to leave Hong Kong, the department has granted permission to his grandmother to take him back to Shenzhen even though she is on bail. Given the disgraceful and disgusting way he has been treated by the Hong Kong public, who in his right mind would want to stay?
We wish him a happier life on the mainland.
04 June 2015
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