Head Start or Not?

I recently read an Ed Week article, "Head Start Study Finds Brief Learning Gains," by Mary Ann Zehr. This article acknowledges Head Start's positive effects on children's learning. I had the privileged of volunteering at Head Start for a year and I, too, saw the positive effects that the Program made on its students, however, I also noticed some of its short comings.

The goal of Head Start is to prepare children for school. Overall, Head Start is a very effective program. However, foreign students are often confused. Head Start is very diverse, there are Indian students, Hispanic students and Chinese students just to name a few. Because many parents do not speak English at home, the children understand very little of the language when they begin attending the program.

There is no requirement that teachers in the program must be bilingual or know any amount of a language besides English. Therefore, some children have no way of understanding his/her teacher, while the teacher cannot understand the children either. Also, interaction with other children is a very important part of kindergarten. In kindergarten, children learn how to play together and build friendships. But this is impossible when children cannot communicate. This communication gap is a problem that prevents many children from learning. It is indeed easier to learn a language when young, but children should not be completely lost in school until they learn English.

Many challenges stand in the way of solving this problem. The first is that the program does not have sufficient funds to train teachers in other languages. Also, many teachers may not want to spend time learning another language. However, the program cannot support an additional teacher to teach English as a second language either. An additional teacher to a program location would cost $ 20,000 that the program does not have. Also, because there are children from various cultures, the teacher would need to know many different languages.

I think that Head Start needs to make small changes to help foreign students. There are many things that the program can do that would not require much money. Even little things would help more than nothing. In the classes there are pictures everywhere, of homes, schools, and colors. If each of these images had a label under it, saying what it is in English and then in the other necessary languages, it may help children make connections between their language and English. Also, if Head Start did this, without trying, the teachers of the program would begin to learn a little of each language, shrinking the communication gap between teacher and students. It is also hard for teachers who cannot help their students.

From my experiences volunteering at Head Start, I have seen that all of the teachers care about the children in their classrooms, they want the children to succeed, that's why they are teachers. As an educator seeing a child’s face light up when they learn/master something is the single most rewarding thing. For this reason I believe that if every teacher had a list of greetings and expressions in other languages they would be motivated to learn. Head Start is a very good program, and with a little work will become a fantastic program. I believe that the communication problem in the program needs to be fixed. Every child deserves the same experience, no matter what language they speak. Little things can really help children in the program. Everything that happens when a child is young influences his/her future.