EVEN START

No one has cheered more loudly for Even Start than Republican Rep. William Goodling, the chairman of the Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee and a former school administrator, who helped create the program in 1988. When the Clinton administration suggested turning the program’s funds over to the states in a block grant earlier this year, Goodling led the effort to stop the plan. Even Start, Goodling pointed out, doesn’t simply help children to read; it helps parents as well, who in turn can help their children. And, as the congressman reminded his audience, “parents are the best teaches.”

True, true. But what sort of teacher is Even Start?

Thanks to an extensive study of the program published earlier this year, it is now possible to answer that question in some detail. Social sientists from an independent research firm, Abt Associates of Boston, spent four years evaluating the nearly 500 individual Even Start sites across the country. The evaluation, financed by federal dollars, was a model of sound research techniques, with carefully matched control groups, and sophisticated analysis of immense amounts of data. As the first major study of a “family literacy” program, the evaluation drew intense interest from educators. Fans of Even Start appeared particularly enthusiastic about it, certain the results would prove the program’s worthiness.

They didn’t.

At first, results seemed promising: Abt’s researchers discovered that Even Start kids had made substantial gains over a year and a half. Unfortunately, they weren’t the only ones: Kids in the control group, who had never seen the inside of an Even Start classroom, made almost exactly the same gains. In other words, children who spent their time in Even Start would have learned just as much had they enrolled in a regular preschool, or stayed home and watched Sesame Street.

Researchers got roughly the same results from every literacy test they administered. One particularly revealing experiment concerned vocabulary, perhaps the key measure of any literacy program. The researchers analyzed the results of a common word test given to Even Start children when they joined the program, and again when they left. The same tests were given to a control group over the same period of time. When the scores were compared, it turned out that children who had eluded Even Start learned more vocabulary words — and learned them more quickly — than those who had enrolled in it.

For supporters of Even Start, data like these seemed perverse, like the scene in Woody Allen’s Sleeper w hen a present-day man wakes up 200 years from now and discovers that smoking, fatty foods, and sugar improve health and longevity. Congressman Goodling simply refused to believe the news. “I didn’t see that part of the study,” he admits, but “I would say that that [the mediocre test scores] would be impossible.” The reason? “If you visit the Even Start programs, they are constantly concentrating on reading-readiness skills.”

In other words: Looks good, must work.

Stunned educrats — those who had made it all the way through the evaluations did their best to respond to the evidence, playing up the scraps of good news contained in Abt’s report. In a memo sent to Even Start administrators, for instance, Department of Education officials boasted that ” Even Start helped many adults attain a GED.” While technically true — the study found Even Start parents more likely than their control-group peers to get high-school equivalency certificates — it was hardly something to brag about. Even the Labor Department has declared equivalency diplomas almost useless for anything but wall decorations. “The GED,” concluded a report issued earlier this year by Robert Reich, “appears to have more of a credentialing than a “training effect.” Its recipients, the report said, ” appear to fare only slightly better in the labor market than seemingly comparable high school dropouts.”

Sharon Darling, head of the National Center for Family Literacy and one of the architects of Even Start, admits the Abt evaluation hasn’t shed much favorable light on the program she helped design. “It did not do a good job of portraying the success of Even Start,” she says. But anyway, says Darling, Even Start would work well if only it were more “comprehensive.” That is, if only it had more money.

Darling’s explanation is an old favorite in Washington, where government programs are never failures, just not “fully funded.” In the case of Even Start, however, the rejoinder sounds especially tinny. Over its first three years, the federal government spent an average of $ 4,022 a year for each family enrolled in Even Start. Not much compared to some government expenditures, but not bad for a literacy program that doesn’t make people literate. If the funding outlined in the House this summer becomes law, Even Start will get more federal dollars next year than public libraries, arguably the best literacy program of all.

What is all that money buying, if not literacy? Nothing less than the best job-training program ever devised, says Rebecca Roberts, director of an Even Start project in Washington, D.C. According to Roberts, it doesn’t much matter whether or not the program actually teaches anyone to read. Economic success is what counts: “Finding employment and housing — we really push that a lot,” she says. And apparently with great results. “Studies have shown,” Roberts explains, that most of the unemployed adults enrolled in Even Start find jobs when they complete the program. “People get employed,” she declares confidently. “That’s the bottom line.”

Actually, it’s not. Isolated Even Start projects may lift large numbers of their graduates from the unemployment rolls, but most don’t even come close. According to the Abt evaluation, enrolling in Even Start makes it considerably less likely that a parent will find work later. Only 14 percent of the unemployed adults studied had found a job by the end of their affiliation with Even Start, compared with 22 percent of the control group. Another study found that Even Start had a negative effect on household income.

So much for economic empowerment.

Which is not to say Even Start doesn’t accomplish anything. Families enrolled in the program do a number of fun things. Listen to some of the program descriptions sent in to evaluators by staff at Even Start projects around the country:

In Indianapolis, “one group activity to emphasize group connectiveness and foster parents” self-esteem has parents and staff stand in a large circle and toss a ball of twine across the circle, making a large ‘spider’s web.’ Before someone throws the ball, she has to announce to whom she is throwing it and then say something nice about that person.”

In Phoenix, “parenting workshops” have “included self-esteem, stress management, child abuse, domestic violence, parent-child communication, spouse abuse, how to take a local bus, and making children’s toys.”

In Birmingham, Ala., “one trip was to the city jail, at parents’ request, to view the facility and visit Death Row.” Administrators there “feel that the program builds esteem in adults. Staff also report that parents are cleaner and better-groomed, that parent-child communication has improved, and that parents are more positive with their children.”

In Hackensack, N.J., the Even Start staff took children and their parents to the circus and the Statue of Liberty.

In Reading, Pa., hungry students took a field trip to “Pizza Hut, where they made their own pizz as” — presumably as a exercise in literacy awareness. (“A is for anchovy.” )

Back in Washington, Rebecca Roberts boasts about the extracurriculars her Even Start project offers, from classes in arts and crafts, to advice on ” talking to your kids about sex.” Parents and children “do get some literacy skills, but they really get self-confidence.” Self-esteem. Self-confidence. Stress management. Notice a theme here? Having failed to teach people to read, Even Start has broadened fits aims. The new frontier in literacy education, it turns out, is telling parents how to raise their kids. “Parenting is the only thing we do in life that we’re never trained for,” explained an Even Start instructor to the New York Times. “We go ahead, have children and hope that things work out.”

The implication, of course, is that, without “training” from programs like Even Star, things don’t work out, not for poor parents, at least. This is federal paternalism on an awe-inspiring scale, and it pervades Even Start.

Howard Miller, director of several Even Start projects in suburban Maryland, explains how a program designed to teach reading now concerns itself with the Whole Person: “We really address all aspects of parenting: health and nutrition, routines, organizing your home, immunization, safety. Especially nurturing, the relationships. ”

How do brothers and sisters solve problems, feeling loved, feeling confident, building responsibility in children? All of those are major issues.”

Another “major issue” apparently now related to literacy is spanking. Lan Dao, an Even Start worker in the Mount Pleasant section of Washington, explains how, in addition to advising parents on what to feed their children, she tells them not to spank their kids. “I say, “No, you can’t hit them.'” Though he couches it in educanto, Howard Miller makes essentially the same demand of parents: “We’re trying to find other ways of discipline other than spanking.” And what, exactly, does a parent’s choice of corporal punishment have to do with reading? “It bears on the child’s emotional development,” responds Miller.

Questionnaires given to parents by Even Start workers are even more intrusive. Ostensibly designed to determine how well parents are teaching their children at home, the forms include a number of questions like, “Who buys the groceries for the family?” and who makes “most of the decisions about how the family income is to be spent?” There are also at least three questions concerning — you guessed it — spanking.

Perhaps the best evidence that Even Start has completed the long journey from literacy program to support group comes from Phoenix. Even Start workers in that city, wrote the Abt evaluators, “report that many husbands are abusive, but that women are reluctant to get help. Since divorce is not acceptable in the Hispanic community, even a woman’s family does not encourage her to leave her husband. The Even Start staff are frustrated by the problems that they see but cannot solve. However, they do try to address these issues in home visits and parenting workshops.”

Keep in mind, Even Start is a literacy program. Or it was. How did this happen? And why does Congress keep paying for it? Robert St. Pierre, one of the researchers who worked on the Abt evaluation of the program, has a theory. “The idea [of Even Start] makes sense,” he says, “so people think there should be a way to make it work. But I’m not sure we’ve found it yet.”

Rep. Goodling has no such doubts. But then, his assessment is unhindered by anything so rigid as test results. “Enthusiasm, outlook on life, all of those things, ihey’re hard to measure,” he says. Does this mean Even Start will enjoy the continued support of the Republican Congress? You bet, says Chairman Goodling. “I asked for more money, in fact.”

By Tucker Carlson