The Evidence Is In: Head Start Still Doesn’t Work

Conn Carroll / October 26, 2010

Delivering his first major address on education in March 2009, President Barack Obama promised the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce: “Secretary Duncan will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.”

Supposedly keeping with this commitment to “evidence based” policy, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag made the case expanded Head Start funding in a recent edition of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Problem is, as Heritage Foundation Research Fellow David Muhlhausen points out, the science just doesn’t say what Orzag says it does: (more…)