What’s the legacy of Head Start, 50 years on?
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GWEN IFILL: Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson announced the creation of Head Start, the government program designed to support low-income children and families.
In our latest American Graduate report, the NewsHour’s April Brown has the story of how it’s changed the lives of millions of children.
That’s part of a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
APRIL BROWN: In Lisette Steinwald’s preschool class in Silver Spring, Maryland, the theme of what it takes to make a salad can be found in a variety of activities throughout the day, from reading, to a little show and tell.
The 4- and 5-year-olds she teaches in the Head Start program at Montgomery Knolls Elementary School spend about three-and-a-half-hours with her every day during the school year.
STUDENTS (singing): Curve it around and slide to the right to make a number two.
APRIL BROWN: They’re learning skills designed to ease the transition to kindergarten, and are following in the footsteps of more than 30 million children who have gone through the program in the United States over the past five decades.
NARRATOR: Head Start, a head start for poverty’s children.
APRIL BROWN: Head Start got its start in the summer of 1965, as one salvo in President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. The early education program for low-income children supported their social, emotional and physical needs and got them ready for elementary school. It drew high-profile supporters, including the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and actor Gregory Peck.
GREGORY PECK: Sadly, there are little children who are already headed for lives of frustration and misery. No one ever read them a story, taught them a nursery rhyme, showed them about colors, letters and numbers. When they start school in the first grade, they will be so far behind the others, that they may never catch up.
DARREN WALKER, President, Ford Foundation: In 1965, I was sitting on the porch of our little shotgun shack in Ames, Texas, with my mother and a woman approached the house. She introduced herself and told my mother that she was representing a new program called Head Start.
APRIL BROWN: Darren Walker’s mother signed him up in the program’s inaugural year, and he recently shared his story at a gathering of supporters and alumni from around the country hosted by the National Head Start Association.
DARREN WALKER: Head Start changed my life. It allowed me to begin to imagine, to think about the world outside of my environment and to think creatively about what my life might be.
APRIL BROWN: Today, Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, the nation’s second largest private philanthropic group, which is a funder of the NewsHour.
In honor of Head Start’s 50th anniversary, the organization is paying for new research on early brain development in an effort to improve outcomes. Walker says the foundation has come full circle since it supported research in the 1960s that led to the creation of What’s the legacy of Head Start, 50 years on?:
