Willer Testimony page 4 involvement strategies of the Head Start and Follow Through programs provide an important strategy in this regard. Such participation helps to empower parents and helps them to better access the services they need. Collaboration and coordination are also important over time. This is especially important for enhancing children's transition from preschool services into kindergarten and the elementary grades. While there have been some transition projects in the past, there need to be more systematic efforts toward fostering the communication and coordination of the various service providers that deal with children from one year to the next. The Follow Through program is a good position for furthering the goals of coordination and collaboration. Certainly, this has been a major goal of the program since its beginning. Coordination and collaboration needs to occur at every level. At the federal level, it is important that systematic means for communication occur between the Department of Health and Human Services, in which Head Start is based, and the Department of Education, in which Follow Through and other school-based services are housed. Nor should other departments be overlooked. For example, the Department of Labor has a number of programs, such as job training, that while not directly affecting children, do have tremendous impact because of their effects on children's families. Again, the groundwork for this process already exists; we need to be sure that the resources are available to strengthen the collaborative efforts at every level. Flexibility to meet individual family and community needs It is important that legislative programs provide sufficient flexibility for communities to best meet the needs of individual families served, recognizing the unique demands and characteristics of local service provision. At the same time, such flexibility should never compromise the quality of service provided. One of the reasons that such flexibility is so important is that communities vary markedly in the degree to which services are being provided, which children are being served, and who needs service. When program standards are rigid and inflexible, there can be needless duplication of some services, while other needed services go wanting. For over two decades, the Follow Through program has been implemented following these principles for high quality service provision, although at funding levels insufficient to fully accomplish its goals. Follow Through's history illustrates that these principles are not easy to implement. It takes much time and effort, as well as new approaches to service delivery. But, the effort is well-placed and will do much to help to assure that we provide all of our young children with the opportunities for educational and life success that they so richly deserve. Chairman KILDEE. Thank you. Dr. Schultz. Dr. SCHULTZ. Thank you. I am pleased to present testimony on behalf of the National Association of State Boards of Education. I am Tom Schultz. I work with early childhood issues for NASBE. Most of my remarks are based on a National Task Force on Early Childhood Education that we empaneled a couple of years ago to produce this report, Right from the Start. It basically addresses recommendations for improvement of public early childhood services for children, ages four to eight, and their parents, so it is a good match to the challenges represented by Follow Through. To summarize my testimony, I will begin with my punch line which is derived from a historical artifact about Follow Through. This book came out in 1975, written by Alice Rivlin and Mike Timpane about Follow Through. It's title was Planned Variation in Education: Should We Give Up or Try Harder? I think, fifteen years later, the verdict is that we have done neither. We haven't abandoned Follow Through, but we haven't given it the resources to allow it to really try harder. The conclusion of my testimony is that it is time for the Federal Government to try harder, and that we have to figure out the strategy that will be appropriate to build on the capacity that Follow Through represents. I have got essentially three major arguments that lead me to that conclusion. The first is the conviction that Follow Through is focused on a key policy problem for public early childhood in the 1990s which is early school experiences for low income children. I think if you look at President Bush's National Education Goals, you will see that he has committed us to essentially a zero defect policy in terms of a ninety percent high school graduation rate and high levels of achievement for all students. What that means is that we can't be satisfied to have low income or minority kids achieve at lower rates than their more advantaged counterparts. We have got to find ways to support them and allow them to be successful. Unfortunately, we have more low income children in our schools than we had five to ten years ago. We are finding increasing complications in their lives in terms of the burdens that they bring to the public schools. The latest horror story that came across my desk from Newsweek last week was a survey that estimates that 375,000 babies are born each year who have been exposed to drugs during pregnancy, primary crack cocaine, so that would take up about 12,000 elementary school classrooms or eighty percent of the slots in Head Start. It is not a minor problem for us to contend with. My sense is that the public schools are not ready to be able to cope effectively with those children. A second point is that there is growing evidence that the early school years are particularly critical if we are looking at outcomes of high performance and ability to complete school. Drop-out experts that we talked with through our task force said that, by the end of third grade, they can tell you, with very high accuracy, which kids are going to drop out. I think the message there is that we've got to intervene sometime prior to third grade if we are going to make a difference in terms of these aspirations that we have as a society. I think a particular concern that was raised in our work as a task force was very high rates of retention of children in kindergarten and the early grades. If you look at records from urban districts like Boston and the District of Columbia and entire states, such as Delaware, Arizona and Florida, you find rates of up to 20 to 25 percent of young children of all income brackets are being retained in those early school years, and higher rates than that for minority, male and lowincome students. Unfortunately, the impact of that practice of holding kids back is not positive on their achievement and tends to increase their chances of dropping out. I think the picture is one where we have got a high priority to succeed with poor kids, more poor kids that are more troubled. A focus has to be provided on those early school years that Follow Through seeks to address. We have some problems in terms of current practices in those years in terms of public schools. It seems to me the second contention that I would bring in my remarks is that Follow Through is an effective and promising program strategy to build on. I am not going to relate the particular evaluation evidence on Follow Through, but rather try to bring some comments from the perspective of early childhood leaders and components of successful programs that we looked at on the part of our task force. I think there is a growing consensus among early childhood experts and experts concerned with programs for low income children, that agrees with the key features of Follow Through in terms of continuous and comprehensive intervention, strong parent involvement, and not waiting until kids fall behind and then attempting to remediate their problems. A primary recommendation in our report right from the start is to create early childhood units that would operate in elementary schools to provide services and distinctive forms of instruction for younger children. There is a similar recommendation coming from a report that is going to be issued soon by the National Association for Elementary School Principals. I think another example of this agreement on this concern for early grades and the Follow Through approach are efforts that have been made by Project Head Start over the past years through the Head Start Transitions Program and an earlier effort, Project Developmental Continuity, that has been trying to improve the transition for young children coming out of Head Start into the public schools. Finally, I think the point made by Mr. Poshard, that parent involvement as an aspect of Follow Through is critical, is one that the experts agree on. My third point, and I think the trickiest issue for us to grapple with at this stage, is the Federal leadership strategy to take this key problem and perhaps the promise of the Head Start Program experience. Let me first address the recommendation, as I understand it, of the Department of Education, which is essentially to say that Follow Through can be zeroed out; the services can be provided through Chapter 1; and, dissemination of the National programs can be handled through Chapter 2 and the National Diffusion Network. NASBE supports all of these programs and we feel that they have an important role to play, but we don't think that they duplicate the mission of Follow Through. Let me give you some examples of differences that we think are significant. For example, Follow Through models are designed to provide continuous support for young children from kindergarten through the primary grades. If you look at the figures on Chapter 1, as of a couple of years ago, three-quarters of their programs in schools do not include services to kindergarten kids. The idea is: Let's wait until we're sure we've found the kids that are needy based on achievement scores and then we'll pick up and try to help them. Similarly, Follow Through is designed to provide comprehensive classroom programs across all the subject areas while Chapter 1 is still predominantly a program that takes children out of the regular classroom for about thirty minutes a day to work in a small group on one particular subject area. It seems to me while Chapter 1 resources are directed toward low income children, the program strategy does not ideally complement that of Follow Through. Similarly, Chapter 2 and the National Diffusion Network are excellent strategies for supporting local school improvement, but we don't believe that they are a good and effective mechanism to disseminate Follow Through. I have three ideas to suggest in terms of component for a new Follow Through strategy which I'll cover briefly. One is I think there is an investment that needs to be preserved in terms of demonstration models for Follow Through. It is important to have enough sites to illustrate those programs in action in real schools and to allow them to continue to refine implementation with new groups of students. Secondly, it seems to me we have got to figure out some fairly pointed ways to spread the lessons of Follow Through, to mandate or to provide resources so that Chapter 1 programs, particularly those under the concentration grants or school-wide projects, can learn about Follow Through and provide support for staff development, perhaps on a cost-sharing basis. Third, I suggest in my testimony some possible new problem areas or challenges that could be addressed through new Follow Through. Some examples there are I think that there are pointed problems for local schools, the needs of multicultural kids, the possibility of Follow Through models that would go back to the idea of strong connections with Head Start in a more precise way. Finally, I think some ideas to revisit the challenge of parent education and parent involvement as a critical strategy and find some new ways of getting at that. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Thomas Schultz, Ed.D., follows:] National Association of State Boards of Education 1012 Cameron Street TESTIMONY ON THE REAUTHORIZATION OF THE FOLLOW THROUGH ACT SUBCOMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES BY DR. THOMAS SCHULTZ, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF STATE BOARDS OF EDUCATION FEBRUARY 21, 1990 Gene Wilhoit |