Head Start ranking shows more money isn’t the fix

It is a cautionary tale, from a respected outside institution, as to the folly of simply throwing money at early childhood education without accountability measures. Those who would advocate for another raid on the Land Grant Permanent Fund in the name of helping New Mexico’s youngest children should take heed.

Because so far, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on New Mexico’s Head Start has left the Land of Enchantment dead last in the nation when it comes to instructional quality. And that should come as no surprise, given the dismal proficiency rates of our youngest public school students.

The new report, from Rutgers University’s National Institute of Early Education Research, took classroom observations during the 2014-2015 school year and found New Mexico’s Head Start program is 50th among the states — yet instead of prompting a demand for accountability, the criticism has already, predictably, prompted a call to spend even more money. And it’s not the first time. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services doles out around $8 billion a year under Head Start for preschool instruction for low-income children, along with family health and nutrition services. In 2013, a Legislative Finance Committee report showed the $61 million the federal government spent on New Mexico’s Head Start each fiscal year had done nothing to boost third-grade reading and math scores. Then, as now, there was a call to simply spend more rather than target existing spending to data-driven programs.

By 2014-15, annual federal spending on Head Start in New Mexico had increased to $78 million — around $8,387 per child — yet the results show that in this case, spending more just gets you more of the same.

In a state that dedicates close to half of its budget on K-12 public education, that has increased K-12 spending from $2.49 billion in 2008 to $2.75 billion this year, that has boosted the early childhood budget to nearly $200 million and ranks among the top states with the highest percentage increase of spending on these programs in recent years, it is unconscionable that fewer children can read and do math at grade level than three years ago. (In 2013, around half of New Mexico students could read and do math at grade level; now, using a standardized test better aligned with curriculum, just 27.7 percent of students can read at grade level and just 19.9 percent can do math at grade level.)

The Rutgers study found just 36 percent of Head Start teachers in the state have bachelor’s degrees, compared with the national average of 73 percent. Apologists for the Head Start ranking argue New Mexico needs to spend more on teachers, even though a Legislative Finance Committee report found the state’s $300 million three-tiered licensure system did little to improve student test scores.

Chairman and Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, said in 2012, “We’ve rewarded, in many cases, mediocrity, and really haven’t accomplished what we set out to do.”

Advocates for taking hundreds of millions more out of the state’s trust fund for education offer no more than the vague promise of “high-quality early childhood education.” That’s highly suspect, considering a longitudinal study of what was a promising K-3 Plus program, which extends the school year into the summer months for some of the state’s poorest children, found that any gains in math, reading and writing flatten out over time.

Unless and until advocates for spending more on early childhood education can fight data with data — that is, offer a proven program to address New Mexico’s abysmal standings in everything from Head Start to student proficiency — they should focus on channeling the hundreds of millions in existing funding to programs that actually work.

New Mexico’s taxpayers, and especially its students, deserve more, not just more of the same.