Head Start fails in Detroit- and everyplace else

Apparently Detroit's Head Start program is less than efficient and potentially corrupt.

Never mind the fact that the Head Start program in general, a social welfare program created forty-five years ago to improve the parenting skills of poor parents and educational preparedness of their children, provides marginal benefits at very high costs. Detroit has introduced (and it is certainly not the only city to do this) fraud into the equation.

Detroit is administering about $40 million in Head Start grants and distributing the money to some 600 children. If you count cards you likely quickly computed that this is in excess of $8,000 per student. Of course, Detroit is not just passing out cash to students though- that would be too efficient. Instead, Detroit has created a bureaucracy of 17 city employees receiving over $3 million in salary and benefits from the program, to carry out what is essentially summer school. In a textbook example of government failing to provide enough textbooks, the city is using almost 10% of the funds for Head Start to pay bureaucrats. And keep in mind that this is on top of the bureaucracy at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which distributed the money from Congress to begin with.

Leaving aside the fact that Detroit likely has more than 600 impoverished children in need of supplemental education, there is the issue of what business the federal government has taking money from taxpayers in one part of the country and redistributing it to Detroit so that it can not be spent wisely in that part of the country. $40 million is a considerable amount of money for one city to receive for a federal program; particularly for a program which only helps 600 people (after the 17 new bureaucrats have been paid). Certainly Detroit is taking in more here than it is contributing, so that means revenues which might have been spent in Texas or New Mexico are going to subsidize Detroit's inefficiencies.

Wayne County, which is lauded as more effective at administering its Head Start program than Detroit, boasts spending of about $6,000 per student. Yet Wayne County can only service some 3,000 students- hardly the full number of poor kids in that municipality.

The entire Head Start program is unconstitutional, poorly administered, inefficient, and inequitable. If Congress insists on trying to redistribute wealth to poor families to improve the education levels of parents and children, then at least remove bureaucrats from the equation and mail each family a check. The administrative costs would be much lower and the illusion of actually encouraging positive social change would be gone. In its place would be the reality of wealth redistribution.