Fight Bush's Head Start "reform"

[Sagatious8]

I'm sending the following letter to my Senators and Congress people. I urge you to paraphrase and send to yours as well. Let's not let him gut another great program!

Dear Senator Corzine,

I write today to urge you to fight President Bush’s proposed changes to the National Head Start Program. Bush’s phony interest in “reforming” Head Start, by turning over funding and control decisions to financially pressed states, imposing standardized academic curricula, and imposing standardized testing on our youngest citizens is a carefully veiled plan to gut yet another productive federal program to fulfill his ideological and self-serving interests. This will only result in fewer resources for already disadvantaged youth and families.

These children are already disadvantaged when they enter the program so of course their “test scores” will be lower, putting them at risk of losing funding. In addition proposed standardized testing of 3, 4, and 5 year olds would put an immense amount of stress on each child and probably would not provide accurate results anyway.

Testing our preschoolers? Test President Bush instead.

George W. Bush has broken everything he’s touched so far during this presidency and cannot be trusted to work for the best interests of our children. I urge you not to support any of his proposed changes to this critically acclaimed program. If it ain’t broke, why is he fixing it?

?W

http://congress.org/congressorg/home/

[GainesT1958]

1. The good news is that...

Your senators--obviously you live in New Jersey, right?--will both support you on this one all the way.

The bad news is how many other senators on our side of the aisle--other than Treacherous Zell, of course x( --will fall for Dub's crap on this one, just as they fell for "No Child Left Behind" before he proceeded to cut over $100 million for the Federal education outlay!:mad:

Head Start is a VITAL program, and not just for lower-income families, either. It's considered so important, even the Reagan Administration kept it while it was cutting other vital programs. But Dub & Co. are wedded to the Grover Norquist School of Government--where Ronnie felt "Government is not the solution; it's the problem", Norquist feels it's more like a disease to be eradicated. I'm convinced that Dub's blithley following his every word on this, while trying to conceal that evil fact from the public at large, lest it be used against him next year. But Head Start MUST be retained, and it needs to reach MORE kids in its current form, not less. And NO "teaching for tests" in Head Start; aren't we already doing FAR TOO MUCH of that in every level of schooling anyway? x(

B-)