Two thumbs up, as movie critics might say, for President Bush and his request to fatten the Head Start program for needy preschool kids. He wants to boost funding for this deservedly popular program next year by $600 million, or 27 percent. This, from George Bush, is progress. As Samuel Johnson might have put it, the approach of a tough presidential election wonderfully concentrates the mind.
I would have liked to see more money pumped in - the Democrats are proposing an increase of $1 billion - but a huge increase may not be realistic. The president's $600 million, intelligently used, will be money well spent.But the renewed debate over Head Start raises a more fundamental question, and it has to do with the level of concern that American adults harbor for their children of poverty.
Such concern is demonstrable: National opinion surveys show that sizable majorities of Americans support preschool programs such as Head Start, better housing for poor children and, by sizable majorities, child care and medical insurance for the 10 million to 11 million children not currently covered. The public knows their needs are great and deserving of public response.
Why, then, the gap? Why the gap between furrowed public brows and the still-modest level of public resolve to get at the roots of child poverty?
When child development is concerned, all sorts of duly certified experts - teachers, doctors, nutritionists - sing from the same verse. Their message: The preschool years are the most crucial in a life, when an extra bit of help can make all the difference. Head Start, which gives a preschool boost to needy youngsters, exemplifies this help. So do programs in prenatal health care, infant nutrition, disease prevention, lead paint removal and others.
Yet few or none of these programs enjoys enough support to provide all the help that's needed. Head Start, for example, reaches only 30 percent of the children who are eligible. As for the others? Far more often than not, they start school with one or two strikes against them.
The Children's Defense Fund, one of the most reliable sources of data in this field, estimates that every $1 spent on maternity care through Medicaid saves more than $3 in later health costs; that every $1 spent on quality preschool education such as Head Start saves perhaps $5 in avoidable later costs for welfare and remedial schooling, and that each $1 spent on childhood immunizations can save $10 in later medical costs and perhaps incalculable social costs.
Like it or not, every American ends up sharing the burden of those costs, whether through increased taxes or through the drag on our economy represented by millions of undereducated and undertrained young people. Their tragedy is their own, of course, but it also is a tragedy for the nation, because in letting down our poorest kids, we in a sense - all of us - are letting down ourselves.
President Bush, by supporting a substantial increase in Head Start funding, has shown that this program enjoys support across the political spectrum. Even there, however, he falls far short of what was recommended in 1987 by the Committee on Economic Development, a business group. The CED, saying that preschool programs for the disadvantaged represented a "superior educational investment for society," urged that every eligible child have a chance to join Head Start. That was five years ago. Even if the Bush increase is approved, America will be far from that goal.
No one can be proud of the fact that American kids are more likely than kids in 18 other countries to die during their first year of life, or that something like 100,000 American kids go to sleep homeless each night. Seen simply as individual tragedies, or as stains on our collective conscience, these are seeds for sorrow enough.