Obama and the Head Start Lie

While most people were sitting out the election across Delaware County today, President Barack Obama traipsed in Yeadon borough for nakedly political purposes.

Addressing the students and employees of the local Head Start program there, he sang the praises of the on of the federal government's most popular program and blasted Republicans for allegedly wanting to "gut investments in education."

That he did this while praising Head Start, one of the greatest government boondoggles in modern history is vintage Obama.

For decades, liberals have been praising the success of Head Start, the early intervention program that is supposed to prepare poor children to learn more in school.

Here's the problem: It doesn't work. And this is according to a study conducted, not by some right-wing think tank, but by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The results of the study were buried for years because of just how embarrassing they were. According to the government study, "the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole.”

Even a number of liberal columnists have admitted the failure of this $150 billion decades-old program, including Joe Klein. and he ain't no Republican.

Wrote Joe back in July:

These outfits soon proved slovenly; often they were little more than patronage troughs for local Democratic Party honchos — and, remarkably, to this day, they remain the primary dispensers of Head Start funds. As such, they are far more adept at dispensing make-work jobs than mastering the subtle nuances of early education. "The argument that Head Start opponents make is that it is a jobs program," a senior Obama Administration official told me, "and sadly, there is something to that."

This is criminal, every bit as outrageous as tax breaks for oil companies — perhaps even more outrageous, since we are talking about the lives of children.

So here is a program that the government itself, admits is an ineffective and costly failure and still the leader of the Democratic Party pretends that it works in order to bash his political enemies.

How cynical is that? Very!

Barack Obama comes to Delco to get his picture taken with a bunch of cute kids, all the while hiding the truth about how these kids are being failed by a federal program that doesn't and hasn't worked for years. When it comes to cover-ups that hurt kids, Penn State has nothing on our Commander-in-Chief.

UPDATE: Obama says he is going to start holding Head Start programs accountable for their failures and defund the ones that don't work. I'll believe it when I see it.