Thursday, May 27, 2010

Stimulating Fraud--For the Children

Lefties love the pre-school "Head Start" program; President Obama stimulated it with an additional $1 billion. Yet, it's never been proven to help kids.

On top of that, the program may be rife with fraud. A recent GAO report found numerous instances where children enrolled had higher than allowed household incomes. Further, in "undercover" tests, the GAO found that just over half the sampled Head Start programs (8 of 15) accepted over-income kids. GAO testimony before the House Education and Labor Committee added:
dramatic audio clips of fraud being taken by [undercover GAO] agents. In one clip, a New Jersey Head Start worker handed back a $23,000 pay stub to two agents who were pretending to enroll their children in the preschool program.

"Now you see it, now you don't," the Head Start worker said.
ACORN-style ethics for an ineffective entitlement--costing $3.7 billion per year. As John Hawkins of Right Wing News says:
It's time to stop wasting our money. It's time for the Head Start program to die.

1 comment:

Gringo said...

IIRC, the original research said that it worked ( circa 1966), but this was with staff better educated than the parents of Head Start children. The current research says that Head Start is a waste. One possibility is that they hired the parents of Head Start children as staff. Not going to get an enhanced vocabulary that way.

Which is one problem when you have government doing "social change."