Obama’s Budget Proposes Cutting Even Start Program
Education

Obama’s Budget Proposes Cutting Even Start Program

By Mary Ann Zehr — May 07, 2009 1 min read
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My colleague Alyson Klein reports over at Politics K-12 that President Obama’s budget proposes to slash the $66 million Even Start family-literacy program. During the 11 years I’ve worked for Education Week, I must admit I’ve never had the chance to observe this program in action.

I read a research brief recently published by Child Trends and the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University of Albany focusing on low enrollment of Latino youngsters in early-childhood education programs that made the following statement about Even Start:

While the most recent evaluation of the Even Start literacy program did point to gains in literacy outcomes for participants, it did not provide evidence that the gains were greater for those assigned to the program than for those in the control group.

Readers, if you have some insight about what elimination of this program would mean, please fill us in.

Mary Ann Zehr
Mary Ann Zehr was an assistant editor for Education Week. Her beats included English-language learners, bilingual education, immigrants, dropouts, achievement-gap issues, and charter and private schools. She is the author of the blog Learning the Language.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.