The Birth of Head Start: Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.

The Birth of Head Start: Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Maris A. Vinovskis. (University of Chicago Press.)

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Eminent education historian Maris Vinovskis has crafted a thorough account of the creation and launch of Head Start. The pleasantly brief text, which spans just 155 pages, offers a clear explanation of how anti-poverty policy, national politics, education policy, and changes in views of child development shaped the program in the 1960s. The author concludes that an emerging belief in the malleability of children's intelligence, the "discovery" of poverty in the early 1960s, Lyndon Johnson's energetic education agenda, and the Democratic majority that passed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 combined to make Head Start possible. Be advised that the volume is a history in the most descriptive sense. Vinovskis provides a careful, blow-by-blow account of the legislative politics and executive decisions that shaped the program rather than an assessment of those decisions. The volume also does not draw links to, or follow implications for, contemporary policy debates; nor does the author explain how early compromises and decisions affected subsequent developments. Finally, the general reader should be forewarned: the narrative ends abruptly in 1969.