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Head Start and similar preschool strategies improve academic performance in the early grades and pay vast dividends over time. President Bush has promised enough funding to put every needy child in Head Start, which Congress says will require a fivefold increase by 1994 from the present $1.55 billion a year. Both the House and the Senate have approved higher funding levels, and lawmakers will soon meet to reconcile differences between the two bills. But as the deficit mounts, the peace dividend sinks into the Persian Gulf and the savings and loan crisis chews into basic budget items, politicians may have a hard time approving funding increases for a constituency that does not vote. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a proponent of costly child-care legislation, says the outcome of the budget negotiations is "going to be terrible for kids."
Likewise, American society has, in the past generation, abandoned its commitment to providing a world-class system of secondary education. Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos himself calls student performance "dreadfully inadequate." From both the inner cities and the affluent suburbs comes a drumbeat of stories about tin-pot principals who cannot be fired, beleaguered teachers with unmanageable workloads and illiterate graduates with abysmal test scores. If they can possibly afford to, parents choose private or parochial schools, leaving the desperate or destitute in the worst public schools. Teachers, meanwhile, are aware that they are often the most powerful influences in a child's life -- and that their job pays less in a year than a linebacker or rock star can earn in a week.
Across the board, people who deal with children are more ill-paid, unregulated and less respected than other professionals. Among physicians, pediatricians' income ranks near the bottom. In Michigan preschool teachers with five years' experience earn $12,000, and prison guards with the same amount of seniority earn almost $30,000. U.S. airline pilots are vigilantly trained, screened and monitored; school-bus drivers are not. "My hairdresser needs 1,500 hours of schooling, takes a written and practical test and is relicensed every year," says Flora Patterson, a foster parent in San Gabriel, Calif. "For foster parents in Los Angeles County there is no mandated training, yet we are dealing with life and death." The typical foster parent there earns about 80 cents an hour.
Worst of all is the status of America's surrogate parents: the babysitters and day-care workers who have become essential to the functioning of the modern family. In the absence of anything like a national child-care policy, parents are left to improvise. The rich search for trained, qualified care givers and pay them whatever it takes to keep them. But for the vast majority, child care is a game of Russian roulette: rotating nannies, unlicensed home care, unregulated nurseries that leave parents wondering constantly: Is my child really safe? "Finding child care is such a gigantic crapshoot," says Edward Zigler, director of Yale's Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy. "If you are lucky, you are home free. But if you are unlucky, well, there are some real horror stories out there of kids being tied into cribs."