PROVIDENCE — Legislators, education advocates and even the medical community are blasting Governor Carcieri for calling Head Start a “waste of money” and a “dismal failure,” saying the governor was ignoring strong evidence of the success of the federal program.

Carcieri made the comments last week, barely seven months after he sent a letter to the Congress praising “the essential role that Head Start plays in providing comprehensive school readiness services to children and their families.”

Head Start supporters say they don’t understand what prompted the governor to so strongly dismiss the merits of a program that has a proven track record of providing effective education and daycare services to disadvantaged preschool children.

The clash began Wednesday, a day when more than 300 youngsters and their teachers gathered at the State House to protest the governor’s plan to eliminate 400 of 2,750 Head Start slots statewide and shift $3.3 million in federal dollars to cover possible enrollment increases in the state’s subsidized child-care program.

Addressing the protesters’ concerns later that afternoon, Carcieri said the following:

“Show me empirical evidence that Head Start has done anything. I think it’s been the biggest waste of money, frankly. What Head Start needs to do is get into the early education business, which is teach kids vocabulary and things they need early on. Head Start, I think, is the biggest waste of federal money. What I’ve said, if you want to do early childhood education, particularly in urban areas, get Head Start integrated into what we’re trying to do with kids. … If you want empirical evidence that a program has been a dismal failure, I’d put Head Start at the top of the list. That doesn’t say it can’t be changed or morphed into something that could be effective, but as it is I think it’s totally ineffective.”

Since then, Carcieri has offered little data to support his statements and has declined to speak further to The Journal on the topic.

Legislators including Rep. Eileen S. Naughton, D-Warwick, called his comments unfounded. “I’m outraged. With just a simple Google search and a couple of clicks, there is tremendous data about [Head Start’s successes],” she said.

Rep. Thomas Slater, D-Providence, said that calling the program “a dismal failure” was the governor’s way of “showing Don Carcieri’s true feelings about the state and the people in the state.”

Carcieri’s recent comments stand in sharp contrast to those contained in a letter sent to Congress on Sept. 5, 2007.

That letter, signed by Carcieri in his capacity as chairman of the of the National Governors Association’s education, early childhood and workforce committee, and the panel’s vice chairman, Gov. Brad Henry, D-Okla., was addressed to the leaders of the House and Senate committees on health and education.

In it, the governors called for Congress to grant them more control over the appointment of local advisory panels, extend eligibility for Head Start to children in families living below 130 percent of the federal poverty level, boost the educational requirement for Head Start teachers and require Head Start agencies to enter into memoranda of understanding with local education agencies or councils to coordinate activities.

Research pointing to Head Start’s achievements is substantial. Federal studies demonstrate that on the whole the program better prepares low-income children for the academic rigors of school. That’s particularly true in recent years, when the federal government has directed Head Start programs nationwide to better emphasize educational services including early math and reading curriculum, half a dozen supporters interviewed said.

“The governor’s statement flies in the face of the some of the newest empirical data that we have on Head Start, which comes from developmental psychologists, political scientists and economists,” said Georgetown University psychology and public policy Prof. Deborah Phillips, a national expert on early childhood.

“I don’t think [the governor] wants to put himself in that position. It leaves him very vulnerable to be out of touch with the newest data and literature.”

Here in Rhode Island, Head Start supporters had much the same reaction.

After hearing Carcieri’s comments, Rhode Island Kids Count Executive Director Elizabeth Burke Bryant sent him copies of the latest Head Start research, including an academic study that shows “significant gains at pre-math and pre-literacy levels” which are critical to help a child keep pace in elementary school.

Hasbro Children’s Hospital pediatrician and Brown medical school Prof. Dr. Brian Alverson said the benefits of Head Start reach far beyond the classroom.

“Compared to non-enrolled students, children going through these programs are more likely to graduate from high school, are more likely to own a home, are less likely to have problems with the law and less likely to get pregnant as teenagers,” said Alverson, who heads the legislative advocacy committee of the Rhode Island Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But Gary Alexander, director of the state Department of Human Services, which administers the Rhode Island program, said Head Start, while seeing some successes over the years, has been met with mixed reviews nationwide. “There just isn’t a complete and total proven fact that Head Start is an unqualified success,” he said.

Many of those much-lauded gains made at the preschool level are short lived and can quickly fade as children get older, he said, contending that without lasting improvements the program’s overall value must be questioned. He pointed to the economics book Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, which draws much the same conclusion about Head Start’s merits.

Program supporters say such statistics, while true, often rely on data from a decade or more ago when Head Start programs were less rigorous. Students’ academic troubles may have more to do with socioeconomic factors and the quality of the elementary schools they attend than with Head Start programs, they say.

But some of Rhode Island’s Head Start programs –– and those nationwide –– have also seen serious management problems. In October, Providence Head Start was temporarily shut down by the federal government, and an interim contractor was brought in to run the program after federal authorities discovered that the agency was not properly conducting criminal background checks on its employees. Months later, that program is still run by the contractor.

Despite all that, Alexander characterized the plan to cut 400 children from Head Start programs as a budgetary decision, not a philosophical one. The state, he said, is trying to preserve “as much of the core programs as it can,” but in doing so must also trim a variety of services.

Phillips, the Georgetown professor, called such cuts “a shortsighted response” to a budget problem. When compared with the public savings Head Start could bring in future decades, the initial cost of the program is well worth it, she said.

“Is this a program that should be defunded? No, this is a program that should on the whole be celebrated.”

cneedham@projo.com