I'm sending the following letter to my Senators and Congress people. I urge you to paraphrase and send to yours as well. Let's not let him gut another great program!
Dear Senator Corzine,
I write today to urge you to fight President Bush’s proposed changes to the National Head Start Program. Bush’s phony interest in “reforming” Head Start, by turning over funding and control decisions to financially pressed states, imposing standardized academic curricula, and imposing standardized testing on our youngest citizens is a carefully veiled plan to gut yet another productive federal program to fulfill his ideological and self-serving interests. This will only result in fewer resources for already disadvantaged youth and families.
These children are already disadvantaged when they enter the program so of course their “test scores” will be lower, putting them at risk of losing funding. In addition proposed standardized testing of 3, 4, and 5 year olds would put an immense amount of stress on each child and probably would not provide accurate results anyway.
Testing our preschoolers? Test President Bush instead.
George W. Bush has broken everything he’s touched so far during this presidency and cannot be trusted to work for the best interests of our children. I urge you not to support any of his proposed changes to this critically acclaimed program. If it ain’t broke, why is he fixing it?
?W
http://congress.org/congressorg/home/