The other day I met and talked to a teacher from another parish who teaches in public school. Her students are almost all poor and black. She said she has learned a hell of a lot in the classroom that they don’t teach you in education programs — mostly about the mind-forg’d manacles of the culture of poverty. For example, she said the kids are almost all on free or subsidized lunches, but nearly all of them have new iPhones, fancy sneakers, and so forth. The kids are conditioned by families and local cultures that do not value learning, and that are marked by all kinds of severe dysfunction. The obstacles in the way of classroom achievement have very little to do with an absence of financial resources in the school, she indicated, and everything to do with a culture that works powerfully against the self-discipline and vision required for academic achievement.

I keep saying that there is no constituency for blaming parents and communities for their own failures on these points, so politicians instead blame teachers, or racism, or fill-in-the-blank. And they are certain the way to boost achievement is through more testing, or more money, or more “accountability” for teachers. You can’t come up with a government program that makes bad parents quit drinking and partying, and take care of their kids.

All of which is prelude to linking to (liberal) Joe Klein’s call (in Time magazine) for Head Start to end.  We’ve spend $7 billion on the thing, says Klein, and there’s now conclusive evidence that it doesn’t work. Says Klein:

“The argument that Head Start opponents make is that it is a jobs program,” a senior Obama Administration official told me, “and sadly, there is something to that.”

This is criminal, every bit as outrageous as tax breaks for oil companies — perhaps even more outrageous, since we are talking about the lives of children.

Adds Walter Russell Mead:

[T]he fundamental assumptions behind decades of government policy in education are coming unglued. The tools we’ve been using to address some of our most serious social problems don’t work. The money we’ve spent has been wasted.

It isn’t the just the Tea Party and Ayn Rand acolytes saying these things. It’s President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services. It’s Time magazine.

A paradigm is falling apart.