Hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce: Financial Accountability in the Head Start Early Childhood Program

HEARING OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE: FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE HEAD START EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAM

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Ms. Henry, I would like to thank you for being here, too and thank you for what you do. We appreciate you very, very much and thank you for what you do.

I would like to make a brief comment and then ask Dr. Horn a question. Dr. Horn, I was on the original board of the Smart Start program in North Carolina when it was formed about 1995. And that program was designed to give maximum flexibility to
local programs in North Carolina, but it is State-funded primarily.

I have always had a little bit of experience of program evaluation over the years in my role as a university administrator and community college president, so I know a little bit about program evaluation. Smart Start, where we funded 12 programs, and then 12 more, and then 12 more, and then we had one or two programs that really had problems, and we almost could know that from the very beginning that they were going to have problems. We could tell that from the criteria that had been established, and yet we funded them because we were trying to do one per congressional district. When we abused the system to make it fit, we created problems. But over time, we had few people who really abused the system and misused funds. And part of that is because there was not a consistent accounting program established and there was not consistent valuation of the programs done at the State level. And what wound up happening was there were both sins of omission as well as sins of commission that occurred.

What is wrong with the Federal Government establishing oversight that would establish minimum sort of requirements for
evaluation, minimum requirements for accounting standards and those kinds of things? In fact, I am not very much involved
with Smart Start anymore, but my understanding is they have installed a statewide accounting program so that people can--so
apples and apples can be compared.

What is wrong with the Federal Government establishing a mechanism for gathering information and evaluating at the Federal level, and yet leaving capability for local control, which you said is a very difficult balance to strike? And has anybody attempted to do that?

Mr. Horn. Well, two things. First of all, there are certainly consistent ways that the Federal Government asks for information from the local programs. I think you are suggesting a step further than that, which is that the Federal Government should say precisely what accounting package they use and so forth. That is sort of left up to local grantees in the Head Start program. But there are consistent methods for us to ask for information that they have to generate for us.

I think the difficulty that GAO pointed out is that we don't always use that information to its maximum potential. But it is precisely on this point of consistency that we implemented the National Reporting System in Head Start, because prior to the National Reporting System, every grantee could determine for themselves how they were going to measure outcomes.

And as someone who has a history in program evaluation, I realize that as a Federal program manager, if people are measuring what they think is the same thing but in different ways, you can't compare them. Even worse, if you don't know
they are measuring them in different ways, you compare them anyway, and then you have no idea whether your interpretations
are correct.

So is there anything wrong with the Federal Government, in appropriate areas, standardizing the way people collect
information or report information? Absolutely not.

Ms. Foxx. Follow-up, if I could, for Dr. Shaul and you too.

Did we see consistent problems or is there a thread that runs through? I know, again from having operated a Federal program one time in my life, grantees get together and share information, talk about what works, what doesn't work. Did you see regional problems where people are sharing bad information or how to get around the system? Are there regional issues,
State issues? Are there just programs stuck out there all by themselves? Is there any kind of pattern to the problems that you saw?

Ms. Shaul. We did an analysis of which of the Federal standards and regulations were the ones that were most commonly a problem for grantees, and the ones that came up most often were in the program governance area, particularly things like the ability of the agency to generate reports that could provide information to its policy boards, its parents, and to the staff so they could know what was going on in program management and operation. So that was a fairly common thread.

Also there was an issue that came up fairly regularly about difficulties in establishing practices between the policy boards and the governing boards about how they would share program responsibility, which sometimes meant that agencies were not in touch with what the community wanted them to do. Those are two areas.

One thing I might add to the question you raised earlier, too, I think probably all of the Head Start programs or the entities within which they are housed are subject to the Single Audit Act, so there is that uniformity across the agencies. However, as Dr. Horn pointed out, that information isn't always used.

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