The federal government is spending roughly $10 billion per year on a program called Head Start. It is a program with laudable aims. Launched in 1965 during the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Head Start aims to close the education gap between children from poor families and those more fortunately situated. It purports to do this by providing daycare, nutrition assistance and educational skills to preschoolers from poor families, thus giving them a head start as they enter grade school.

I say “purports” because all the evidence indicated that Head Start just doesn’t work. As Mona Charen notes in this column, “A 1969 study found that any gains participants displayed faded away in the early grades. By third grade, Head Start graduates were indistinguishable from their non-participating classmates.” Though Head Start does accomplish some good things—it provides immunizations, for example—experts have concluded that these things could be provided more cheaply and efficiently through other existing programs like Medicaid. In short, Head Start is a waste of money, and the $1.1 billion cut in the program that has been proposed by the GOP House is completely justified. Logic, indeed, suggests that Head Start should simply be abolished.

But as Charen notes, progressives are simply impervious to the ironclad evidence of Head Start’s failure. These characters never met a failed social program that they didn’t like, and Head Start is no exception. The proposed cut has them frothing at the mouth with outraged indignation. It’s outrageous! It’s a war on children! Blah, blah, blah. With such adolescent theatrics as these does the self-described reality-based community suppress the inconvenient truth.