Ron Herndon, chairman of the National Head Start Association since 1992, is unhappy about a Senate-passed Head Start reauthorization bill that would change the program’s policy-shaping parent councils into advisory groups.

It’s an effort, he complains, to change a program that works, and that most politicians praise right up there with apple pie and borrowed corporate jets.

But throughout the Bush years, Republicans in Congress have battled to reduce parents’ role in the program, apparently on the grounds that poor parents can’t be trusted with that kind of authority.

“What research do they have to claim that parents have done a bad job of running the programs?” Herndon asks. “There is none.

“If you thought that was true, why didn’t you have a hearing to find out?”

According to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Republicans on the Senate’s education committee demanded the change before they’d support any bill. But Herndon is no happier with the committee Democrats who went along, including three presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton, of New York, Barack Obama, of Illinois, and Chris Dodd, of Connecticut.

“How are they going to run saying they will strengthen families and make this a better country?” he asks. “They just capitulated and rolled over.”

Some time after Congress returns, the Senate version of the Head Start reauthorization goes into conference committee with the House version, which largely maintains the current structure. “What’s going to make the difference,” says Murray, who supports the parent councils, “is if the House members insist on their language.”

Murray isn’t the only senator rooting for the House position. “As the Senate and House negotiate the Head Start reauthorization conference report, we urge you to maintain the shared governance structure and the important role for parent policy councils,” Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Gordon Smith, R-Ore., urge the committee. “By empowering parents of Head Start children and giving them shared responsibility for the management of the local programs, parents are invested in the success of the program and in the success of their children.”

Continuing it, they say, “is critical to the continued success of the Head Start program.”

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., who will lead the House side in the conference committee, said he wants to maintain the program’s governance role for parents.

If the House delegation to the conference committee stands firm, the parent voice in the program can’t be gutted.

Republicans like Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind. – a strong voice for the parent councils over the past two Congresses – get their own mail.

“With the Head Start conference committee approaching fast, we urge that the critical role parents play in Head Start is not diminished,” the Family Research Council, a vocal conservative group, wrote Souder recently.

“The parents council has helped make it possible that hundred(s) of thousands of low-income children have begun their lives with a head start to success; there is no need to silence their voices now.”

The Family Research Council, Ron Herndon and the House Committee on Education and Labor probably don’t agree on a lot of things, but as the future of Head Start is being decided, it seems there is one.

They don’t think that a parent’s role in the life of a 4-year-old should be advisory.