The Trump administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of Head Start that would largely relinquish federal control of the early learning program for low-income babies, toddlers and preschoolers.
Standards, such as the number of children a teacher can supervise, would soon be under local control, leading to variations across the country, which Head Start advocates worry could diminish the quality of the program.
Head Start was established in the 1960s to help fight poverty and has long been considered by early childhood education experts to be a gold standard early learning program. The changes, which must undergo a 60-day public comment period before they are finalized, are the latest in a string of attempts by the administration to alter the program, which has been a target of conservative thinkers calling for its elimination.
At the same time that the administration is stepping back from regulating Head Start, it will expand the program’s nutrition and health rules, including a requirement that children engage in 30 minutes of physical activity for every 3.5 hours of classroom instruction.
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The proposed changes will “not make any of those programs operate differently,” said Alex Adams, head of the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees Head Start and is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a call with reporters on Wednesday. “If their structure is working for their community and their governing board and the parents who sit on that affirm that, no changes will be needed, except in the areas where we did add new requirements.”
Nationwide, Head Start serves just over 700,000 children and is funded at $12.4 billion annually, a level that Adams said the Trump administration intends to maintain this fiscal year. California providers receive $1.5 billion annually in federal Head Start funding, serving 84,000 children across the state.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, affirmed the importance of Head Start.
“It’s a program that works for the most vulnerable, the poorest kids in our society, and it’s really important we protect it,” he said in the Wednesday media call.
Federal officials said they plan to reduce “administrative overhead” from 15% to 5%, which they expect to produce $2.2 billion in savings that will be reinvested in the program. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, these changes would allow Head Start to serve up to 236,000 more children.
In May, the Trump administration proposed rescinding a Biden-era plan to increase wages and benefits for Head Start workers. In an order that was later rescinded, the administration attempted to freeze funding for the program. It also moved to restrict eligibility based on immigration status, which was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, and consolidated Head Start’s regional offices, leading to the layoffs of scores of workers. Last year, a document from the Trump administration that proposed eliminating Head Start was leaked, but the proposal ultimately was scrapped.
Streamlining administrative regulatory requirements isn’t a bad idea but changing standards does little to reduce the burden on the child-care providers that participate in Head Start, said Steve Barnett, director of Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research.
“We don’t need hundreds of pages of regulations to tell Head Start what to do. That approach doesn’t really work,” Barnett said. “But Head Start needs, if anything, needs higher standards, not lower.”
Policy analysts at conservative think tanks have long considered child care the responsibility of the states, saying that overarching federal regulations do not create enough flexibility.
“When the states are designing these programs, it’s a lot easier for our constituents to weigh in on them than at the federal level,” said Colleen Hroncich, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “The federal government is just so big, and the population is so big versus in states, it’s much smaller.”
Deregulation is the first step toward completely sunsetting Head Start, according to Jonathan Butcher, the acting director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, who is an advocate for eliminating the program.
But support for Head Start is widespread among politicians of both parties. In California, state legislators wrote a pro-Head Start letter to the congressional delegation — “probably the most bipartisan letter and issue that we have worked on in years,” said Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens (D-Sunnyvale).
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children, from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
