For 60 years, Head Start has provided early childhood education for low-income children. President Donald Trump has now proposed major changes to rules that govern the program, including rolling back federal regulations and cutting costs.
The administration says the changes will make the program available to more children living in poverty. Critics say the changes will severely weaken Head Start.
In Texas, the student-to-teacher ratios could double, according to one study from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.
Steven Barnett, the institute’s founding director, says the impact will fall on states and on low-income children. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: The administration characterizes its proposal as deregulation with the goal of giving states and parents a bigger role in the program. Is that a fair description, and what does that mean?
Steven Barnett: Well, it’s a fair description of part of it. Deregulation, per se, is great. But there are a number of key proposals the administration has made that don’t seem to have anything to do with deregulation or giving states a say in how the program is run.
There is a comprehensive set of regulations for Head Start. But at the same time, the program is supposed to be flexible to meet local needs.
The program has evolved over the past 60 years. One of the things that we’ve learned is that the program’s goal of getting kids in poverty ready to succeed in school and breaking the cycle of poverty, that’s much more difficult than we thought back in the 1960s, or even in 2000.
And so there have been a series of changes moving the program to pay teachers more, to have stronger curriculum, to align with state early learning standards, and to offer more hours. And the current proposals roll some of that back and make it much more unlikely that the program will actually achieve its goals.
Your organization, the National Institute for Early Education Research, just published a paper that describes the differences between federal Head Start standards for student-staff ratios and state requirements. What did you learn?
Well, in Texas, I think the new rules are potentially a disaster. At the very least, what they would do is not cut costs, but shift costs from the federal government to Texas.
That’s because the default now for ratios moving from, let’s say, a class of 20 with a staff of two, which is the current regulation in Head Start, to 1 to 18, which potentially means 36 students in a classroom rather than 20. That isn’t going to work.
If you do that, Texas will be paying the cost of that in education remediation, delinquency, crime, unemployment for decades. Alternatively, Texas could step up and pay for the difference for kids in Head Start.
But the other changes that are really serious here are a cap on administrative expenses, reducing that from 15% to 5%, completely unrealistic. It’s just a 10% budget cut.
Either someone else comes up with it, or you close the program and then either those kids get no services, or Head Start has to serve them in the state preschool program. And that’s possible, but then the entire cost is shifted to Texas.
The third thing that’s really worrying here is this requirement for English-only instruction. In Texas, that’s a big concern because of the very large numbers of kids in Texas who come from homes where Spanish is a home language.
Maybe it’s important to remind people who don’t know, why is early childhood and very early childhood education so important? You kind of alluded to the costs that come later in life if you don’t do this early.
Well, the first five years of life set the foundation for later success: success in school, success in family and social life, success economically, even for how healthy you’re going to be as an adult and how long you’re gonna live.
And we know that kids in poverty don’t make the progress that’s going to set them up for success by the time they enter kindergarten. In fact, they could be two years behind where they should be if we don’t do something to provide them with additional educational resources.
And that’s what Head Start does. It’s a child development program. And the explanation for many of these Trump administration proposed changes seems to be that Head Start is really just a child care program. Well, that’s not what it’s for.
Let’s delve into Head Start. Is it regarded as a successful, well-run program, or are there issues the administration wants to resolve to make it better that should be taken into account?
There clearly have been issues with Head Start. Not that it didn’t work at all, but that it was not as successful as we wanted it to be.
And the last major study of this is for children who entered Head Start in 2001. So that’s 25 years ago. And people keep citing that study as if the George W. Bush administration and Congress did not introduce major changes in 2007. The Obama administration followed those with more changes.
So these were changes to increase the quality of teaching, to focus more on achieving state early learning standards, to increase hours.
And what’s concerning is that the current proposal from this administration is to roll those back. Well, no. The reason that we have the push for more hours is because we weren’t getting the results that we wanted when programs were half-day, four days a week.
So if you think about what’s the key ingredient here, what makes Head Start successful, it really is individualized teaching one-on-one and in small groups.