Imagine an Early Head Start toddler classroom with a soft carpet, eight tiny chairs, eight cubbies full of diapers and clothes, and a fridge stocked with bottles and baby food. Eight one-year-olds fill the room with activity. Two well-educated primary caregivers manage the classroom and work in partnership with each child’s family through regular communication and home visits to support children's health, development and learning.
In this classroom of eight, teachers are screening each child’s development, working toward goals for children with disabilities, serving family-style meals, visiting families at home, and building the kind of steady, responsive relationships babies need in order to learn. Head Start’s programming is developed to ensure success for children facing the steepest financial barriers, those experiencing homelessness, and children with disabilities. That’s the promise of Early Head Start and Head Start.
In 1965, as part of the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty, policymakers decided that a child’s circumstances at birth shouldn’t determine their future. Head Start promised access to high-quality early learning and a strong support system for families. In 1994, Early Head Start extended that promise to infants, toddlers, and pregnant people.
Across all states, the program is implemented with the same high-quality standards. For more than sixty years, the bedrock program has had strong support across the aisle and served as a critical link in our economic infrastructure. Over time, it has evolved to meet the needs of working parents by offering longer school days, even as funding has not kept pace with rising costs.
Now, this program, spread across 48,000 classrooms serving 750,000 children, is at risk. In August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a proposal to shrink the performance standards governing Head Start and Early Head Start by 90 percent. The agency argues the cuts would provide flexibility and fiscal savings that could be reinvested to serve more children, especially because the proposal does away with program-specific, teacher-to-child ratios, replacing them with each state’s teacher-to-child ratios for child care.
On its surface, a plan aiming to “reduce federal burden” sounds like it would reduce paperwork and bureaucratic hoops for teachers and caregivers. Less time on administrative tasks would mean more time caring for and educating children. A win-win. However, the HHS proposal mainly cuts health and safety standards like health screening deadlines and mental health consultation, or hands them off to the states. It barely touches administrative duties. A significant number of standards are either removed entirely or default to each state’s licensing rules, making the implementation of the program different in each state.
HHS’s regulatory impact analysis estimates that providing fewer services at a lower quality will save $2.2 billion once fully implemented. With those savings, the agency argues, Head Start and Early Head Start programs will have the “flexibility” to serve more children without additional funding from the government. But this ignores those populations of students that will be harmed by the cuts in the first place.
The HHS proposal removes key requirements for serving children with disabilities, including the requirement to support children before they receive a formal diagnosis. It harms multi-lingual learners by mandating English-only instruction, threatening their ability to access the services and support that help them fully participate and succeed.
At a time of soaring operating costs and severe staffing shortages, the department suggests reducing the cap on Head Start programs’ use of federal funds for administrative expenses from 15 percent to 5 percent. It also wants to eliminate minimum service hours for Early Head Start and reduce them for Head Start, leaving parents to scramble for additional care.
The proposal even does away with standards for child development and family services such as infant and maternal health, weakening protections like vision and hearing screenings for the country’s youngest and most vulnerable children. Perhaps most visibly, it targets standards for educational quality, often represented by teacher-to-child ratios.
But the teacher-to-child ratio isn’t red tape to be cut. Evidence backs how much support children and families at each stage of development need for the Head Start promise to be realized. Caring for young children is demanding, skilled work with little margin for error. Research indicates that a one-to-four ratio in an Early Head Start program is the difference between attentive care and a dangerous scramble. Imagine that same toddler classroom, staffed with two teachers but now supporting more than eight toddlers and their families. Depending on the state’s child care regulations, that classroom could be serving ten, twelve, or sixteen toddlers—and, in Mississippi, eighteen toddlers—with no additional support.
According to advocates, cramming more children into the classroom and shortening the school day will not reduce administrative burden and could cost 40,000 jobs.
Instead, HHS’s proposal increases the likelihood that programs will fail. Stripping away evidence-based standards would undermine not only the quality of Head Start services but also the very foundation that has justified decades of bipartisan federal investment in the program. Head Start’s success has been built on a commitment to proven practices that support children’s learning, health, and development. Weakening those standards risks eroding both program quality and public confidence in the results Head Start delivers for children, families, and communities.
The costs and consequences of this proposal will hit close to home for the 750,000 children enrolled in Early Head Start and Head Start programs—as well as their families, educators, and communities.
This is especially true in rural communities, where Head Start programs are one of the largest sources of regulated care available. Without Head Start programs, areas like Richland Center, Wisconsin and rural northern Mississippi—where Head Start closures have already left parents scrambling—would lose one of the few child care options they have.
The country is already grappling with the consequences of a woefully underfunded child care system. One in four child care centers receives Head Start funding. When federal standards are weakened, local providers are left to navigate greater uncertainty, families lose assurances about program quality, and communities are asked to absorb the risks. This doesn’t reduce the burden, as HHS proposes. It shifts the burden to the people who are least able to absorb it.
The proposed rule is not yet final. Public comments are a critical part of the federal rulemaking process, and they enter the official record considered by policymakers. Federal officials must consider every comment before issuing a final rule.
Everyone concerned about the future of Early Head Start and Head Start should submit a public comment by the October 6 deadline to share how these proposed changes would affect children and families, early educators, and communities.