The past two weeks have seen a growing ruckus over big changes in the Head Start regs that are reportedly nearing completion by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). First reported by Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark on July 19 and amplified via weekend coverage by The NewsHour and The New York Times, it appears that the 120+ pages of regulations that now govern this popular, 60-year-old federal program will be slashed to a dozen or so. Among the big scrap pile will be extensive specifications of standards, goals, and curricula focused on getting these low-income preschoolers ready for reading and math in kindergarten and beyond.
Those learning expectations are numerous and quite specific. For example, operators of Head Start programs today are supposed to ensure that a child reaching his fifth birthday “Counts and answers ‘How many?’ questions for approximately 10 objects” and “understands that each successive number name refers to a quantity that is one larger.” In the literacy realm, expectations for that age include the early stages of phonics, such as “Names 18 upper- and 15 lowercase letters,” “knows the sounds associated with several letters,” and “produces the beginning sound in a spoken word, such as ‘Dog begins with /d/.’”
Many pages later, we find elements of assessment, individualization, and possible accountability; the regs say that a Head Start program must “conduct standardized and structured assessments, which may be observation-based or direct, for each child that provide ongoing information to evaluate the child’s developmental level and progress in outcomes aligned to the goals described in the Head Start Early Learning Child Outcomes Framework: Ages Birth to Five. Such assessments must result in usable information for teachers, home visitors, and parents and be conducted with sufficient frequency to allow for individualization within the program year.”
I supply this detail—there’s vastly more—as background for three points about the forthcoming deregulation.
First, Head Start is undoubtedly over-regulated! Over its six decades, rules and specifications have been affixed to every possible realm of program operations like barnacles encrusting the hull of an aging ship. The education bits are a tiny fraction of a vast rulebook. The rules specify, for example, that:
A center-based program must have at least 35 square feet of usable indoor space per child available for the care and use of children (exclusive of bathrooms, halls, kitchen, staff rooms, and storage places) and at least 75 square feet of usable outdoor play space per child.
Complying with all that stuff is expensive, too. Between 2007 and 2025, the Head Start appropriation rose from $6.9 to $12.3 billion even as enrollments fell from a million youngsters to about 715,000.
So yes, some paring back of the regulatory burden is surely in order—as is clearer alignment of Head Start with state preschool programs. Back when Sargent Shriver conceived it as part of LBJ’s War on Poverty, few states had such programs—and some shunned the neediest (and least white) kids—so Head Start was born as and has remained a self-contained island, a direct grant program from HHS (formerly OEO and HEW) to individual program operators all over the place. It’s surely past due for modernization, simplification, decentralization, innovation, and local coordination.
Second, getting serious education targets, standards, and curricula into Head Start was a hard-won victory that wasn’t really sealed into law until 2007, when (as with NCLB) a bipartisan compromise between the Bush 43 team and Senator Ted Kennedy yielded a Head Start reauthorization that, for the first time, began to treat it as a pre-school endeavor as well as the “child development” program that it had always been. Getting to that point took more than 40 years because Head Start program operators and staff—many without college educations themselves—long fought such changes, as did some civil rights groups and a handful of early childhood “experts” and lobbyists. (That’s also why Head Start never became part of the Education Department.)
The 2007 legislation was a mixed bag, as the compromise also killed an assessment called the National Reporting System that the Bush team—notably Assistant HHS Secretary Wade Horn—had put in place to determine whether local Head Start programs were actually producing cognitive gains among their wee charges. It amounted to a worthy step forward for education combined with a backward step for program accountability.
Third—returning to the present—at a time when every known assessment of children’s “kindergarten readiness” shows immense shortcomings among half or more of America’s five-year-olds and when “universal preschool education” remains a potent political war-cry and policy objective, undoing the elements of Head Start (or any early-childhood program) that focus on cognition and school preparation in basic skills should strike any sentient being as folly.
I’m reminded of the days a year-and-a-half ago when Elon Musk’s DOGE emissaries, newly arrived at the Education Department, determined that their first targets should be in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES): the statistics, assessment, and research staffers and contracts that perform ED’s most fundamental (and least political) functions. As if their instructions were “do the greatest possible damage to American education as quickly as possible.”
The parallel isn’t far off. The geniuses behind Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation had urged that the Trump team eliminate Head Start as well as the Education Department. The new administration came close to zeroing out Head Start funding in its budget requests, eventually backing off—surely aware that Congress would continue funding this cherished program—while still attempting via regulation to trim its sails in various ways (such as not letting immigrant kids take part).
