Head Start Has Never Worked
Head Start “works,” according to the New York Timesand its sources.
The Times has been blasting a Trump administration plan to deregulate much of this quintessential Great Society program. Since its inception in 1966, Head Start has spent more than $240 billion in taxpayer dollars on early education and anti-poverty services for low-income children up to the age of five. Now at a median annual cost of $20,000 per child in Early Head Start (for infants, toddlers, and pregnant mothers) and $15,000 per each pre-K student, it imposes detailed requirements for class size—one teacher cannot supervise more than four two-year-olds, for example—medical screenings, and in-home visits.
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The spending has been more than worth it, according to education bureaucrats. Joel Ryan, director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, tells the Times that Head Start is “one of America’s most successful early childhood programs” and that it has “changed millions of lives.” Ruth Friedman, the former director of the Office of Child Care in Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), lauds the “science-backed standards” that ensure that children “arrive at kindergarten ready to succeed.” The Trump deregulation constitutes a “massive gutting” of this successful initiative, Friedman told the Times.
Last year, the White House contemplated cutting $12.2 billion from Head Start’s funding. That $12 billion is roughly what the program costs today. A draft federal budget cited Head Start’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and use of books for toddlers that validate LGBTQ families, among other identity-obsessed practices, as grounds for essentially zeroing the program out.
Then the administration, facing protest, reversed course. Today, the Administration for Children and Families at HHS touts how it has not cut Head Start’s budget at all but has instead merely pared back the program’s 133 pages of federal requirements imposed on state and local partners.
The administration should have stood its ground. Head Start does not “work,” contrary to the Times. (Of course, Head Start may still be “one of America’s most successful early childhood programs,” since most of the others are also ineffective.)
