Can Head Start Be Deregulated Out of Existence?
“They project enormous savings from the reduction in the number of teaching staff, and the reason for that is the ratios,” Jennesa Calvo-Friedman, who was the lead counsel on the A.C.L.U. lawsuits, told me. “But the only way programs are going to have higher ratios is if they’re forced to. There’s just not a Head Start director or teacher who would ever ask for that.”
Small class sizes are crucial in Head Start schools, where many kids have disabilities or unstable home lives; they often need high levels of individual attention in order to thrive. “There are these bold claims about flexibility,” Jennie Mauer, who leads the Wisconsin Head Start Association, said of A.C.F.’s proposals. “But I don’t think any teacher is saying, ‘I have lots of children with speech and language delays, autism behaviors, and complex family situations, and the answer is that we need to serve more kids for less pay.’ ” She added, “Have these people ever met any small children? Do they know how to get a classroom full of three-year-olds to put their snow pants on?”
If Head Start can be said to be in “crisis,” to borrow a word from Project 2025, it is most plausibly so with respect to enrollment, which has fallen by more than two hundred thousand seats since before the coronavirus pandemic. The precipitous decline can be attributed to multiple factors—including, happily, the expansion of universal pre-K in some states. But a significant contributor has been staffing shortages and their knock-on effects. According to a government estimate, one in five Head Start teachers left their jobs in 2022. Low pay—about forty thousand dollars a year, on average—played a major role in the turnover. As a result, H.H.S. under President Joe Biden permitted many Head Start programs, in the absence of additional funding for teacher pay, to reduce enrollment, which helped them set aside money to improve wages and slow the staffing churn.
Thanh Bui-Duquette is a Head Start director for four counties in western Wisconsin, which include some Spanish- and Hmong-speaking communities. In several of her classrooms, close to half of the students have a diagnosed disability, and, she said, “challenging behaviors related to trauma” are common. Her programs reached a turnover crisis starting in 2021, when her lowest-paid staffers were making around eleven dollars per hour and teachers with licensure and bachelor’s degrees were making twenty-two. By comparison, Bui-Duquette told me, some high-school students at the local fast-casual chain Culver’s were slinging corn dogs and ButterBurgers for eighteen dollars an hour. Bui-Duquette felt that she had no choice but to lift her staff’s wages to keep the program open, at the painful cost of lowering enrollment. “This effort has helped us with staff retention, and, for the first time in many years, we have zero per cent turnover in teachers,” she said.
About a quarter of Bui-Duquette’s staff members are former Head Start parents or alumni. “They believe in the Head Start model,” she said. “What is disheartening is that they continuously feel the need to prove that their work matters, and that is really draining and demoralizing.” She believes that, if the A.C.F. proposal is implemented, the staff turnover of a few years ago will resume, owing to lower standards and, presumably, lower pay. “They will find somewhere else to go,” Bui-Duquette said. “If these changes go through, we will not be Head Start anymore.”
In 2024, H.H.S. approved incremental, across-the-board wage increases that were intended to bring all Head Start teachers’ earnings in line with those of their counterparts at local public schools. In the hope of paying these educators a princely average of about fifty thousand a year while maintaining enrollment numbers, Biden asked Congress, in 2023, to give Head Start an additional $1.1 billion—about what aviation experts have estimated it would cost to refurbish Trump’s Qatari private jet. But Congress agreed to just two hundred and seventy-five million dollars—less than the estimated taxpayer bill for Trump’s ballroom. (In May, A.C.F. proposed rescinding the Biden-era wage increases.)
