As the Trump administration weighs wiping out funding for Head Start, one question looms large in debates over the program’s future: Does it work?
A draft of President Donald Trump’s pending budget proposal would eliminate the $12 billion, 60-year-old early childhood program altogether. His administration has already closed 10 regional offices, leaving providers in 22 states without a designated federal contact to handle questions about funding and program regulations.
Among the key justifications for the cut, supporters of this plan say, is that it’s ineffective at improving outcomes for the nation’s poorest children. They frequently point to a congressionally mandated longitudinal study, now more than a decade old, that found that measurable effects on cognitive skills and school readiness among participating children seemed to “fade out” by the time they reached third grade.
But researchers and Head Start advocates say relying on that study fails to recognize its limitations, ignores promising findings from other research, and doesn’t take into account more recent efforts to strengthen the program. A cheaper, more effective way forward would be to strengthen Head Start rather than ending it altogether, they said.
“The answer isn’t take the money away because we know it could be better,” said W. Steven Barnett, senior director and founder of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “The benefits of doing this right are multiple times the cost. Getting rid of the program will long-term cost you more money than improving it.”
The downstream effects of the cut would also be much further reaching than the program’s roughly 800,000 3- and 4-year-old participants. A drop or elimination of Head Start funding would also destabilize the entire child care sector, because many centers draw money from multiple sources, including Head Start, state funding, and fees from higher-income families, Barnett said. Cutting Head Start seats from those centers could put child care at risk for non-Head Start families.
And the proposal comes as the Trump administration promotes work requirements for programs like Medicaid, which could increase the need for child care.
Trump may propose ending Head Start
Created in 1964 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Head Start funds early childhood education programs for low-income children nationwide. Local programs offer education to preschool-aged children as well as health screenings, nutrition, social services, and parental support—making it a critical part of the nation’s fragmented child care system, particularly in rural areas.
Plans to cut Head Start in Trump’s draft budget were first reported by USA Today and later confirmed by the Associated Press.
“The budget document says Head Start uses a ‘radical’ curriculum and gives preference to illegal immigrants,” the New York Times reported April 25. “A description of the program also criticizes it for diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and the use of resources that encourage toddlers to welcome children and families with different sexual orientations.”
Congress typically views presidents’ budgets as statements of priorities, and it rarely enacts those proposals in full. But Trump’s plans may face less resistance. In the first 100 days of Trump’s term, Republicans majorities in both the House and Senate have shown little resistance to dramatic spending cuts, program cancellations, and staffing reductions the White House has enacted unilaterally, even though the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to appropriate funding.
Those cuts have already resulted in funding disruptions for Head Start providers around the country.
On April 28, four state Head Start associations joined parent groups from California and Oregon and the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s actions towards Head Start as unlawful and unconstitutional. The groups are calling for a court order that reverses recent layoffs and funding changes affecting Head Start.
Calls to eliminate or cut Head Start date from years before the Trump administration. Most recently, they appeared in a sweeping conservative policy proposal, Project 2025, unveiled well before the elections.
Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the White House office of management and budget, helped author the set of recommendations that call for eliminating Head Start. While Trump sought to distance himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, he has enacted many of its priorities since he took office.
“Research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers, which provide preschool care to children from low-income families, have little or no long-term academic value for children,” Project 2025 reads.
Do Head Start’s benefits fade over time?
While Project 2025 doesn’t cite its source for claims about Head Start’s effectiveness, it’s likely referring the Head Start Impact Study, which was ordered by Congress in 1998, said Paul von Hippel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
That seminal randomized control study of about 5,000 3- and 4-year-olds compared academic and behavioral outcomes for a group of children who enrolled in Head Start in 2002 and a control group of children who applied for, but did not get, seats in oversubscribed centers. About 40 percent of the children in the control group did not receive formal preschool services; the rest did through programs other than Head Start.
In the final phase of that study, released in 2012, researchers found that by the end of 3rd grade, children who participated in Head Start were, on average, academically indistinguishable from their peers who had not participated.
It’s not just about the numbers that you see on the piece of paper on a 20-year-old research study; it’s also feeding kids, identifying disabilities at a young age, health screenings. Those things are valuable, and they are saving lives.
An earlier phase of the study had found that children who started Head Start at age 4 outperformed their peers in learning vocabulary, letter-word recognition, spelling, color identification, and letter-naming. For children who entered Head Start at age 3, the gains were even greater, demonstrated by their language and literacy skills, as well as their skills in learning math, prewriting, and perceptual motor skills, Education Week reported at the time.
By the end of the 3rd grade, 4-year-old Head Start participants outperformed their peers on just one literacy assessment. Critics referred to that pattern as the “fade-out” effect, said von Hippel, who co-authored an April review of Head Start research for Education Next. But it would be more accurate to call it the “catch up” effect, he said.
“It’s not that kids somehow forget everything they learned in Head Start, but that other kids catch up. And that’s not really Head Start’s fault,” von Hippel said.
Subsequent research has found significant redundancy in concepts taught in preschool and kindergarten and coverage of concepts, like math, that children already know. That may be in part because kindergarten teachers have to help children with no preschool experience master concepts that are already familiar to their peers, von Hippel said. That’s an argument for greater preschool access, not less, he said.
Head Start participants may show greater gains later down the line with better coordination between pre-K and elementary education, or more rigorous instruction to help them build on initial benefits in the early grades, von Hippel and his co-authors said.
Limitations in major Head Start study
The Head Start Impact Study also had limitations that may have affected its results, Barnett said. Because of its design, it focused on centers in cities with waiting lists for Head Start spots, which is “not necessarily nationally representative,” he said.
The study also measured the effects of one year of participation, not two. A NIEER evaluation of a similar preschool program in New Jersey found more substantial effects for children who attended for two years compared to peers who attended for one year, though it did not use a random-assignment methodology.
In a separate 2018 study researchers further analyzed data from the initial federal Head Start Impact Study and found substantial variations in the program’s effects depending on participants’ characteristics, practices at child care centers, and variations in the control group. The findings could inform efforts to improve Head Start as a whole, said co-author Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at NIEER.
There have also been efforts to improve Head Start since the impact study was conducted, Friedman-Krauss said.
That includes efforts to expand teacher training in concepts like early literacy, to increase the number of teachers with bachelor’s degrees, and to introduce new program standards for Head Start centers through measures like the 2007 Head Start for School Readiness Act. A 2011 rule adopted by the Obama administration required Head Start funding recipients to meet certain quality benchmarks, or lose their funding and be required to compete to receive it again.
“Those kids [in the original Head Start study] have families now,” Friedman-Krauss said. “It’s likely the quality of experience children are getting now is much different than what they had in 2002 and 2003.”
Additional studies of Head Start found that participants were more likely to complete higher education and demonstrated stronger social-emotional skills than siblings who did not participate.
Findings about child well-being come from federal report
The authors of the Education Next review, including von Hippel, also dispute Project 2025’s claims of widespread abuse and neglect in Head Start.
The conservative policy document claims that “approximately 1 in 4 grant recipients had incidents in which children were abused, left unsupervised, or released to an unauthorized person between October 2015 and May 2020,” citing a 2022 report from the office of inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start.
But a “grant recipient” is not the same thing as an individual Head Start center, von Hippel. Rather, recipients may fund a number of programs at multiple sites. The government report documented about 1,000 incidents among 1,600 recipients operating 20,000 individual Head Start centers over a five-year period.
While those incidents should be taken seriously, they are much less common than they might seem, von Hippel said.
“In general, Head Start centers are safer than the kind of improvised care environments that parents managed to cobble together before Head Start came along,” he said.
Researchers agreed that Head Start needs improvement. The program was initially envisioned as a laboratory to identify promising strategies for breaking generational cycles of poverty, Barnett said. That approach requires further evaluation and a commitment to continuous improvement, he said.
Findings about inconsistencies in Head Start quality should be used to make the case for such efforts, rather than to justify fully eliminating the program, Friedman-Krauss said.
“It’s not just about the numbers that you see on the piece of paper on a 20-year-old research study; it’s also feeding kids, identifying disabilities at a young age, health screenings,” she said. “Those things are valuable, and they are saving lives.”
