Rethinking Head Start to Help Disadvantaged Preschoolers

Could Head Start’s $10,000-per-pupil spending be unlocked to provide better early childhood education?

Executive Summary

Since 1965, Head Start has been a focus of the nation’s bipartisan strategy to promote equal opportunity in education. The $9.8 billion program provides preschool and other services to 887,000 low-income children and their parents. The program’s annual cost per-person enrolled is approximately $10,000.

In 2012, a long-anticipated national evaluation found that by third grade children who attend Head Start were no better off than their peers who did not enroll.

In 2016, the Obama Administration implemented new rules to require Head Start providers to increase the minimum hours of care provided from 448 to 1,020 hours per year. The Obama Administration reasoned that additional time in Head Start would improve children’s development and benefit working parents by offering more child care.

In 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services has announced new rules to undo the 2016 reforms — restoring Head Start centers’ option to offer just 448 hours of care (or 3.5 hours per-day for 128 days).

This reversal should cause policymakers to question whether the approximately $10,000 spent per-child could be used more effectively to benefit disadvantaged children and their parents. For example, $10,000 could fund full-time, state preschool or purchase full-time child care in many states.

Reforming the Head Start program has the potential to provide better learning and developmental opportunities for disadvantaged children to narrow the education opportunity gap while also helping working parents.

Background on Head Start

The United States spends $9.8 billion annually on Head Start to provide preschool and other services to 887,000 disadvantaged children and their parents.[1] The program’s annual cost per-enrolled is approximately $10,000.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awards grants to Head Start providers who meet the program’s guidelines. The program offers a range of services to disadvantaged children and parents, including: “educational, nutritional, health, social, and other services.” The majority of Head Start’s services are provided through a preschool setting, such as center-based care.

The National Impact Study finds no lasting benefits

For three decades, Congress funded the Head Start program with limited evidence about the program’s value. In the 1990s, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office recommended a national empirical impact study to determine whether the program was benefitting children and their parents. In 1998, Congress mandated a national study.

From 2002 to 2006, government-funded researchers collected data to understand how the program affected the performance and well-being of children who attended Head Start compared to unenrolled peers.

In December 2012, HHS finally released the study’s results after facing pressure from Congress. The evaluation found that by third grade children who attended Head Start were not better off than children who did not enroll in Head Start. Kids who remained in their parents’ care or enrolled in another form of preschool or child care performed at comparable levels in elementary school.

The report also revealed other differences in children’s preschool experiences. For example, children who did not go to Head Start but did attend preschool or child care received an average of 4 or 5 more hours of care per week. At the time, Head Start only required that centers provide a minimum of 448 hours of care per year (or 3.5 hours per day for 128 days per year). To put that into perspective, the average K-12 public school calendar is 180 days and 6.64 hours per day (or nearly 1,200 hours per year).

The Obama administration’s reforms to increase Head Start program hours

In 2016, the Obama Administration used the rulemaking process to initiate a series of reforms to Head Start, including increasing Head Start’s minimum hours to more closely match the traditional public school year. Under new Head Start Performance Standards, providers were required to offer 1,020 hours of care per year. Centers must provide that level of care to half of all children by August 2019. By 2021, all kids would receive 1,020 hours of care.

At the time, the Obama Administration explained that children receiving the minimum 448 hours of Head Start preschool “receive less than half of the early learning services that children in some state-funded pre-kindergarten programs receive, and substantially less than children served in the highest impact early childhood education programs.”

The Obama Administration argued that increasing Head Start program hours would benefit children:

Research indicates that full school-day and year preschool programs are associated with greater gains in cognitive and social-emotional development and school readiness, and that added hours of early education contribute to closing the achievement gap.

Moreover, the Obama administration reasoned that expanding Head Start hours and providing preschool throughout the entire school year would have “clear benefits to children’s families who balance work schedules with the need for affordable, high-quality child care during the hours and days that children are not in Head Start.”

HHS Department reverses Head Start increased hours reforms

When the rule was initiated, Head Start providers resisted the proposed expansion. The National Head Start Association, for example, warned that increasing the “dosage” of Head Start hours and days would require centers to reduce enrollment. The Association predicted that the proposed shift in service from 128 days to 180 days per year “would lead to 126,488 fewer children being served and 9,342 teachers’ jobs being lost.”

Nevertheless, the rulemaking went into effect in September 2016.

Fast forward to 2019.

The HHS Department recently announced a new rulemaking to undo the 2016 mandated hours increases, as Education Week’s Christina Samuels recently reported. The Office of Head Start stated that the change in program days and hours “was too prescriptive and will reduce grant recipients’ flexibility to meet the needs of the communities they serve.”

The HHS Department’s decision raises several important questions about Head Start’s future:

1. If longer hours are not the answer, what is the strategy to improve Head Start’s effectiveness in improving school readiness for enrolled disadvantaged children?

The Obama Administration’s case for the 2016 reforms hinged on providing disadvantaged children additional time in care. The other reforms were modest, including streamlining regulations and increasing data collection and analysis. If more time in care is out of the picture, Congress should question whether Head Start is the best value for disadvantaged children given the national evaluation’s findings that it had no noticeable long-term benefit.

2. How does the Head Start program’s cost and time-value compare with other preschool and child care options?

Putting aside potential question about whether taxpayer-subsidized preschool or child care is an appropriate use of resources, everyone should agree that programs should operate effectively — maximizing services and benefits for the cost. Head Start fails on this metric: In general, state preschool costs less per-child than Head Start and often provides more hours of care.

Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) reports that the average state spending per child in preschool was $5,170 in 2018. NIEER determined that some states have been increasing the number of days and hours that children are served by state preschool programs:

Over the last decade, in addition to expanding access to state-funded preschool, many states have made concerted efforts to increase enrollment in school-day or longer programs. This shift to a longer program duration supports children’s development as long as quality is high and better accommodates the needs of working parents. Not all states are able to report enrollment of children by operating schedule, but among those that can, there has been a trend toward more children in longer program days.

Several states are currently offering more preschool hours than Head Start at a lower per-student cost, according to NIEER’s data. For example:

• Georgia offers universal preschool to all 4-year-olds at a cost to the state of $4,411, or about half of the $8,753 per-child Head Start funding in Georgia. Georgia’s state pre-k program offers 6.5 hours of service per day, five days per week during the school year, or approximately 1,170 hours per year.
• Oklahoma spends approximately $3,700 per-child a preschool program that provides 6 hours per day for five days a week during the school year, or approximately 1,080 hours.
• Florida offers a different kind of preschool benefit — a voluntary preschool voucher worth approximately $2,200 per child. To collect vouchers and enroll children, Florida preschool providers must offer 540 hours of service annually. In comparison, Florida’s per-child Head Start spending is $8,900 (or four times greater), even though Head Start providers may offer 92 hours less per year.

Policymakers should also consider the cost and time-value question another way — evaluating how free child care benefits parents.

As the Obama Administration reasoned in 2016, Head Start also benefits low-income families by allowing parents to work without paying for additional child care costs. Therefore, policymakers should compare the cost of Head Start with the cost of center-based child care.

According to Child Care Aware of America, which advocates for greater support for child care programs, the average annual cost of center-based care for a 4-year-old is between $8,900 and $9,200 per year. Care.com reported that the average weekly cost of care for an infant at a child day-care center was $211 per week or approximately $11,000 for the entire year.

Based on these estimates, participating disadvantaged families could receive nearly an entire year’s worth of full-time child care for the average $10,000 per-child cost of Head Start.

3. How could Head Start funds be better used to help disadvantaged children and their parents, such as by achieving the Obama Administration’s goal of 1,020 hours of care?

The Obama administration believed that increasing the number of Head Start service hours was a key to improving the program’s effectiveness for children served and value for working parents. If 1,020 hours per year at an average cost of $10,000 per child is not feasible within the current program, policymakers should consider whether reforming Head Start could yield better value for America’s low-income families.

The following are examples of reforms Congress could implement to achieve the bipartisan goal of offering better preschool and child care benefits for poor children and their parents:

• Incentivizing state full-year preschool programs by allowing states that offer at least 1,020 hours of service the ability to directly receive and combine Head Start program funding with state preschool benefits for eligible low-income children. The Obama Administration’s justification for its proposed 2016 reforms included that Head Start children received less preschool than some states pre-k programs, including the most effective pre-k reforms. Congress could reform the Head Start program to encourage states to offer high-quality, full-year preschool programs by allowing states to directly receive Head Start funding. To be eligible, states could be required to meet Head Start guidelines, including offering 1,020 hours of care for eligible children.
• Giving disadvantaged families control over their children’s share of Head Start funding for eligible preschool and child care expenses. Another approach would be to give families eligible for Head Start direct control over the roughly $10,000 per-child benefit for preschool and child care expenses though a subsidy with federal or state oversight. A preschool scholarship program for disadvantaged children could allow families to choose the best preschool or child care services for their children, including by balancing the quality of the preschool and the hours of child care provided. In such a program, the federal and state governments could even allow families to reserve unspent funds for a future year of child care, schooling, or tutoring through a state-managed education savings account.

It is not clear that enrolling disadvantaged children in preschool for a longer duration will yield meaningful long-term gains. However, allowing parents to choose the best preschool setting for their children and allowing states to experiment by providing new preschool options has the potential to significantly improve Head Start’s value for disadvantaged children and their families.

Additional Considerations

Significantly restructuring Head Start would require policymakers to consider other issues, such as:

• Early Head Start provides different services to the youngest children, including infants, as well as pregnant mothers. Restructuring the program to include state-provided preschool or preschool scholarships for disadvantaged children would require rethinking how or whether these services would continue to be provided, potentially through other programs.
• The Head Start program also offers certain health, nutritional, and wellness benefits, as well as a range of benefits for pregnant mothers (including prenatal care) and parents (including providing access to other state services). Policymakers would need to consider whether those benefits would continue to be provided under alternative systems.
• HHS explains that the Head Start population changes throughout the year, and reports that the program served 1.05 million in 2017–2018, or a higher amount than the enrolled population. Policymakers would need to determine how benefits would be awarded, including to children who are not served during the entire year. Serving all children, including those that cycle out of the program during the year, could reduce the per-child benefit from about $10,200 to $8,700.
• Restructuring the Head Start program would also result in significant changes for the provider community. Policymakers could consider options for incorporating Head Start centers and providers into alternative systems, such as state-provided preschool programs or as eligible providers in a preschool choice program.
• Head Start is one of nine federal programs for “early learning or child care for children age 5 or under,” which the federal government operates at an annual cost of $15 billion as of FY2015, according to GAO. These additional programs should be included in the conversation during a restructuring of Head Start.

Conclusion

In a forthcoming analysis, I will examine the state of equal opportunity in preschool and K-12 education in the United States. After a half century of bipartisan federal interventions, the achievement gap between poor and nonpoor children from preschool to high school remains. As Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, Laura M. Talpey, and Ludger Woessmann recently explained in Education Next,

We find the opportunity gap — that is, the relationship between socioeconomic status and achievement — has not grown over the past 50 years. But neither has it closed. Instead, the gap between the haves and have-nots has persisted.

The stubborn endurance of achievement inequalities suggests the need to reconsider policies and practices aimed at shrinking the gap. Although policymakers have repeatedly tried to break the link between students’ learning and their socioeconomic background, these interventions thus far have been unable to dent the relationship between socioeconomic status and achievement. Perhaps it is time to consider alternatives.

This certainly applies to Head Start. It is time to consider alternative ways that this $9.8 billion program could help disadvantaged children and close the education opportunity gap.

[1] According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, pregnant women account for 1 percent of the Head Start enrollment population. 73 percent of the enrollment population are 3 or 4-years-old. See: Head Start Program Facts, FY 2018, at: https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/no-search/hs-program-fact-sheet-2018.pdf (accessed on May 8, 2019).