Improving the Value of Head Start for Working Parents
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Summary
In December, the White House held a summit on child care and paid leave. President Donald Trump called for “expanded access to quality, affordable child care… for all American parents.” All of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have endorsed universal preschool for low-income families, and many back free pre-k for everyone.
Given the nation’s long-term fiscal challenges and projected federal budget deficits, a reasonable starting point for improving access to affordable child care and preschool would be to examine how existing programs can better serve American parents and children.
Since 1965, the United States has provided free preschool and child care to low-income families through the Head Start program, which is managed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In FY 2018, the United States provided in $9.1 billion funding for Head Start. The program’s enrollment was 887,125, which amounts to an annual per-enrolled cost of more than $10,000.
A long-anticipated national evaluation (mandated by Congress in the 1990s and released by HHS in 2012) found that Head Start did not provide lasting benefits to participating children compared to their peers who did not attend Head Start. A key finding of the report was that children who attended Head Start actually spent less time in care than their peers who did not enroll but receive non-parental care, a difference of four to five hours per week.
The disappointing national evaluation led liberals and conservatives to propose significant reforms.
Liberals have favored expanding the program to provide more hours of care for enrolled children. The Obama Administration pushed to require Head Start providers to offer at least 1,020 hours of care per year, rather than the current minimum of 448 hours, in part to give working parents more “affordable, high quality child care.” But HHS recently canceled these reforms, warning that mandating increased minimum hours would require reducing the number of children enrolled.
Conservatives have proposed reforming Head Start to offer greater choice. Dr. Lindsey Burke, the lead education expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has called for ending the program, but offered expanded choice as a compromise option: “at a minimum, if the federal government continues to fund child care, states should be allowed to make their Head Start dollars portable, following children to any preschool provider of their parents’ choice.”
A review of state-by-state child care and preschool costs shows that the Left and Right’s goals are actually complementary.
Maintaining the Head Start program but allowing parents’ greater options to choose among preschool and child care providers would significantly improve the program’s value. In 37 states, the per-child cost of the Head Start program is more than the average cost of full-time child care for a 4-year-old. (See Table 1.) Moreover, state-operated public preschool programs provide more hours of care at a lower per-child cost than Head Start in more than a dozen states.
For a working parent, increasing the number of hours of free child care provided through Head Start from 448 hours to 1,020 would provide 572 additional hours of care. This is enough child care to allow a parent to work the equivalent of 14 extra weeks per year. Working parents could earn an extra $4,290 per year by working those extra hours, assuming they earned the federal minimum wage of $7.50. This would amount to at least a 20 percent increase in earnings for a working mother with two children who is eligible to enroll in Head Start based on federal poverty guidelines. (This is a conservative estimate since full-time child care could provide significantly more than 1,020 hours of care per year.) More than doubling the amount of child care provided through Head Start for a working parent would be a significant economic benefit. The Center for American Progress has reported that child care costs amount to 35 percent of income for the average low-income family paying out of pocket.
Beyond the economic benefits, allowing parents to choose their child’s preschool or child care provider also has the potential to increase provider quality and improve parental satisfaction, which could help improve children’s school readiness.
The Obama Administration proposed increasing Head Start hours
In a June 2019 article for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, I reviewed the Obama Administration’s 2016 reforms to expand the minimum number of hours care provided by Head Start from 448 to 1,020 hours per year and the HHS decision to halt this change. These reforms were initiated in response to a 2012 national evaluation, which found that Head Start did not provide lasting benefits to participating children (compared to their peers who did not attend Head Start). A key finding of the report was that children who did not attend Head Start but did go to preschool received, on average, 4 or 5 more hours per care than Head Start attendees.
The Obama Administration believed that expanding Head Start’s minimum program hours would provide educational benefits to children and economic benefits to parents:
“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,” the Obama Administration reasoned, adding 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.”
However, the National Head Start Association opposed the change, arguing that warning that meeting the new standard would lead to 126,000 fewer children enrolled and 9,400 teachers’ jobs being lost.
In 2018, HHS began waiving the requirement for more hours, stating that implementing it would require reducing the number of children served. In 2019, HHS announced news rules to undo the 2016 reforms — restoring Head Start centers’ option to offer just 448 hours of care per year.
The Heritage Foundation has called for increasing parental choice in Head Start
Conservative education experts have been critical of the Head Start program. Dr. Lindsey Burke at the Heritage Foundation recently wrote that “For more than 40 years, this pet project has been a sinkhole for taxpayer dollars an ineffective education program for children,” and that “it’s time to rethink Head Start.”
Burke offered several criticisms of the program. First, she points that the program has had no positive impact for children served, pointing to the national evaluation’s findings. Second, she described the program as a “federal jobs program,” stating that “more than 265,000 adults were on staff with Head Start in 2018, 22 percent of whom were parents of current or former children enrolled in the program.” Third, she explains that federal standards and regulations create “red tape” and compliance costs for Head Start providers.
Burke warns that the program’s history since 1965 shows that “the federal government is ill-suited to manage and fund nationwide early childhood education and child care.” She calls for the program “to be placed on the chopping block.” But if it continues, states should manage the program and participating parents should have greater ability to choose among providers.
Why increasing the hours of care and expanding parental choice are complementary goals
If parents had greater flexibility to use their child’s share of funding for Head Start to choose among a wider range of preschool and child care providers, many parents would be able to significantly increase the number of hours of care that their children receive.
One way that they could increase their hours of care is by enrolling in a child care center, rather than Head Start. For example, Child Care Aware of America, a membership-based non-profit organization, estimates that the average cost of full-time child care in the United States is “around $9,000–$9,600.” This is less than the national average per-enrollment cost of Head Start: $10,200. To emphasize, for a lower cost than Head Start, which provides only a minimum of 448 hours of care per year, a parent could purchase full-time child care.
Table 1 presents a comparison of state by state estimates of child care costs for 4-year-olds with state per-child Head Start funding. (To understand the data, the per-state Head Start cost is from the Rutgers University National Institute for Early Education Research’s most recent annual report on The State of Preschool. The average state-by-state cost of child care for a 4-year-old is from the Economic Policy Institute’s site on child care costs in the United States.) In all but 13 states and D.C., the per-child Head Start funding is greater than the cost of full-time child care for a 4-year old.
Table 1 — Per-Child Head Start Funding vs. Full-Time Child Care Costs, by State
Another way to increase the amount of time in care offered would be to allow parents to use Head Start funds to enroll their children into state preschool programs. Table 2 shows states that operate subsidized preschool programs which provide more time in care than Head Start’s minimum 448 hours for a lower cost, according to data compiled by Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research. (Note: the below estimates for annual hours are based on federal data or assuming 180 days per year where no federal data is available.)
Table 2 — State-Operated Preschool Programs That Offer More Hours at a Lower Per-Child Cost
Conclusion
The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity’s mission is to “expand economic opportunity for those who least have it.” Our recent review of The State of Equal Opportunity in American K-12 Education found:
“Measures of students’ cognitive learning upon entering kindergarten show that achievement gaps start before K-12 schooling, and existing or new efforts to improve early childhood education should be studied to identify ways to improve equal opportunity, such as by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of federal and state preschool programs, including Head Start.”
Reforming the federal Head Start program to give families the flexibility to use their share of per-enrolled funding to purchase private child care (or to enroll in state pre-k programs) would significantly increase the hours of care offered to many parents. Increasing the number of hours of child care provided through Head Start would increase working parents’ potential earnings by 20 percent or more, while addressing a major out-of-pocket expense in the family budget.
Allowing parents to choose their child’s preschool or child care provider also has the potential to increase quality and improve parental satisfaction, which could help improve children’s school readiness and promote equal opportunity.
Dan Lips is a visiting fellow with the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.