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Trump’s Deregulation of Head Start Would Lead to Bigger Class Sizes, Lower Quality

The administration has now made public a proposed rule to eliminate critical standards for services in the free preschool program.

Children at a Head Start program in

On Thursday, the Trump administration released a proposed rule that would eliminate hundreds of regulations that set safety, quality, and other standards for Head Start, the nation’s free preschool program for low-income children, deleting the entire 133-page set of standards and replacing them with a far more slimmed-down version that eliminates numerous health and safety requirements.

What would be left is “a really watered-down Head Start program that removes a lot of the health and safety requirements, quality standards, and comprehensive services,” Katie Hamm, who served as deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at the Office for the Administration for Children & Families under President Joe Biden, told The Nation.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose uncle Sargent Shriver helped create Head Start in 1965, said in a press release that the rule is “removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children. That’s how we renew the promise of Head Start for the next generation.”

A New Trump Rule Would Lower Standards at Head Start and Exclude Immigrants From the Program Bryce Covert

A New Trump Rule Would Lower Standards at Head Start and Exclude Immigrants From the Program

The proposed rule eliminates the requirements that limit Head Start class sizes and mandate a minimum number of adults to care for young children. Instead, programs are instructed to follow state rules, but no state has staff-to-child ratio regulations for all age groups that are at least as good as Head Start’s; following state ratios will worsen the minimum requirement for 97 percent of 2-year-olds in Head Start, 93 percent of 3-year-olds, and 71 percent of 4-year-olds, a report from Arizona State University’s Children’s Equity Project found. In its proposed rule, the administration estimates that Head Start teachers would be able to serve between 16 and 32 percent more children in their classrooms if the rule is finalized and that it will “preserve or expand” as many as 236,000 Head Start slots.

But Head Start program directors have told Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, that they have a “deep fear about a requirement to serve more children,” she told The Nation. Some are already operating at lower ratios than required in order to meet the significant needs of the children they serve. More children are coming into Head Start with emotional and developmental issues; for young children, she pointed out, that often means behaviors like biting or throwing that require intensive, hands-on supervision. It’s not that programs don’t want to serve more kids; “they want to serve children in their care in ways that really meet their needs,” she said. If the administration puts pressure on them to serve more children, staff may quit and programs may just have to close, Hamm noted.

The proposed rule also gets rid of a requirement to have at least one bus monitor on all buses, with more as necessary. Programs are concerned about what that will mean when 3- and 4-year-old are put on buses by themselves. “I am really worried about safety,” said Lori Pittman, a former Head Start parent who works at a Head Start program in Washington State, on a press call on held on Thursday.

It also eliminates curriculum requirements that guide the commercial educational materials that programs can buy and implement. Currently, the rules say that curricula must be scientifically valid, aligned with the program’s outcomes framework, and have standardized materials and training procedures. Head Start is such a big purchaser of these materials that these rules have driven up quality across these companies’ products. But “the accountability and the monitoring comes from what’s in the........

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