How Much More Positive Head Start Evidence Do We Need to Save It?

Opinion: Under threat by the Trump administration, the program has proven its value, even while being unfairly expected to solve all childhood inequities // Conor P. Williams

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The Trump administration’s first four months have been rough on U.S. children. They certainly don’t deserve the punishment. From polarized and destabilizing politics to a global pandemic, increasing environmental pressures from climate change (and more), this cohort of children is coming of age in a particularly difficult moment.

And yet, we have reached what is perhaps a zenith in Trump-era politics of disinvesting in children and families. The administration’s response to America’s youth crisis has been stunningly consistent: again and again, it has balanced occasional, vague promises to do something constructive to address child care costs or infertility challenges on the one hand with real and stunningly concrete attacks on children’s well-being on the other.

Perhaps the most direct and comprehensive assault on children is coming through the administration’s war on Head Start. At $12.3 billion last year, it’s the federal government’s largest-single investment in early learning, and it serves almost 800,000 children and families per year. Over its 60 years, Head Start has provided high-quality early learning as well as connecting around 40 million children and their families to comprehensive support services like health and dental care, nutrition and housing assistance.

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump echoed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook in calling for Head Start’s elimination. This was hardly novel: though Head Start has long enjoyed bipartisan support, a subset of conservative researchers, activists and politicians have spent decades attacking the program.

While the administration’s chaotic first 100 days decimated portions of the federal government supporting health and well-being, its attacks on Head Start have been uniquely unpredictable. In January, as Elon Musk and his underlings at the Department of Government Efficiency hacked away at the federal civil service, Head Start providers across the country reported that they were unable to access their normally scheduled federal payments. This posed a particular challenge for Head Start center directors navigating the tight margins that define the early education market; hundreds of early care and learning centers warned that they were at risk of closure.

Later in the spring, the administration abruptly pulled funding from regional Head Start centers that offer resources, support and oversight for Head Start providers.

Several weeks ago, it appeared that the administration was preparing to act more decisively to abandon U.S. kids and families who depend on Head Start. On April 17, the Associated Press reported on leaked documents indicating that the Trump administration would erase Head Start funding in its forthcoming budget proposal. Once this hit the news, Head Start supporters mobilized to save the program, and the administration reversed course.

While it appears that the administration isn’t (yet) ready to deliver on this promised assault on children’s well-being, it’s worth reminding ourselves just what a stunning mistake it would be to reduce this particular investment in U.S. kids and families.

Head Start has been studied many times, and the results are broadly positive. Research on it — and other early education programs — finds a relatively consistent pattern:

• Early education programs are reliably good for families and at preparing kids for kindergarten

• There’s some waning of positive academic impacts as kids go through K-12

• But the long-term impacts of early ed investments are generally positive.

First, Head Start appears to be particularly effective at helping children from historically marginalized communities. Perhaps most importantly in the present political context, early education programs tend to promote better child development outcomes that create cost savings for school budgets. This mostly results from pre-K programs like Head Start reducing the likelihood that children will later require special education services or need to repeat a grade.

For instance, economist Tim Bartik notes that studies show possible special education cost-savings of “23 to 86 percent.” Meanwhile, if a child repeats second (or any) grade, the public pays an additional year of per-pupil funding, and it also delays their entry into the workforce. As such, pre-K’s ability to lower grade retention and keep students on track for college and career is a particularly efficient return on early education investments. Finally, early education programs like Head Start are a boon for working families because they help parents get back to work sooner after having a child.

Most encouraging of all, Head Start appears to create some long-term positive effects. In 2022, researchers at the University of Notre Dame and Texas A&M found that the children of Head Start participants garnered benefits like higher high school graduation and college attainment rates, lower rates of teen pregnancy and reduced rates of interaction with the criminal justice system.

For instance, critics often point to the federal Head Start Impact Study, which gathered data on programs in the early 2000s. It largely found that Head Start had positive initial effects on children’s development, but that these effects “faded out” as kids worked their way into the K–12 education system. But problems with the study’s data prompted a field reassessment of its findings in the 2010s, with most researchers concluding that it meaningfully underestimated Head Start’s benefits to children.

This begs some critical questions about how the public should measure “success” for Head Start. Begin here: nearly every study of nearly every early education investment shows that these programs are effective at getting kids ready for K–12 schooling. Put simply, pre-K appears to be good at getting kids “pre”-pared for K(indergarten).

The trouble is, political rhetoric about early education investments has sometimes presented them as an invulnerable “inoculation” against all challenges that children may face later in life. This is the wrong way to think about whether early education investments “work,” because it sets an impossible bar for success. Head Start — or pre-K programs more generally — cannot wholly blunt poverty, poor health or the impacts of low-quality K–12 classrooms.

Indeed, even less rosy findings, like those in a recent study of Tennessee’s public pre-K program, indicate a positive path forward for public early education investments. Initial studies of the program garnered headlines. While Tennessee pre-K attendees were generally more ready for kindergarten than their peers who did not attend the program, pre-K attendees scored worse on a range of metrics by the end of elementary school.

This is concerning! But a more recent analysis of Tennessee’s data found that pre-K’s benefits were “most likely to persist until 3rd grade among those students who went on to attend high quality schooling environments and were taught by highly effective teachers.” That is, Tennessee’s pre-K programs succeeded at preparing children for kindergarten, and kids who went from those programs into higher-quality elementary classrooms continued to do better.

In other words, if Head Start and other pre-K programs are measured as a one-time public investment that will solve all systemic inequities in American schools and society, they will inevitably appear to fail. But if they are measured against their ability to prepare children for elementary schools, it is clear that they are a success.

Furthermore, this fairer definition of Head Start’s effectiveness would allow policymakers to focus their attention on the necessary work of investing and improving K–12 schools so that they bolster children and families beyond the early years.