Don’t eliminate Head Start. Fix how we fund it.

Hi y’all, Jessica Baghian here. 

Head Start is in the news. The White House has proposed eliminating its funding. 

What would this mean? There are roughly 1,600 Head Start grantees serving the most vulnerable children and families in all 50 states. In 2024 alone, Head Start providers served just shy of 800,000 kids between the ages of 0-5. The eligibility requirements specifically encourage a focus on serving the lowest-income families, children with disabilities, and families with other risk factors that might not be served otherwise. Ending early care and education for hundreds of thousands of children is an exceptionally terrible idea.

The program needs fixing, not gutting — and a good start would be changing how the funding works. Today, let’s talk about how the federal government could grant Head Start money to states and make early childhood education better for kids, families, and providers.

How Early Childhood Is Funded Today

A quirk of America’s early childhood funding structure is that it’s not the Department of Education but the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that administers Head Start and the Child Care Development & Block Grant (CCDBG), the two largest federal grant programs designated for early childhood education. (For reference, Head Start received $12.27 billion in FY2024, and CCDBG received $8.75 billion for FY2024.) Unlike federal K-12 education grants and the CCDBG — which flow from the feds to the states to the locals — Head Start dollars leapfrog states and go to local grantees.

A few months back, we talked about the importance of a captain who administers early childhood education as a mixed delivery system, not as siloed individual grants. By managing Head Start separately, the feds have made it nearly impossible for any state leader to improve access to quality programs across all the funding streams most impactful for their state.

When Head Start dollars bypass state leaders, the federal government undermines the efforts of states trying to unify and improve early childhood quality, creating a disincentive to unify in the first place. Because Head Start grantees receive dollars directly from DHS, their primary focus is federal compliance rather than accountability to state reform efforts. State leaders seldom have access to data about access, demand, and quality for the most vulnerable populations, and decisions about which local entities receive/retain funds are made without the key insights of state leaders. 

Governors – red and blue – are ready to take on the problem of early childhood education. Many states are already working to stand up unified early childhood systems that prioritize the needs of children, families, and providers. But if Head Start dollars keep bypassing their authority and going straight to a patchwork system of local grantees, states will have a harder time maximizing dollars to ensure school readiness and stronger workforce outcomes.

Here are two concrete actions Congress could take to improve Head Start rather than eliminate it:  

1. Congress could make Head Start a grant that is governed by states, instead of through state region intermediaries. By structuring all federal early childhood dollars (including Head Start, CCDBG, and the Preschool Development Grant (PDG)) to flow through the same captain at the state level, federal leaders would incentivize leadership in the states. States will still have the freedom to choose who the captain is, but all of the money should flow through a single state entity, not leapfrog over them. This is even more true in states that have established regional or local leads, where the federal Head Start grantee structure can be misaligned and add further complication to local leads’ work.
2. Alternatively, Congress could make a rule that in states that already have a unified early childhood office or agency, Head Start dollars cannot leapfrog that agency. Not all states have a unified early childhood system, but a federal rule like this one could do two important things: (1) Allow state leaders who are leading on early childhood to lead, and (2) incentivize the states that are lagging to unify more rapidly.

For the state leaders reading this: Tell your members of Congress how much value Head Start funding has for your state AND that you want Head Start funds to come through the states. If Head Start were simply eliminated, even the best Head Start providers in your state would likely be forced to shut their doors with little to no notice — and ultimately, that would hurt your kids, your families, your local businesses, and your economy. Instead, let’s come together and make it work better. And if you missed it, check out our post on unifying your early childhood system so the feds will know exactly where to send funding and be able to understand how it’s being used.   

Let’s Get Muddy

🔗 Resources

5 Things to Know About Head Start from Center for American Progress . If you’re a state leader working to unify early childhood, I want to know: What other federal support would help you unify faster? What would you add? 

Special thanks to Nasha Patel for contributing to this issue.