Head Start Has Never Worked

The Trump administration should have stood its ground in its earlier effort to zero out the failed Great Society program.

Courtesy Maansi Srivastava for The Washington Post via Getty Images

By Heather Mac Donald

Head Start “works,” according to the New York Times and its sources.

The Times has been blasting a Trump administration plan to deregulate much of this quintessential Great Society program. Since its inception in 1966, Head Start has spent more than $240 billion in taxpayer dollars on early education and anti-poverty services for low-income children up to the age of five. Now at a median annual cost of $20,000 per child in Early Head Start (for infants, toddlers, and pregnant mothers) and $15,000 per each pre-K student, it imposes detailed requirements for class size—one teacher cannot supervise more than four two-year-olds, for example—medical screenings, and in-home visits.

The spending has been more than worth it, according to education bureaucrats. Joel Ryan, director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, tells the Times that Head Start is “one of America’s most successful early childhood programs” and that it has “changed millions of lives.” Ruth Friedman, the former director of the Office of Child Care in Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), lauds the “science-backed standards” that ensure that children “arrive at kindergarten ready to succeed.” The Trump deregulation constitutes a “massive gutting” of this successful initiative, Friedman told the Times.

Last year, the White House contemplated cutting $12.2 billion from Head Start’s funding. That $12 billion is roughly what the program costs today. A draft federal budget cited Head Start’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and use of books for toddlers that validate LGBTQ families, among other identity-obsessed practices, as grounds for essentially zeroing the program out.

Then the administration, facing protest, reversed course. Today, the Administration for Children and Families at HHS touts how it has not cut Head Start’s budget at all but has instead merely pared back the program’s 133 pages of federal requirements imposed on state and local partners.

The administration should have stood its ground. Head Start does not “work,” contrary to the Times. (Of course, Head Start may still be “one of America’s most successful early childhood programs,” since most of the others are also ineffective.)

The Times’s reporting on the Trump deregulation effort ignores the most significant research ever done on Head Start. A randomized controlled trial found that any early gains in school readiness among enrollees had faded by the end of first grade and were absent by third grade. The results were published by HHS in 2010 and 2012. Academic attempts to discredit this “fadeout” effect have failed.

So advocates have taken to touting Head Start’s alleged non-cognitive benefits, such as alleged small improvements in high school and college completion rates, workforce participation, and wages. Later studies dispute even those findings. Some research shows that Head Start produces worse outcomes in certain areas.

The HHS fadeout report received wide coverage, including from the Times. Today, however, the alleged paper of record is silent about the report and has resumed touting Head Start’s alleged success, while denouncing the White House plan to give states more leeway in running local Head Start chapters.

Meantime, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed free childcare program is now projected by the New School for Social Research to cost $9 billion a year. The Mamdani plan is just one of many local early-education programs nationwide that run concurrently with Head Start. The existence of such programs makes it hard to credit claims that a heartless Trump administration is throwing poor children to the wolves.

Those concurrent efforts are unambiguously efficacious only for the interest groups that get paid regardless of whether their work accomplishes anything. This patronage is why welfare schemes are seemingly impossible to eliminate.

There is nothing that government social-uplift programs purport to accomplish that cannot be done better by parents. To be sure, the state of the American family is dire, especially in lower-income brackets. But it is time to stop throwing good money after bad. Taxpayers have already coughed up too many billions of dollars for failed antipoverty efforts whose subtext is displacing parents as primary caregivers. Civil society must figure out a way to reknit the two-parent family, however daunting that task may be. One place to begin is by acknowledging that mothers and fathers are crucially important to their children.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of When Race Trumps Merit. This piece first appeared on our main website, city-journal.org.