When President Lyndon B. Johnson launched Head Start 61 years ago, he called it one of the most constructive and sensible programs ever undertaken by the U.S. government.

Today, it provides free learning and development programs to nearly 800,000 low-income kids from birth to age 5. Head Start is a vital resource that serves two generations at the same time: vulnerable young children and their parents. But now, despite its track record of success, real progress toward stabilizing and improving the program could vanish.

Currently, Head Start doesn’t receive enough public investment to meet the needs of all families who qualify for its services and is only able to serve a fraction of those families as a result. And in rural areas, where Head Start plays a critical role in closing gaps in patchy care infrastructure, nearly half of young children have no access to a Head Start program slot at all.

In 2024, Head Start Preschool served just one quarter of qualifying families, while Early Head Start — a companion program for pregnant mothers, infants, and toddlers — only reached an estimated 10% of qualifying participants.

Meanwhile, Head Start educators, despite holding equivalent degrees and certificates to public school teachers, are paid 30 to 40 percent less than their counterparts. In the 2024-2025 school year, Head Start teachers earned an average salary of about $46,380. Among those with bachelor’s degrees, the average annual salary was just over $48,000 — far less than the average annual salary of a K-12 teacher at $74,459. In fact, many Head Start teachers earn wages so low that they qualify for the same government aid programs as their students’ families.

The Biden administration took steps to address these inequities by creating a long-overdue plan to increase wages for the Head Start workforce to reflect the importance of their daily work. But the administration of President Donald Trump has proposed a rule change that would cancel these improvements and keep many of these essential workers trapped in poverty. It would also exacerbate existing retention and turnover issues. In a nutshell, the rule change would make it harder for the people who care for our most vulnerable children to earn a living wage.

This is a huge problem. Decades of research prove that Head Start is highly effective for young kids and their families. Participating children see greater educational attainment, higher earnings, and even improved health well into their adult years. In rural communities, the program sometimes serves as the only available licensed early learning option, and a critical job provider.

Head Start is not a niche program, but a lifeline woven into the fabric of hundreds of communities across every state in America. Without sufficient investment, that lifeline grows weaker.

Because Head Start wages are so low, a high rate of educators and staff inevitably quit every year. In 2025, the turnover rate was as high as 41 percent in some locations. This constant shuffling is very bad for young children, who rely on stable, nurturing relationships with adults to support their healthy development.

The Trump administration says it wants to protect children, promote community autonomy, grow the workforce and boost the economy. But its proposed and planned rule changes completely contradict those goals, making it much harder for parents to find childcare they can trust, and undermining any promise to pay the workforce fair wages for its hard work. These efforts effectively pull the rug out from under low-income families trying to escape poverty.

The proposed rule change argues that without overturning the 2024 requirements, programs would have to cut slots. But this framing treats inadequate federal funding as a fixed constraint instead of a policy choice. Ultimately, it’s the job of Congress to appropriate the necessary funding for Head Start to reach the families who need it.

There is no way to look at Trump’s position on Head Start as helpful to families, children or educators. Rather, the point it makes is that our youngest and most vulnerable citizens don’t deserve the same support as everyone else, and that the early educators charged with helping keep children out of poverty don’t deserve to escape it themselves.

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Hailey Gibbs is the associate director for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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