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

The Trump administration is on the verge of publishing a proposed rule that, if finalized, will gut most of the crucial standards that ensure uniform quality of Head Start programs across the country while adding new requirements aimed at shutting out immigrants for the first time in the program's history, according to two people with direct knowledge of the draft regulation. Head Start, the federal program that provides free preschool education and services to low-income families, was created in 1965 and currently serves more than 700,000 children.
The administration's proposed rule, which has been drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services and sent to the Office of Management and Budget for review, would rescind the entire 133-page set of "performance standards" that currently spell out how Head Start laws must be implemented by states, counties, and programs, they said. While the Head Start Act includes some specific requirements, most standards in the program have been delineated by this set of rules. Instead, a much shorter set of standards would take its place, leaving it up to states and local governments to implement their own standards if they so choose.
"What it does is transform a program that has high quality," one of the people said, "and create a generic early-childhood funding stream that doesn't look like Head Start." In a post to X on August 1, HHS said that the rule "expands opportunity for children, cuts unnecessary red tape, and reinforces Head Start's core mission."
Currently, the Head Start guidelines place limits on class sizes and specify how many adult staff are required to supervise certain numbers of children. The new regulations would eliminate those class size and ratio requirements; instead, they would require programs to adhere to state and local laws. Some states have strict childcare ratio requirements, but others are much looser, permitting higher ratios of children to teachers than Head Start currently allows. The proposed rule also nixes specific requirements that mandate the curriculum standards programs must adhere to.
The proposed rule removes guidance around the circumstances in which children can be suspended and expelled. The existing standards prohibit corporal punishment, a prohibition that will disappear in the proposed rule. It gets rid of required developmental screenings for all children and detailed regulations governing how children with disabilities must be given access to services and included in classroom instruction. Gone are guidelines around how homeless families and children in foster care should be accommodated so that they can enroll.
"If it's not explicitly stated in the Head Start statute, it won't seem to exist after this proposed rule is finalized," the second person said. "It really turns over its authority to states and localities on how to handle almost everything."
What the proposed rule adds is just as troubling as what is disappearing. If the rule is finalized, it will only allow children who are citizens, United States nationals, or "qualified aliens," and with at least one parent with that status, to enroll. That will shut out a number of immigrants, and potentially children who are American citizens, for the first time ever.
The rule states that all teaching must be done in English, except for in Native American tribes, and says that if a child's native language isn't English, programs must prioritize teaching them in English anyway.
The rule creates a new requirement that staff must maintain records proving a family's income, immigration, and other eligibility for a certain amount of time and provide them to HHS upon request. It says that programs have to report staff who violate eligibility requirements to HHS. The combination will create a massive increase in paperwork and the possibility that staff members will be penalized for clerical errors.
The current standards say programs must establish parent committees that weigh in on the program's policies and services; the proposed rule would make those optional.
While the proposed rule would not affect Head Start's budget, it nevertheless changes regulations that will force programs to tighten their belts. Under current regulations, programs are permitted to spend up to 15 percent of their grant funding on administration and overhead, which was already a difficult threshold for programs to meet. But the proposed rule reduces that to just 5 percent. "That's going to be a pretty significant burden for programs," the second person said.
The proposed rule could change before it's made public and may change before being finalized. Even if it is finalized in its current form, it is likely to be subject to litigation; a number of its provisions appear to contradict the Head Start statute and a 2007 reauthorization that mandates that the standards don't eliminate or reduce quality.