The Trump Administration has announced a reorganization of the Head Start program that annually serves 750,000 children. The adjustments include raising class size, requiring classes to be taught in English, and eliminating some health services provided. Head Start supporters claim that it has been an effective program in raising educational abilities and that the recommended changes threaten these benefits. Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute has presented evidence that the meager benefits are not long lasting. However, Head Start’s limited and short-lived gains raise a more fundamental question: what alternatives might do more to improve the educational prospects of children being raised by relatively young single mothers?
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In the early 1990s, almost one in four black teen women, 15-19 years old, became pregnant annually, nearly all unmarried. While about 40 percent ended in abortions, almost half went to term so that the black teen birth rate peaked at 11.5 percent in 1991. For most of the decade, each year more than 10 percent of black teen women gave birth.
While it is helpful to subsidize childcare expenses, there are better ways to do it than the current way Head Start programs are administered.
Liberals feared that these young mothers were incapable of providing the skills to effectively raise their children. Not only were they unmarried but the fathers were transitory and too often uncaring. As a result, the norm became that these women would quickly end the relationship and enter into sequential relations so that more than half of young black mothers had children with different fathers.
First among these liberals was Jason DeParle, whose best-selling book, American Dream, became widely accepted as the best understanding of these dynamics. In it, he argued that Head Start’s success could be attributed to its ability to provide educational and social resources that some families may lack, thereby acting as a substitute for traditional family support systems.
Not surprisingly, substituting for parents is a central part of the current Head Start mission. Head Start directly provides vision and hearing screening and medical and dental checkups. While they interact with mothers to schedule appointments and help when there are threatened utility shutoffs, staff does not attempt to aid parenting skills. MacDonald noted,
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.
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.
Two things changed the 1990s situation. Welfare reform freed young black women from being trapped on welfare where they had to rely on dysfunctional, often abusive men for the extra income needed. The books, Precious and Saving Bernice: Battered Women, Welfare, and Poverty vividly documented this situation.
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Once these women were employed, they had the independence and resources to build more productive lives. These women offered a model to other teens that there was an alternative to early motherhood and welfare. By the mid-2000s, black teen birthrates had declined significantly so that by 2023, less than 2 percent give birth annually.
The second change was a better understanding: Rather than find a substitute for parenting, programs should provide family-counseling resources to better prepare young women for motherhood. Among the most effective are visiting-nursing programs that provide in-home services to young mothers from pregnancy through their child’s third year. They can be followed by MIECHV (maternal, infant, and early childhood visiting) programs, which allocate funds that aid three- to five-year-olds. Other programs include Parent as Teachers and HIPPY (home instruction for parents of preschool youngsters). In existence for 30 years, HIPPY provides activity packets, storybooks, and manipulative shapes. HIPPY uses trained coordinators who go into the home and role-play activities.
Once children enter the school system, initiatives could mimic some of the charter-school policies that prod parents to be more involved in their children’s education. They could include subsidizing the parents and children’s attendance at cultural events on weekends: museums, theaters, etc. The main point is that schools must find ways to engage parents in the education of their children. These are clearly the aspirations of the vast majority of parents.
Many who engage in an exercise routine to improve their health flounder because of other demands on their time or their lacking knowledge of how best to proceed. They need a coach or trainer to assist in their efforts, to offer helpful suggestions and gentle prodding when needed. This has been the strategy of successful charter schools and should be embraced by the traditional public schools. Some parents may rebel, rejecting the help as paternalism, but for many it will help them become the parents they want to be.
Federal mandates do not allow Head Start to adapt to provide parental counseling, another example of the unwillingness of liberals to strengthen the agency of the needy. They refused to support Clinton’s Welfare to Work initiatives that set in motion effective dynamics that transformed the lives for the better of poor single mothers; and here they cling to the counterproductive strategy of relying on government childcare programs to substitute for parental development.
While it is helpful to subsidize childcare expenses, there are better ways to do it than the current way Head Start programs are administered and hopefully states will provide more productive alternatives. While not all of Trump’s recommended health service cutbacks and other parts of his deregulation are helpful, Head Start’s overriding vision to weaken parental agency must be abandoned.
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Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? (Wicked Son, 2026).
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