For as long as there has been a child care licensing system in this country, there has been a debate about how best to strike a balance between regulation and flexibility. Head Start has spent more than 60 years finding that balance. It operates under a set of Program Performance Standards that set parameters for program quality while still giving programs the flexibility to meet the specific needs of the families and communities they serve. This balance is one of the reasons Head Start is widely considered the gold standard in early childhood education.
Despite Head Start’s decades of success, the federal government recently released proposed changes that would eliminate roughly 90 percent of the program’s standards, including standards related to teacher coaching, class-size limits, teacher-child ratios, and explicit prohibitions on corporal punishment and seclusion. The government’s proposal includes changes that, to be blunt, feel like we’re going back to the dark ages of program regulation.
My relationship with Head Start goes back well over 50 years, and the program has always been near and dear to my heart. I started as a classroom teacher and have built a career as a regulatory scientist, studying how policies and standards impact children and families. As someone who has spent decades identifying, empirically, which standards we can’t afford to lose, I am disheartened by the administration’s recent proposal, as those are precisely the rules it seeks to eliminate.
Consider the training and coaching of Head Start teachers. Over the last 20 years we’ve discovered that coaching and mentoring staff is one of the most effective ways to see behavior changes in the classroom. Coaching allows us to meet staff where they are and directly support them to improve their skills. It may be a more costly way to support staff, but that cost comes with a demonstrated value. In my own work, I’ve seen this play out directly in a mentoring program I developed and evaluated with Penn State, which produced measurable gains in classroom quality. We should not eliminate an intervention with such clear connection to child outcomes.
More concerning still, the proposal seeks to eliminate federal standards on teacher-child ratios and group sizes, deferring instead to the patchwork of uneven state standards. According to the Children’s Equity Project, this will likely result in larger class sizes for 80% of children enrolled in Head Start. Teacher-child ratios are closely linked with the quality of teacher-child interactions and, ultimately, child outcomes. When ratios increase, the quality of teacher-child interactions changes in predictable ways: staff talk becomes more focused on directions (“sit down,” “gentle hands”) and less on the back-and-forth conversation that helps children build language and problem-solving skills. Teachers also have less time available to observe children and adapt their strategies to meet children’s individual needs. Importantly, the children who are going to be most impacted by this change are the ones that Head Start is designed to serve: children from more disadvantaged communities who may not be exposed to the same language-rich environment outside of child care.
Of course, teacher-child ratios and class sizes aren’t just about the quality of interactions: they exist to keep children safe. A teacher watching over fewer children can see a fall or a child wandering off before it becomes an emergency. Stretch that same teacher across a larger group, and the odds of missing something rise accordingly.
The administration’s proposed rule change further exacerbates these safety concerns by eliminating the explicit prohibition on corporal punishment and seclusion in Head Start classrooms. The evidence against these practices is clear, yet the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) removes the language ensuring that they have no place in a classroom serving our youngest and most vulnerable children.
