Head Start — which has had a rough year — got a shake-up this week when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced proposed regulations that will force at least a quarter of Head Start grantees to compete to stay in business. The Obama administration says the new rules will improve the quality of Head Start programs by removing programs that don’t measure up, but the new rules are likely to upset a lot of Head Start providers.
Lady Bird Johnson visits a Head Start class in 1966 (photo courtesy of White House Photograph Office, Robert L. Knudsen)
The idea to make Head Start more competitive came out of a 2005 Government Accountability Office audit, which found that Head Start often kept giving money to programs year after year, regardless of program quality. The Bush administration convened a committee to look at the issue. In the resulting recommendations, the committee proposed that 10 to 20 percent of Head Start grantees should have to compete for their grants.
Obama administration officials said they took this proposal further, raising the percentage to 25 percent, to bring more accountability to the Head Start system. Accountability has been a favorite buzzword for the administration. The Race to the Top competition — which awarded states money for proposing, among other things, new ways to make teachers and schools more accountable — just wrapped up. Obama has also pushed Congress to fund a similar competition for early education systems, known as the Early Learning Challenge Fund. So it’s no surprise that Head Start has been caught up in the “accountability” push.
“A renewed era of innovation, improvement and integrity in Head Start is here,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in the press release.
The proposed rules call for ranking Head Start programs based on a variety of measures, or “triggers,” related to poor performance, including financial audits, low scores on assessments and child abuse. Programs with the most triggers would have to compete to be refunded every five years when their grant-periods are up.
Center leaders have expressed concerns about such a system, however. The director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, Joel Ryan, wrote in comments on the first set of proposed rules that “wide scale competition would be costly to administer, would create more uncertainly [sic] and chaos in the management of a complicated program, and would unfairly ‘sweep up’ high quality programs with subpar performers.”
And some large centers worry that they could be singled out because they are more likely to have a higher number of infractions due simply to their bigger size.
HHS is offering carrots as well as sticks. The department will be naming 10 “Centers of Excellence,” to be nominated by governors. These high-performing centers will offer “peer-to-peer technical assistance.” In addition, HHS is creating four training centers to help local Head Start programs.
The rules are not set in stone, yet. HHS is asking for public comments on the proposals, but my impression from a reading of the proposed rules is that the 25 percent cutoff is here to stay.
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[...] EarlyStories examined some suggested new rules for Head Start recently, and now a leading expert on early childhood is lauding the Obama administration for proposing a new system he says could could force much needed improvements o the $8 billion program for 3 and 4-year-olds. The piece makes it clear that what happens before children set foot in a public school classroom is an integral part of the national debate about education. [...]