When Head Start was established in 1965, it was meant to boost outcomes for children from low-income families by offering high-quality early learning and wraparound services, like dental care and mental health support. Fifty-nine years later, funding has increased for the program—from about $96 million in the 1960s (about $959 million in today’s dollars) to nearly $12 billion in fiscal year 2023. But the way that federal funding is assigned to individual Head Start programs is still based in part on a formula developed in 1974. This has allowed an “outdated, uneven” funding system to persist, which fails to equitably assign money to states that now have the most children in poverty, according to a new report by the Southern Education Foundation.

The lack of equitable funding is leading to wildly different experiences within Head Start, researchers say. “Different children across different states are getting a different opportunity,” said Allison Boyle, a research and policy specialist at the Southern Education Foundation. Due to this inequitable funding, the percentage of children in poverty who are served in Head Start ranges from 7.7 percent in Nevada to 50 percent in Alaska.

Under Head Start’s current funding model, money runs directly from the federal Office of Head Start to individual Head Start program operators, like schools, nonprofits and community organizations that submit grant applications for funding. The funding these programs receive is based on a complex formula determined by Congress that takes into account factors like how much funding a program received the previous year, the number of enrollment spots a Head Start grantee plans to offer and the number of people in a state who receive public assistance.

Put more simply, the formula does not allow Head Start funding to shift in order to match population changes or rates of child poverty in a given community.

This is of particular concern to the Southern Education Foundation, as the southern region has higher rates of young children living in poverty. The report found Head Start programs in the southern states are of lower quality and serve a lower percentage of eligible children than those in non-southern states.

The solution, according to researchers: give Head Start a one-time boost—ideally $1 billion over a period of five years or less—to even out the funding, and then fix the formula so that it provides even per-child funding and takes into account the number of children in poverty and where those children live. That would ensure that Head Start funds are going to the places with the most need and that similar percentages of children would be served across the states.

A general boost in funding might also improve quality in Head Start classrooms, the report found. Head Start programs with the highest quality ratings spent an average of $10,932 per child, researchers found, while the classrooms with the lowest quality ratings spent about$1,300 less per child.

The report’s release comes on the heels of a new federal rule that will provide a raise of about$10,000 annually to most Head Start teachers, adding urgency to the need to reconfigure the funding formula, said the report’s authors. If the formula doesn’t change, the limited money available within programs could be put to teacher salaries instead of taking on more children.

“I actually admire the Head Start office for saying you have to pay more to the teachers and the home visitors and all the personnel,” said Kathy Thornburg, one of the report’s authors and the director of the Institute for Professional Development at the University of Missouri. “But it can’t be at the expense of serving fewer children. And that’s what directors are worried about all over the country.”

This story about Head Start funding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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