Opinion: Trump Administration’s English-Only Head Start Edict is Bad for Young Learners

For 61 years, Head Start has served both as the United States’ largest early care and education system and one of its most successful, tangible commitments to children living in poverty and those from historically underserved communities. 

The program has served around 40 million children and families in every state in the nation, ensuring kids not only receive access to early learning opportunities, but have what they need to learn — nutritious food, health supports, developmental screenings, and the like. It also supports their families to become healthy, well, socioeconomically stable, and skilled advocates for their children’s education. 

The impacts have been short-term, long-term, and even intergenerational, reaching the children of Head Start graduates, improving their  educational attainment, employment, health, and parenting practices. Meanwhile, research indicates that linguistically diverse kids — Head Start calls them dual language learners — have been some of the program’s greatest beneficiaries. 

That’s why the Trump administration’s recent proposal to enact a national English-only mandate in Head Start classrooms is so mistaken. This idea flies in the face of all available evidence and conflicts with the law’s requirements for linguistically responsive services. It also undermines the administration’s own objectives by reducing instructional options for parents and giving local Head Start providers less regulatory flexibility while imposing a greater compliance burden. 

Today, about a third of Head Start’s roughly 800,000 enrollees are dual language learners. These children have long been a focus for the program. In 1975, President Gerald Ford’s administration launched regulations that required Head Start providers serving linguistically diverse kids to hire bilingual staff. For decades since, Republican and Democratic administrations (including the first Trump administration) have sustained that requirement. 

Fifty-one years later, it’s clear that Head Start’s architects were ahead of their time. Bilingual early learning centers and schools are more popular than ever — with both English-dominant families and with families speaking other languages at home. Research indicates that these programs are highly effective for English learners and English-dominant students alike. 

The Trump administration’s English-only proposal is not only misaligned with science, law, and the administration’s own stated goals, it will also cost taxpayers. Given that roughly one-third of Head Start teachers speak a non-English language proficiently, implementing English-only instruction would force providers to spend considerably on restaffing and purchasing new learning materials. Specifically, the administration estimates implementation costs would be between $73 million and $124 million. 

That’s a lot to pay, particularly to abandon a half-century of bipartisan consensus that Head Start works best when it’s responsive to the needs of the particular communities it serves. Indeed, the administration recognized this when it exempted tribal communities from the proposal’s English-only mandate so that tribes could build stronger connections between children and their heritage. Why would this be any different for children who speak other, non-tribal languages at home and in their neighborhoods? 

The proposed English-only mandate is also a resoundingly bad idea on the merits. Studies are unambiguous: for the nearly one-third of Head Start attendees that speak a non-English language at home, bilingual learning is the educational gold standard. When these children have opportunities to strengthen their abilities in their first languages — while also being exposed to English — they are more likely to become fully proficient in English and succeed academically. 

Maybe this seems counterintuitive. Why wouldn’t English-only instruction help linguistically diverse kids learn more English? It appears that bilingual early care and education programs help these children become stronger language learners in general. That is, by developing their first languages more deeply, they become more confident language users, more able to understand complex elements of grammar, syntax, and the like. Over time, these stronger language competencies help them to more thoroughly and rapidly acquire English. What’s more, bilingual programs absolutely still provide young, linguistically diverse kids with English-language instruction. 

Bilingual learning models work for early education and K–12 programs alike. Over half a century ago, Texas launched one of the country’s most ambitious commitments to bilingual education. Since that time, the state has grown its investments in these programs to a point where it is now, perhaps, the country’s best school system for English-learning students. On the Nation’s Report Card, ELs in Texas routinely score better in math and English language arts than their peers in almost every other state. 

Finally, in a more general — and a more urgent — sense, anyone who cares about kids’ well-being should also be concerned whether it’s a good idea to trade in safety and quality for more seats. Even if — after spending around $100 million on a national English-only mandate for local Head Start providers — the administration’s proposal lowered costs enough to expand the number of available seats, those seats wouldn’t be of high enough quality to keep kids healthy, safe, and learning, let alone deliver the results that have made Head Start so effective for so many decades. 

And at some point, once safety, quality, and the high standard of care that has made Head Start the national guidepost are dissolved — we need to ask ourselves what exactly are we expanding access to?