Every year, Head Start educators provide hundreds of thousands of children and pregnant mothers with comprehensive early childhood education and family services. To do so effectively, Head Start staff are required to attain advanced credentials and degrees per the 2007 reauthorization of the Head Start Act.

Yet, Head Start teachers with a bachelor’s degree still earn less than 70 percent of elementary and kindergarten teachers’ wages, and they turn over at higher rates than K–12 educators. The primary reason: inadequate compensation.

In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) introduced a rule to improve wages and job supports for Head Start educators. But now, HHS has proposed eliminating this rule, arguing that doing so would allow programs to enroll more children. But freeing up funding to open slots in programs that can’t retain the teachers to staff classrooms won’t expand access—it will only expand Head Start waitlists (PDF).

For families to have access to Head Start services and receive high-quality caregiving support, well-compensated staff are crucial.

Without additional investment and a federal focus on the workforce, Head Start services cannot meet current demand

Established in 1965, Head Start provides school readiness services to children living in families under the federal poverty level, in foster families, in families lacking housing, or with a documented disability and to eligible pregnant mothers. The federal government provides Head Start grants that support a specified number of enrollment slots directly to community-based organizations that offer early learning, development, nutrition, health, and other services necessary to support family well-being.

However, Head Start programs have faced chronic underenrollment for nearly a decade, with a lack of qualified staff as the primary culprit. In a 2022 survey, a quarter of the Head Start programs anticipated facing staffing challenges, including a lack of suitable candidates, high costs of hiring, and long training timelines for staff without the required qualifications. Those challenges stem in part from the 2007 reauthorization of the Head Start Act, which sought to improve child outcomes by raising credential standards for educators but did not account for compensation.

Following the 2007 reauthorization, the share of Head Start teachers with a bachelor’s degree increased from fewer than half to 70 percent by 2021, but those teachers’ inflation-adjusted salary rose by less than 1 percent over the same period. In 2022, the average annual salary for a Head Start teacher was roughly $35,000. In contrast, 2024 data show that the average public kindergarten teacher earned $60,000, and the average worker with a bachelor’s degree earned $105,000. Higher standards came without higher pay, setting the stage for the staffing crisis programs face today.

Wages aren’t the only aspect of job quality pushing qualified educators away from Head Start either. Demanding work conditions and requirements to support children and families with development make the job stressful. That leads to high turnover rates, with the average program losing 29 percent of their teachers in 2022. In fact, more than half of Head Start programs had turnover rates of more than 20 percent that year.

Head Start programs that lack enough staff must close classrooms or leave slots unfilled. Without a steady supply of qualified educators, Head Start programs struggle to hit full enrollment, even as more than 130,000 children and families remain on program waitlists (PDF). Greater rates of educator turnover also negatively affect the children served. A 2019 study found that Head Start teachers experienced a 10 percent within-year turnover rate, more than double that of K–12 teachers, and that children in programs with higher turnover rates had lower language, literacy, and socioemotional development scores than those in programs with consistent educators.

Investments in the Head Start workforce are investments in serving children

Addressing the issues driving staffing shortages and underenrollment requires some federal agenda setting. Because Head Start funding is allocated using a congressionally mandated formula, Head Start directors lack the discretionary funds to easily adjust program budgets to offer higher wages or benefits.

In 2024, HHS took steps toward improving staff wages. A new rule required programs to update their pay scales, provide benefits, establish a minimum salary, and improve staff compensation so it is comparable to local public preschool teachers’ wages by 2031. The rule also made accommodations for local labor market conditions, allowing waivers for small programs and time to phase in improvements.

Early evidence suggests the rule is working. Between 2024 and 2025, teacher turnover declined from 19 to 17 percent, and the number of unfilled slots dropped from 13 to 8 percent. Yet there is still work to be done. The states with the biggest gaps in compensation between Head Start and K–12 teachers offered services to the smallest share of children eligible for Head Start. This suggests raising wages for Head Start educators in these states could help increase enrollment and improve childhood outcomes.

However, HHS’s new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking could undo this progress. The proposal argues that it can free up funding for more services by eliminating the wage and benefit requirements put forth in 2024. But the evidence is clear—without a sufficient workforce of quality educators, Head Start programs cannot provide quality services to children and families. Moreover, caregiving quality depends on consistent relationships between educators and children, so families may disenroll when that consistency breaks down.

Ultimately, investments in the Head Start workforce are investments in serving children. Eliminating the 2024 wage enhancement requirements won’t address the real problem: a workforce that is highly qualified but chronically underpaid.

Investing in compensation can help programs attract and retain more Head Start educators (PDF), and by doing so, keep classrooms open, fill slots, and improve children’s development outcomes. Rolling back these standards now, just as early data show they're beginning to work, would be a step backward for children, families, and the educators who serve them.