What If Head Start Was Never Established?

The Actual History

The Head Start program emerged as a cornerstone of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" and broader "Great Society" initiatives of the mid-1960s. Launched in 1965, Head Start was conceived as a comprehensive child development program designed to break the cycle of poverty by providing preschool children from low-income families with a program that would meet their emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs.

The program's genesis can be traced to research in the late 1950s and early 1960s that highlighted the critical importance of early childhood development and the disadvantages faced by children from impoverished backgrounds. Studies demonstrated that children from low-income families often started school without the foundational skills and health supports their more affluent peers received, creating an achievement gap that frequently persisted throughout their educational careers.

Head Start was officially announced by President Johnson on May 18, 1965, when he stated, "Five and six-year-old children are inheritors of poverty's curse and not its creators... Unless we act, these children will pass it on to the next generation, like a family disease." The program was initially implemented as an eight-week summer program serving over 560,000 children, and was administered by the Office of Economic Opportunity under the direction of Sargent Shriver.

What began as a summer initiative quickly evolved into a year-round program. By 1969, Head Start had served nearly 2 million children. In 1972, program control transferred to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services), and amendments in 1994 established Early Head Start, which extended services to infants, toddlers, and pregnant women.

Throughout its existence, Head Start has maintained a commitment to comprehensive services, including education, health screenings, nutrition, parental involvement, and social services. The program also pioneered inclusion practices for children with disabilities, requiring that at least 10% of enrollment opportunities be made available to children with disabilities.

By 2022, Head Start and Early Head Start served over 1 million children annually through approximately 1,600 agencies across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and U.S. territories. The program had grown to a federal investment of more than $10 billion per year.

Research on Head Start's effectiveness has shown mixed results, but numerous studies have documented positive effects on school readiness, health outcomes, and long-term success indicators. A landmark study by economists David Deming, Jens Ludwig, and others found that Head Start participants were more likely to graduate high school, attend college, and had better health outcomes as adults than similar children who did not participate.

The program has weathered numerous political challenges over its nearly six-decade history, with debates about funding levels, program quality, and federal versus local control. Nevertheless, Head Start has remained one of the most enduring and recognizable elements of American social policy, with bipartisan support that has allowed it to survive changes in administration and shifting political winds.

The Point of Divergence

What if Head Start was never established? In this alternate timeline, we explore a scenario where the ambitious early childhood initiative proposed as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty either failed to materialize or was abandoned before implementation in 1965.

Several plausible scenarios could have prevented Head Start's creation:

The most likely divergence point centers on the program's planning phase in early 1965. When Sargent Shriver, then Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, was tasked with developing a preschool program for disadvantaged children, he assembled a planning committee of experts in child development, education, and healthcare. This 14-member committee, led by Dr. Robert Cooke of Johns Hopkins University, worked intensively for six weeks to design the program.

In our alternate timeline, this crucial planning phase might have faltered due to several possible factors:

First, internal disagreements among the planning committee members could have proven insurmountable. The original committee included scholars with different perspectives on child development, from psychologists to pediatricians to educators. In this scenario, theoretical disagreements about program implementation—whether to focus primarily on cognitive development, parental education, nutrition, or healthcare—created an impasse that resulted in a fragmented proposal that failed to gain administrative approval.

Alternatively, budgetary constraints could have played a decisive role. The original Head Start summer program received $96.4 million in funding—a substantial sum for 1965. In our alternate history, Secretary of Defense McNamara might have successfully argued that escalating Vietnam War expenditures necessitated cutting proposed domestic program budgets, leading Johnson to sacrifice the untested Head Start initiative to preserve other Great Society programs like Medicare or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

A third possibility involves political calculation. While Johnson was genuinely committed to antipoverty programs, he was also a consummate political strategist. If internal polling or advice from political aides had suggested that a program focusing on preschool-aged children would not yield political benefits comparable to other initiatives, Johnson might have redirected resources elsewhere in his antipoverty agenda.

In this alternate timeline, we assume that by April 1965, rather than announcing the creation of Head Start, the Johnson administration instead announced that early childhood interventions would be incorporated into existing education initiatives or deferred to state-level programs, effectively abandoning the comprehensive federal approach that defined the actual Head Start program.

Immediate Aftermath

Impact on the War on Poverty

The absence of Head Start created an immediate void in Johnson's War on Poverty strategy. Without this flagship program targeting young children, the administration's anti-poverty efforts lost a crucial preventative component, shifting focus more heavily toward remedial programs for adults and school-aged children.

The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which would have administered Head Start, reallocated the approximately $100 million earmarked for the program to other initiatives. The Community Action Program received expanded funding, as did Job Corps and VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). However, these programs lacked the political appeal and broad constituency that Head Start would have generated.

As historian James Patterson noted in his analysis of Great Society programs, "Head Start's focus on children made it politically unassailable in ways other anti-poverty programs never achieved." Without Head Start's broadly appealing focus on children, the War on Poverty became more vulnerable to criticisms of inefficiency and ideological overreach.

By 1966-67, as public support for Johnson's domestic agenda waned amid Vietnam War escalation and urban unrest, the absence of Head Start removed what would have been one of the most defensible elements of the antipoverty strategy. Congressional appropriations for poverty programs faced steeper cuts than in our timeline, with the OEO seeing its budget plateau by 1967 rather than continuing to grow.

Educational Response and Adaptation

The educational community responded to the gap left by Head Start's absence in several ways. Some states with progressive leadership, particularly New York and California, developed their own early childhood initiatives. Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York announced a state-funded "Early Start" program in late 1965 that incorporated some elements of the proposed federal program, though at a much smaller scale.

Private foundations also stepped into the void. The Ford Foundation expanded its Grey Areas Project, which already focused on disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, to include more early childhood components. Similarly, the Carnegie Corporation increased funding for early childhood research and demonstration projects.

However, these efforts remained fragmented and reached far fewer children than a federal program would have. By 1967, various state and private initiatives were serving approximately 150,000 preschool-aged children from low-income families nationwide—less than a quarter of the number that Head Start served in its first summer in our timeline.

The educational research community also adapted. Without the practical laboratory that Head Start provided for studying early intervention, researchers like Jerome Bruner and Urie Bronfenbrenner focused more on theoretical work or secured foundation funding for smaller-scale studies. The field of early childhood education developed more slowly and with less empirical grounding than in our timeline.

Health and Nutrition Consequences

One of the most immediate and tangible losses in this alternate timeline was the absence of Head Start's comprehensive health services. In our actual history, the first summer of Head Start alone provided dental examinations to more than 430,000 children and medical examinations to over 500,000, many of whom had never previously seen a healthcare provider.

Without this intervention, thousands of children's health conditions went undetected and untreated. Dr. Julius Richmond, who would have served as Head Start's first director, instead published a scathing analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1966, documenting the "missed opportunity for preventive health services" and estimating that approximately 35,000 cases of vision problems, 60,000 cases of anemia, and hundreds of thousands of untreated dental issues would affect school performance among low-income children entering kindergarten that year.

The nutritional component of Head Start was also lost. In our timeline, Head Start provided millions of meals to participating children, establishing nutritional standards and practices that later influenced other child nutrition programs. Without this model, school nutrition programs evolved more slowly, with less attention to early childhood nutritional needs.

Political Repositioning

By the 1968 presidential election, the absence of Head Start affected political calculations. Republican candidate Richard Nixon, recognizing the void in early childhood policy, included a more modest proposal for early childhood development in his campaign platform. His "Right Start" initiative proposed tax incentives for businesses to provide day care rather than direct federal provision of services.

When Nixon won the presidency, his administration's approach to poverty programs differed subtly from our timeline. Without Head Start as a successful model to build upon or criticize, Nixon's advisors developed the Family Assistance Plan without reference to early childhood education, focusing instead entirely on income support.

Democratic opposition likewise shifted. Senator Walter Mondale, who in our timeline became a champion for child development legislation building on Head Start's foundation, instead focused his legislative efforts on housing and employment policy in the early 1970s, leaving early childhood education without a prominent congressional advocate.

Long-term Impact

Educational Achievement Gaps

By the 1980s, the absence of Head Start had created measurable differences in educational outcomes compared to our timeline. The achievement gap between children from low-income families and their more affluent peers widened substantially.

A landmark study published in 1983 by the Educational Testing Service found that first-grade reading readiness scores for children from families in the lowest income quartile averaged 15 percentile points lower than in comparable communities that had been served by state-level early intervention programs modeled after what Head Start would have been. By fourth grade, these differences translated to approximately a full grade level in reading achievement.

The longitudinal impacts became even more pronounced over time:

High School Completion: Without the early intervention that Head Start provided in our timeline, high school dropout rates among children from low-income families remained stubbornly high through the 1980s and 1990s. The estimated difference by 2000 was approximately 3-4 percentage points higher dropout rates compared to our timeline.
College Attendance: The ripple effects on higher education were substantial. A 2005 study in this alternate timeline estimated that approximately 120,000 fewer students from low-income backgrounds were attending college annually than would have been expected had early childhood interventions been implemented nationally.
Special Education Placement: Without early screening and intervention, identification of learning disabilities and developmental delays occurred later in children's educational careers. Special education placement rates increased by approximately 5-7%, and interventions typically began 1-2 years later than in our timeline, reducing their effectiveness.

Child Care Infrastructure Development

The absence of Head Start fundamentally altered the development of America's childcare landscape. In our actual timeline, Head Start centers provided both a model and an infrastructure for quality early childhood education in many communities. Without this foundation, childcare options evolved differently:

By the 1970s, the lack of a federal quality standard meant that childcare facilities developed with minimal regulation in many states. Working parents, particularly single mothers entering the workforce in increasing numbers, faced a patchwork system of variable quality and availability.

Commercial daycare chains expanded more rapidly to fill the void, but primarily in middle-class neighborhoods where parents could afford their services. Low-income neighborhoods experienced a severe shortage of affordable childcare options, creating a significant barrier to employment for single parents.

In the 1980s, as women's workforce participation accelerated, the childcare crisis became acute. In 1984, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) co-sponsored the "American Families Childcare Act," which would have created a system of tax credits and provider subsidies. While more limited than Head Start would have been, it represented a belated recognition of the gap in early childhood services. The legislation passed Congress but was vetoed by President Reagan as fiscally irresponsible.

By the early 2000s, the United States had developed a highly stratified early childhood system, with high-quality programs available primarily to affluent families, while low-income children were more likely to experience informal care arrangements or substandard group care settings.

Research and Policy Evolution

Without Head Start as a national laboratory for early childhood development, research in the field evolved differently:

The landmark Perry Preschool Study and Abecedarian Project still occurred, providing evidence for early intervention benefits, but remained isolated examples rather than complementary evidence to a national program. Their policy influence was consequently diminished.

Research funding streams developed differently. In our timeline, Head Start research funding has provided hundreds of millions of dollars for studies on early childhood development. In this alternate timeline, research funding remained more fragmented, coming primarily from private foundations and scattered federal sources.

The field of neuroscience still demonstrated the critical importance of early brain development in the 1990s, but without Head Start's infrastructure to translate these findings into practice, the "brain development" revolution in early childhood had less practical impact on policy and programming.

Economic Impacts

The economic consequences of never establishing Head Start became increasingly apparent as economists developed more sophisticated methods for analyzing human capital development:

A 2010 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office in this alternate timeline estimated that workforce productivity was approximately 0.4% lower than it would have been had early childhood programs been established in the 1960s—a seemingly small percentage that translated to approximately $70 billion in annual GDP loss.

Income inequality metrics showed meaningful differences. The absence of early intervention for low-income children compounded over generations, contributing to reduced economic mobility. Studies showed that intergenerational poverty persistence was approximately 7% higher than in our timeline.

Health economists identified substantial increased healthcare costs due to conditions that might have been addressed early through Head Start's health screening components. A 2015 analysis estimated annual excess healthcare expenditures of $14-18 billion attributable to delayed intervention for preventable childhood conditions.

Contemporary Landscape (2025)

By our present day in this alternate timeline, the absence of Head Start has created a substantially different early childhood landscape:

Fragmented System: Rather than a national program with consistent standards, early childhood services remain highly variable by state and locality. Approximately 12 states have developed robust state-funded preschool systems, while others provide minimal or no early childhood services.
Privatized Solutions: Corporate-sponsored childcare has become the dominant model in many regions, with major employers offering childcare benefits to attract workers but leaving non-employed parents with few options.
Technological Interventions: Without the relationship-based model that Head Start pioneered, technology-driven solutions have proliferated. "Early Learning Apps" and digital programs marketed directly to parents have become the primary intervention strategy in many communities, despite mixed evidence of effectiveness.
Workforce Development: The early childhood workforce has developed without the professional standards and career pathways that Head Start established. Childcare workers receive lower compensation and have fewer opportunities for professional development than in our timeline, resulting in higher turnover and variable quality.
Political Landscape: Early childhood education has become a more partisan issue without Head Start's bipartisan legacy. While Democrats typically advocate for universal pre-kindergarten, Republicans favor tax credits and private-sector solutions, creating a more polarized policy debate than in our timeline.

Expert Opinions

Dr. Camilla Rodriguez, Professor of Education Policy at Stanford University, offers this perspective: "The absence of Head Start represents one of the great 'roads not taken' in American social policy. By failing to establish a comprehensive early childhood program in the 1960s, we lost six decades of accumulated knowledge, infrastructure, and human capital development. The data is clear: states that developed their own robust early childhood systems show significantly better outcomes in educational achievement, workforce participation, and reduced social service utilization. But these state successes simply highlight what we missed nationally. The fragmented approach has left millions of children behind, with consequences that ripple through generations."

Dr. James Washington, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, provides a contrasting analysis: "The assumption that a federalized Head Start program would have delivered consistently positive outcomes across six decades may be overly optimistic. Our current state-by-state approach has allowed for innovation and adaptation to local needs that a national program might have stifled. States like Florida and Georgia have developed effective voluntary pre-kindergarten programs with different models than what federal control would have permitted. That said, the lack of a baseline early childhood infrastructure in many regions has undoubtedly contributed to persistent achievement gaps and represents a market failure that even conservative policy analysts must acknowledge."

Dr. Elena Yoshida, developmental psychologist and author of "Critical Windows: How Early Experience Shapes Lifelong Potential," elaborates: "From a developmental science perspective, the absence of Head Start delayed our national understanding of effective early intervention by at least two decades. The program wasn't just a service delivery system—it was a massive research enterprise that connected academics, practitioners, and families. Without that learning laboratory, breakthrough discoveries about executive function development, the impact of toxic stress, and effective teaching practices for diverse learners all emerged more slowly and with less practical application. The science eventually developed, but the gap between what we know and what we do in early childhood settings remains much wider than it would have been with Head Start's translational infrastructure in place."