Nithya Raman, the frontrunner in the Los Angeles mayoral race, has denounced a Trump administration proposal that would require federally funded early education programs to conduct all instruction in English.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced the proposed change to Head Start last month. The nationwide, taxpayer-funded program provides preschool and other early education services to children from low-income families.
Under current Head Start rules, teachers and aides must be able to communicate in the predominant home language of the children they serve. Families may also request developmental assessments in a preferred language, while key information for parents is made available in multiple languages.
The proposed English-only policy would eliminate those provisions, potentially affecting nearly 290,000 dual-language learners nationwide.
Supporters argue that the change would help young children gain English-language skills and enter school better prepared. Opponents, however, say restricting instruction to English could hinder language development and weaken children’s broader early education experience.
Raman is one of the proposal’s most prominent critics. In a statement posted to X on Tuesday, she said she was “outraged” by the plan.
“Kids who grow up bilingual are prepared for the future. This isn’t really about improving the quality of early education – it’s part of a bigger campaign to target and destabilize immigrant families,” Raman said.
She vowed that, if elected, she would “bring the full weight of the mayor’s office to fight this cruel mandate and work with our school district to call for a joint lawsuit if needed to protect our families’ rights.”
Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has criticized a Trump administration proposal that would require a federal early education program to conduct all instruction in English
The proposal targets Head Start, a nationwide federal program providing early education services to low-income families. Preschoolers are pictured in a stock image
The Trump administration says an English-only mandate would “open doors economically” and bring Head Start into line with the president’s executive order designating English as the official language of the United States.
An HHS spokesperson defended the proposal in a statement to the Los Angeles Times: “Head Start is designed to prepare young children to be ready to enter school.
“Providing a firm foundation in the English language is a critical part of that preparation.”
HHS has also said that children whose first language is not English, or who do not speak English, would receive priority for English instruction under the proposed policy.
Some Head Start programs serving American Indian and Alaska Native communities that use Tribal languages would be exempt from the change.
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Raman remained unconvinced, saying Los Angeles has “seen this playbook before.” She warned that the city’s large multilingual communities could be disproportionately affected by the proposal.
She noted that the Los Angeles Unified School District serves more than 400,000 students who speak over 150 languages.
The mayoral candidate also pointed to Proposition 227, a California law approved in 1998 that ended most bilingual K-12 programs across the state before being repealed in 2016.
Raman said eliminating bilingual early education would be ineffective, citing a former California law repealed in 2016 as an example
Studies conducted after the law’s repeal found that students who received bilingual instruction demonstrated stronger English proficiency. A preschooler is pictured in a stock image
‘Prop 227 targeted immigrant and working families, banned transitional bilingual education, and set back a generation of Angeleno kids. We cannot let that happen again,’ Raman said.
Studies of the law’s outcome indeed found that English immersion did not increase academic performance for bilingual children.
And since the law was repealed, students receiving bilingual instruction demonstrated higher English proficiency than those who received instruction only in English, UC Berkeley professor of education Lisa Garcia Bedolla told the LA Times.
The Administration for Children and Families, a division of HHS, has estimated that the English-only proposal would lead to curriculum changes in one third of Head Start programs across the country.
It said that altering classroom materials and replacing or retraining teachers could amount to a one-time cost of up to $124.4 million.
But that figure is small when compared to the federal funding received just by California for Head Start.
The state received $1.5 billion for the program in fiscal year 2024, serving about 84,000 students. That amounts to about $17,850 per student.
Beyond making Head Start English-only, broader proposed changes to the program include cost-cutting measures such as lowering the administrative spending cap from 15 percent to five percent and removing staff-to-child ratio mandates.
The Administration for Children and Families has estimated that the administrative spending cap cut on its own would save about $754 million per year.
The department estimates that altogether, the proposed changes would save about $2.22 billion per year. Head Start currently receives around $12.3 billion annually.
