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Abstract

This is a case study of political struggles over early care and education in the USA using a combination of archival, interview, and observational data from a study conducted in the US state of Arizona. This case analysis illustrates how a combination of the episodic nature of public attention paid to early care and education in the USA, internal tensions within US early care and education between its educational and caring purposes, and competition over scarce resources has worked to undermine the development of universal early care and education in the USA. The study is framed by Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave’s ideas of enduring struggles and locally contested practice, and uses an analytic strategy informed by Bakhtinian theory to illustrate how understanding the cultural logics involved in locally contested practice can be of use to the practice of policy advocacy, specifically engaging adversaries with what Bakhtin called an “excess of seeing” - understanding beneath the surface. While focused on one state in one national context, this analysis may have transnational relevance by raising comparative questions about early care and education policies and policy practice in other localities.

Keywords

Cultural studies early childhood education history policy studies

The provincial, self-protecting behavior of some groups associated with child care, be they proprietors, agencies, or officials, makes it nearly impossible to gain agreement on the needed changes. We need to move beyond these differences and create an array of child care possibilities for infants, preschoolers and school-age children with diversity as a rule. We need to establish strong standards for child care providers and we need to be creative in providing a range of financing options. It will take dramatic leadership to bring about an acceptable response to these issues and move the care of our children to the quality levels they deserve. (Randall, 1985: 1)

As the twenty-first century begins, there can be little doubt that something approaching voluntary universal early childhood education, a feature of other wealthy industrialized nations, is also on the horizon [in the USA]. (Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2001: 1)

These opening quotes frame an ongoing dilemma in the USA’s approach to early care and education (ECE). While “there can be little doubt” that ECE is an emerging form of schooling, there is considerable debate about the nature of ECE in the USA—for example, over “strong standards,” financing options, who is best suited to provide “quality” ECE, and for which children and families (Bowman et al., 2001: 1; Randall, 1985: 1). This interpretivist case study examines historically grounded oppositional perspectives and contestations over ECE, centering on struggles over one state’s ECE policy system that were occurring within national education reform efforts at that time.

In particular, this case focuses on contests over the concept of quality, which I argue reflects skirmishes over which is primary in early care and education—care or education—as well as old fights involving some of the USA’s central problematics: the nature of welfare (well-being), the proper roles of the public and private spheres in promoting welfare, and the underlying question of the state itself when, as Henry David Thoreau famously proclaimed, “[t]hat government is best which governs not at all” (Willis, 1999: 15). My analysis draws on Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave’s (2001, 2009) notions of “enduring struggles” and “locally contested practice,” ideas which are, in turn, influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984, 1990) concepts of social heteroglossia and dialogism. Acknowledging that an examination of political conflict over ECE in one locality at a particular point in time cannot be seen as representative of what has happened—and is happening—in the USA or elsewhere, I maintain that this case (1) illustrates the impact of cultural issues on the development of ECE in the USA (see Bowman et al., 2000) and (2) can stimulate comparative questions about the politics of ECE in other national contexts, which is relevant, given the transnational circulation of Euro-American ECE discourse (e.g. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2000; Penn, 2002). Furthermore, drawing on Bakhtin’s (1990) notion of “excess of seeing,” I suggest that such analyses can have applications to policy practice by prompting reflection on the ways that underlying cultural logics complicate rationally based approaches to policy advocacy, and that these reflections can inform different ways of encountering policy adversaries.

The US context

Within the USA’s federalist system, ECE exists as a part of a complex web of federal (nationwide) compensatory education/civil rights/social welfare programs; state-level administration of these federal programs plus, at least in some states, similar state-funded programs; and local administration of all these by smaller units of government, school districts, and/or community-based organizations (Allen and Backes, 2018; Gallagher et al., 2004; Kagan, 2002; Manna, 2006; Nagasawa, forthcoming). Of key importance to this discussion is that the multiple facets of this system have different policy objectives, traditions, administrative structures, definitions of professionalism, and function with limited coordination (Gallagher et al., 2004; Hayes, 1982).

What I have been tidily calling ECE—early care and education—only shares a few commonalities: a focus on young children, a feminized and undervalued workforce, and scarce resources. Lying beneath a discourse of child-centeredness are difficult-to-reconcile values systems that have deep cultural and historical roots. Among others, Gallagher et al. (2004) have shown that US ECE (comprising three major sectors: Head Start, privatized childcare (small businesses and corporations), and public school preschools) is made up of very different policy aims, governmental systems, histories, and professional development (socialization). To summarize, albeit crudely and debatably, at its core, Head Start exists as an intervention to address racial and economic inequities; childcare is a service for working parents (mothers); and public school preschools are an early intervention to prevent later school failure. Each of these sectors exists in part because of the US welfare state’s expansion in the 1960s and the influence of sociologist James Coleman’s 1966 report Equality of educational opportunity, which brought long-standing race- and class-based educational disparities to public attention (see Coleman, 1990).

My consideration of conflict over the US state of Arizona’s ECE system is an example, albeit at a particular point in time, of this policy and programmatic mosaic, with features and issues that transcend both the time period and specific place. It reflects the fleeting and episodic nature of public attention paid to ECE in the USA (Cahan, 1989); tensions in ECE between its main historical purposes—education and custodial care, an issue that is not unique to the USA (OECD, 2000; Tobin et al., 1989); the complexities involved with neo-liberal, market-based assumptions about how best to address the care and education of young children (Moss, 2009); and how competition over scarce resources has, thus far, contributed to undermine the development of universal ECE in the USA.

A caveat

The intrafield competition this case focuses on may be somewhat less visible in the USA’s current moment, with overall rates of public funding and enrollments for state-funded ECE increasing between 2002 and 2017 (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018). Arguably, the focus may have shifted from the creation of state ECE programs (although 7 of the USA’s 50 states do not have state-funded ECE programs (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018)) to boosting the quality of existing early childhood programs and systems, with 49 states either planning, piloting, or having regional/statewide Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (Quality Rating, 2017). Perhaps the conflict in this case over which segment of US ECE (i.e. Head Start, private childcare, or public school preschools) should form the basis of state-funded programs may appear to be largely resolved, since many states’ ECE programs provide funding across these divisions, although the system’s “hodgepodge” nature makes it difficult to determine accurately to which ECE sectors this funding is actually going—a question for future study (Allen and Backes, 2018: 2–45; Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018).¹

The contemporary relevance of this case

However, I suspect that this shift in focus toward coordination across policy systems may reflect a kind of latency period or détente, belying unresolved tensions between proponents of US ECE’s main factions that could be activated should advocates succeed in securing increased funding, although this conjecture involves empirical questions that can only be answered by close observation over time. I base this proposition on several factors. First, while the overall trend has been toward increased funding for ECE by states, inflation-adjusted per-child funding went down slightly between 2002 and 2017, so what appears to be an increase can be reasonably seen as stagnation, especially if the lynch-pin idea for these efforts is quality (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018). Second, and related to the first point, the combined federal and state spending on ECE is considerably below what proponents of high quality ECE estimate as necessary. For example—and the calculations are crude because of the multiple federal and state funding sources that exist in the USA—a recent study pegged combined ECE spending in 2016 at somewhere between US$29 and US$31.3 billion, and projected that achieving widespread high quality across the nation could cost “at least” US$140 billion annually—an end point arrived at incrementally over time (Allen and Backes, 2018: 6–30).

While it cannot be assumed that the historical pattern of episodic public interest and investment in ECE will continue, history can be used to formulate a reasonable hypothesis that funding spurts, like those seen with the creation of Head Start, public subsidies for private childcare, and the creation of state-level preschool programs, are a very real possibility (Cahan, 1989; Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018). This potential causes me to consider how fault lines could be triggered by an infusion of new funding in a resource-deprived field (Allen and Backes, 2018). Again, whether my suspicion is justified is an open question. In the interim, finer-grained analyses of both historical and contemporary political conflict in ECE can be fruitful both for their own sake and to prompt critical reflection about ways of navigating the field’s tectonics. This case analysis is a small step toward that broader aim.

Background

The discussion that follows is a reanalysis of primary sources and selected interviews from a broader, ethnographically informed historical study of the state of Arizona’s mixed federal and state-funded early childhood system, developed between 1989 and 2010. At the beginning of this time period, ECE became a visible issue in Arizona at the confluence of a longer advocacy for ECE in the USA (see Beatty, 1995; Cahan, 1989), shifting women’s work patterns (Carnoy, 2000; Uttal, 2002), calls for scaling back the welfare state (Morgen and Maskovsky, 2003), and a rising discourse of risk signaled by the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s (1983) A nation at risk report, which likened the state of public education in the USA to a national security crisis.

It was in this zeitgeist where the now famous cost–benefit analyses from the Perry Preschool Program (Berrueta-Clement et al., 1984) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (Ramey and Campbell, 1984) were gaining public recognition, and ECE came under the education reform gaze, with the National Education Goals Panel (1991) identifying children’s readiness for school as goal number one—later federally codified in the 1994 Goals 2000: Educate America Act (Public Law 103-277). As my research unfolded, I became interested in understanding the taken-for-granted values that informed ongoing conflicts about the role of the state in the historically private-sphere tasks of child-rearing, the tensions within ECE over affiliating with social welfare or schooling, and a rising neo-liberal discourse in US public policy.

Methodology

In order to accomplish the current study’s aims, I draw on Holland and Lave’s (2001, 2009) concepts of “enduring struggles” and “locally contentious practice,” ideas which are informed by Bakhtinian (1984, 1990) conceptions of social heteroglossia and dialogism. Enduring struggles and contentious practice (in this instance, the practice of concern is policy advocacy) refer to the ways that local conflicts can be about more than “local practice, local institutions, and local history. Local struggles are also always part of larger historical, cultural, and political-economic struggles but in particular local ways worked out in practice” (Holland and Lave, 2009: 3). However, “not every argument, fight, biting comment, or other form of contentious local practice is significant, only those that interrelate with long-term, translocal, enduring struggles” (Holland and Lave, 2001: 93). Take, for example, an argument presented by Clyde Dangerfield, an advocate for Arizona’s childcare industry, against the involvement of public schools in state-funded preschool:²

At risk children merit the best we have to offer—not simply an expansion of our existing educational system. Private providers are subject to all of the incentives that produce the highest quality product, incentives that are lacking in the public schools. (Dangerfield, 1991)

This is a clear example of an industry advocate critiquing public schools based on common free-market beliefs about competition fostering quality goods and services—and acting in the industry’s interest of boosting profits through a public subsidy.

However, in Holland and Lave’s view, this statement can be productively seen as a nuanced mixture of both this speaker’s identity and long-standing, competing social positions. In the USA, debates about (pre)schooling and, just beneath the surface, the nature of social and moral good run very deep. Does this good arise from choices about schooling that promote individual fulfillment and advancement (Friedman, 1955) or from those that promote children’s development as citizens (Dewey, 2004)? While this is a highly oversimplified binary example, Holland and Lave’s (2009: 12) point is that much can be learned from attending to the “puzzles and contradictions” that can be seen and heard in interpersonal conflicts, which “implicate broader historical forces at work.” In this instance, the contradiction is a free-marketer’s stance about the benefits of competition while seeking access to public funding, with the broader historical forces being, particularly over the past 50 or so years in the USA, a shift in the care and education of young children from the private sphere of the home to include the public sphere (Beatty, 1995; Cahan, 1989; Uttal, 2002).

Methods

As I have already begun to illustrate, this interpretivist study draws primarily on archival research, augmented by selected oral history interviews, and is informed by three years of participant observation in both official and less formal governmental meetings. The participants were purposefully and conveniently recruited based on (1) the ability to speak from one (or more) of the major positional perspectives in US ECE (i.e. Head Start, private childcare, and public schools) and (2) positionality within the field (e.g. local program, state government, child advocate, etc.). While not all of these historical actors are directly cited in this report, their perspectives were critical to the analysis, for they provided experience-near insights, referral to other informants, and access to personal archives.

Constructing a historical narrative

I started the investigation by identifying and examining formal policy texts (statutes and administrative regulations), legislative records, newspaper archives, and state agency reports, budgets, and internal memos. The analytical strategy was twofold. First, I took a more traditional approach to constructing a periodized historical narrative, focused on the questions: What happened? When? Who were the key actors (to whom I might also speak)? And what were the key controversies and turning points?

This was based on the premise that “[historical] periods are demarcated on the basis of contrasting solutions for recurring social problems” (Haydu, 1998: 354), such as changing means of production, women’s labor, immigration-related demographic shifts, and what to do with the children of working parents (mothers; Beatty, 1995; Cahan, 1989). From a practical standpoint, this involved creating analytical memos for each source; a recursive process of grouping and regrouping these texts to piece together a chronology; comparing interview transcripts and archival sources to each other; and revising the narrative arc as new information emerged or was shared.

Bakhtinian textual analysis

The second analytical approach was driven by the question of why events unfolded in the ways they did. This involved a kind of textual analysis that Tobin (2000: 143) calls “Bakhtinian text mapping,” which applies deconstructivist ideas to probe texts and transcripts for cultural meaning (see also Kaomea, 2000, 2003; Tobin, 2005) - a method that lent itself well to exploring Arizona’s hybrid federal-state ECE system. This strategy borrows from literary criticism and employs mixed deductive-inductive coding of figurative or symbolic language—for example, metaphor, hyperbole, binary constructions, and explicit or implicit citations to people or texts (for the coding scheme, see Graff, 1995 and Appendix 1). I followed a three-stage analytic procedure, similar to Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) open, axial, and selective coding phases, adding a data display dimension (frequency counts) drawn from Miles and Huberman (1994) to assist with the interpretive process (axial/clustering and selective/meaning-making).

Tobin’s (2000) method is grounded in Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that speech, which is frequently thought of as an individual product, is better understood as “heteroglossic” (double voiced)—a dynamic blend of a speaker’s own words and ideas with those consciously or unconsciously internalized from others. In this view, language and ideology are hybrid, and a word is only “half ours” (Bakhtin, 1984: 345). Someone can take in and (re)use another’s words for many reasons: to mock; because they make sense; because one person has authority over another; or, as in my case, to present a scholarly claim through citations and weaving others’ words with one’s own. Therefore, as I was considering a source’s chronological location in relation to the informants’ accounts, I was also probing these texts for latent meaning, particularly toward the questions of key controversies and potential discursive connections.

A key assumption in Bakhtinian theory is that a person’s language use is the result of their social memberships and interactions. Therefore, people’s words can also reflect “social heteroglossia,” a society’s mixture of discourse, social tensions, and collective anxieties (Bakhtin, 1984). In light of this proposition, words have condensed social meaning, which can include the presence (at least implicitly) of the speaker, audience, and socio-historical setting. This is a perspective very much akin to the famous lines from William Blake’s (1988: 490) “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” It is a process of closely examining particulars (words, texts, locales, etc.) to seek reflections of the more general.

In order to illustrate the approach I took, let us return to Dangerfield’s advocacy for the Arizona childcare industry:

My first task was to examine texts for things that stuck out. A clear example of this is this passage’s opening use of the term “at risk,” a concept that is so commonly invoked that its polysemy is often unquestioned (Swadener, 1995), which gets at the purpose of this method—raising questions about the determinacy of meaning in someone’s language use toward cultural analysis. “At risk” was not only frequently repeated across texts—perhaps a sign of (un)conscious citationality/inter-textual reference (a sign of discursive connection)—but is also an example of something that I coded as a binary, something that gets its meaning in relation to its opposite: “risk” (secure).

In the (post-)structural anthropological tradition, analyses of binaries can be used to reveal cultural beliefs and values (Leach, 1976; Lévi-Strauss, 1978). Other examples of binaries in this selection are children (adults), merit (worthless), best (worst), offer (withhold), private (public), and quality (high/low). This process reveals possible tensions in the text that are not only reflective of one advocate’s position, but also, when viewed in light of the zeitgeist surrounding A nation at risk, heteroglossic echoes of recurring social anxieties—which can feed enduring struggles—in the USA: welcoming strangers/guarding against external threat, public–private, ECE as a good (a product) versus a social good, and, relatedly, the nature of quality ECE.

In my reading of the sources, “quality” became thematic not only because of its ubiquity (potential citationality and/or reflection of value(s)), but also because it could be multiply coded as a binary and an example of catachresis (a term borrowed from one setting and used in another). In this instance, I suggest that this borrowing comes from industry, based on contextual clues in this passage and similar language use across sources, and because of other analyses linking quality discourse in ECE to industrial-era production (Cahan, 1989; Dahlberg et al., 1999). Therefore, I saw the use of “quality” in this and other data samples as a quilting point (a metaphor from quilt-making that speaks to a place in a text where manifest and latent meanings are tied together), which can help undo the apparent coherence of a text, like pulling on a loose piece of yarn can unravel a sweater. That same yarn can be reused to create a new sweater, and so the deconstructive analysis was the basis for reorganizing and making meaning of the chronologically based narrative that follows.

Enduring conflict and locally contentious practice

In the late 1980s, ECE in Arizona began as a competitively funded demonstration program called the At-Risk Preschool Pilot, which was a part of an ensemble of state-funded preschool through high school compensatory education efforts, paralleling similar federal programs (colloquially referred to in the USA as Title I, which refers to a section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965).³ The Arizona programs were created in the wake of A nation at risk, whose breathless proclamations bear quoting at length:

Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people … If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. (National Commission, 1983: 5–6)

Despite the forceful anxieties expressed in this report, and rising public awareness of outcomes resulting from ECE programs (e.g. Berrueta-Clement et al., 1984; Ramey and Campbell, 1984), the initial bill to create the preschool program faced strong opposition in the state legislature.

Paul Koehler, who was an associate superintendent in the state Department of Education at the time, recalled:

It got the ultra-conservatives out in force. They were down at the legislature saying this is nothing more than an attempt by the Democrats to take kids away from their families. They would testify, “This is just what the Soviet Union did, taking kids away from their families when they’re young. You’re training and indoctrinating them.” (Personal communication, 7 May 2009)

Similar concerns can be heard in this next example, although in response to a national bill being debated at the same time: the Act for Better Childcare. Arizonan Karen Johnson called the Act for Better Childcare, which would have created federal childcare standards, “dangerous socialist legislation” that would produce a “giant federal baby-sitting bureaucracy.”⁴ She went on to say that it would

discriminate against mothers who care for their own children, discriminate against religious day care, cause further federal incursion into the family unit, with the result of further abdication of personal and family responsibility … It must be pointed out that day care does not benefit family life but serves chiefly to facilitate female employment. (Johnson, 1989)

Embedded within these examples are critiques of state invasion into the traditionally private-sphere practice of child-rearing, represented by language with condensed symbolic meanings: “religious,” “the Soviet Union,” “indoctrination,” and “giant federal baby-sitting bureaucracy.”

While representing commonly heard socially conservative viewpoints, a Bakhtinian perspective suggests that cultural beliefs are hybrid, and the anti-governmentalism expressed in these examples can be seen as reflecting a core value shared by many Americans across a political spectrum. Depending on the issues and context, many in the USA might agree with the statement that “Any power given to the government is necessarily subtracted from the liberty of the governed” (Willis, 1999: 16). It is a value that has its origins in the nation’s conflicted creation, with Willis arguing that “Americans believe that they have a government which is itself against government, that our Constitution is so distrustful of itself as to hamper itself” (15). Debates over quality in ECE are fraught and about more than just program quality.

On translocality

My claim that this case has meaning beyond this locale may appear as a logical leap, for it is very reasonable to question whether these examples from Arizona have any sort of relevance to other settings. I argue that they do, based on heteroglossic evidence from other US states, which might also bear some similarity to historical private–public-sphere debates about young children in Europe (Chalmel, 2003). For example, Raden (1999: 40) quotes one member of the Christian Coalition in Georgia, which parallels the arguments in Arizona: “Parents, not the state should be the Department of School Readiness … Will parents lose more of their rights to direct the upbringing, morals, and values of their children?” In 2005, Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle sounded a familiar refrain:

Where does this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes out of the pit of hell. It’s not a tender heart. It’s ripping the heart out of this country. (Kirp, 2007: 198)

And, in a final illustration from North Carolina, often looked at as one of the leading states in the USA for ECE policy innovation, Nix identified that primary opposition to that state’s early childhood initiative, Smart Start, came from a group of ministers and church-based childcare providers, who raised the familiar-sounding claims that

home child care would be abolished, and their children would be forced to attend public day care centers where they would be indoctrinated in atheism. Further, they feared that Smart Start was an initial step toward government officials entering their homes and telling them how to parent their children. Adversaries also had an economic argument against Smart Start. If a law was passed decreasing the staff-to-child ratios in day care centers, church day care centers would be forced to hire more staff and thus charge parents more. (Nix, 2000: 92)

Protesters chanted “Big Brother” outside of the governor’s mansion, and the Raleigh News and Observer quoted one person as saying: “I would have expected this [Smart Start] to happen in Nazi Germany with Hitler. This is not the United States of America, not the United States that I grew up in” (Nix, 2000: 95). What is at stake in these conflicts is not just whether there should be ECE and quality standards, but also the proper roles of women (motherhood) and families, and which extra-familial institutions best serve social order.

Expansion

Returning to the Arizona case, despite impassioned opposition to the bill, the At-Risk Preschool Pilot passed the state legislature with the assistance of a businessman-philanthropist who was interested in ECE and offered US$500,000 to the state for preschool if the legislature would match it (Nagasawa, 2010). The state’s preschool program was created, housed in the Arizona Department of Education, and began providing competitively awarded grants to public school districts to initiate general education preschool programs.⁵ Initially, the program was small (US$1.1 million), but expanded to just over US $12 million between 1989 and 1995, most dramatically during an unusually public and contentious legislative session in 1994 that was the climax of several contentious years (Nagasawa, 2015). However, what is most fascinating is that, in this period, the strongest voices of opposition to the program came from within the early childhood field itself. As expansion proposals were forwarded, vehement dissent came from both the private childcare industry and local Head Start programs.

An “old fight”

Turning to a different selection from Dangerfield’s (1991) opposition to the At-Risk Preschool Pilot’s expansion, which rested on the prevailing concerns about failing schools expressed in A nation at risk, Dangerfield further argued that: “Rather than expanding a public school system of dubious quality, the state can instead ensure that the highest quality service is delivered by allowing those who use the service to select the provider.” He identified the “encroachment of the public sector” as the

single largest threat to the well-being of the child care industry. This is because public schools hold an unfair advantage by being exempt from child care licensing laws and regulations and have lower overhead costs by not having to pay taxes or worry about recapturing the costs of capital expenditures … This is hardly a level playing field. (Dangerfield, 1991: A13)

State Senator Lela Alston (1991), who chaired the Joint Legislative Committee on At-Risk Pupils, called these views “astonishing” and provided a detailed rebuttal, explaining that the program was modeled after Head Start and contained a provision that private childcare providers could participate if they could implement the model: “The for profit child care industry has shown little or no interest in making itself available to this population [‘at risk’ children]. This is not a criticism, but merely a reflection of their need to generate a profit, which is quite understandable.” The state’s newspaper of record, the Arizona Republic, observed that

opponents have all but killed efforts to accelerate legislative funding for public preschools … The state has an estimated 10,700 poor children who are not being served by public preschool programs by the state or by federally funded Head Start. Although the state purse strings are tight, the battle has not centered on money. Rather, it has focused on who can best provide quality, publicly funded programs for children whose parents cannot afford private preschool tuition. (McCowan, 1991: C1)

Dangerfield averred that “losing business is one of our concerns,” and added:

We believe the goal of many of these people is to turn child care into a socialized industry. I’m a free-enterprise person. When [advocates] push for funding, they point to Head Start’s record of success but they want the money to go to school districts, not Head Start. (Dangerfield, 1991: A13)

Once again, the specter of socialism was raised, with intriguing quasi-support for the federal Head Start program—an example of what might be called an aporia (a site in a text that gives pause or raises a question) and perhaps best understood as an instance of the proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

An unlikely alliance

Despite Senator Alston’s claim that the At-Risk Preschool Pilot was modeled after Head Start, it did not have the support of the local Head Start programs. For example, Mary Bielous, then an influential Head Start director, offered a different critique of the At-Risk Preschool Pilot, one that reflected the historical mistrust of public schools held by many in Head Start (see Kagan, 2002; Kirp, 2007: 189):

We’re happy that school districts are finally recognizing the importance of early intervention, but when they say they can provide “Head Start-like” services to children, it sends shivers down my spine. If schools were really committed … why aren’t we seeing those kinds of programs for the 5-year-olds they already have as kindergarten students? (McCowan, 1991: C1)

Why this searing evaluation? It is important to remember that Head Start was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s short-lived War on Poverty agenda that, arguably, came into being because of the civil rights movement (Kagan, 2002). From its inception, and for valid reasons given the historical record, Head Start’s architects held a distrust of states’ and public schools’ commitment to racial and economic equity (Kagan, 2002). If the state of Arizona was so concerned about helping children who were “at risk” (read poor, Black, or Brown—for further discussion see Swadener (1995)), why not fund an existing program whose origins were in the civil rights movement and which was designed for both child development and parent empowerment? A possible explanation lies in the relative status advantage education has over social welfare programs in the USA, of which Head Start is one. Another plausible explanation is that Head Start, with its ties to the civil rights movement, challenges the status quo by design, while public schools arguably do not (Althusser, 1971; America’s War, 1995; Anyon, 1980; Jackson, 1990; Kagan, 2002).

(Un)intended consequences of the neo-liberal turn⁶

Within five years of its creation, the state legislature combined the At-Risk Preschool Pilot with the state’s other compensatory education grants—most notably, full-day kindergarten and supplemental funding for use in kindergarten through third grade—to create what became known as the Early Childhood Block Grant (ECBG). Block grants are a funding mechanism for public aid to address a broadly defined area, such as ECE or social services, with their key distinguishing features being capping funding and limiting regulation, which provides expanded local discretion for how funds are used (Finegold et al., 2004; Posner and Wrightson, 1996). Department of Education records showed that the intent was to create a grant that would encourage school districts to align preschool through third grade, although this did not happen in practice (Nagasawa, 2010). The main consequences of this change were in how the program was regulated and in who could access the funding. Whereas the At-Risk Preschool Pilot had been a targeted, compensatory education program for school districts serving children who were “at risk,” the ECBG was made available to all public school districts—but without substantive funding increases.

Care versus education

The consolidation of the ECBG appeared to serve an education reform agenda and so did not address the childcare industry’s concerns about the role of governmental regulation in operating costs and competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the public schools. State Representative Bob Burns called this issue “an old fight” and moved to legislate public school ECE as childcare:⁷

There are those who believe that all the day care should be provided through the public schools … The difference is public-school day-care centers aren’t licensed. At least they haven’t been in the past. We’re changing that. And the same people who fight to keep the public-school day-care centers from being licensed are the same ones who want stricter regulation of private day-care centers. It isn’t hard to figure out their agenda. (Sommer, 1996: 1)

This passage centers on the perennially unresolved question of whether the education and care dimensions of US ECE are the same thing. While Representative Burns was ultimately unsuccessful through the legislative process, meaningful changes were made over the space of years through the lesser considered avenues of administrative policy advocacy, which involves working with staff in state agencies to influence both administrative decisions and the regulatory process (Mosley, 2013). The changes included:

Decoupling the ECBG from kindergarten and the public schools by removing a fixed birthday deadline for ECBG-funded preschool that mirrored the age-five-by-31-August birthday deadline for kindergarten entry;

Adding requirements that school districts advise parents about their right to choose Head Start and childcare providers, as well as furnishing them with a list of providers in the area;

Opening participation to any ECE provider located in a school district if they could provide services at a similar cost;

Requiring that public school preschool programs be licensed as childcare centers;

Mandating that local programs receiving any ECBG funding be accredited by one of five approved accrediting bodies (e.g. the National Association for the Education of Young Children or the Association for Christian Schools International);

Encouraging the use of early childhood education standards.

In each of these changes can be seen signs of the “old fight” that Bob Burns spoke of in 1996—in its most simple framing, over-regulation of the private childcare sector and under-regulation of a failing public school system with a highly questionable commitment to social equity. These administrative policy changes are the heteroglossic result of contentious local practice between advocates for the three different ECE factions as childcare regulations were applied to public schools and educational standards were pushed “down” into all facets of ECE (a national phenomenon—see Stipek (2006)). It is also an “old fight” over the expansion of ECE at the intersection of multiple phenomena: the role of the state in the “private” matter of child-rearing; women’s changing workforce participation and related “welfare reform”; global economics (including im/migration); advancements in neurodevelopmental research highlighting young children’s developmental malleability; and discourses of school readiness (Beatty, 1995; Bowman et al., 2000; Cahan, 1989; Gallagher et al., 2004).

Education reform

It bears remembering that the state’s involvement in ECE had been tied to education reforms from its beginnings. While the ECE program was being developed and fought over, during this same period the state was enabling expansion of charter schools. Charter schools are a relatively recent education reform in the USA that rest on an interesting mixture of free-market logic (Friedman, 1955) and a desire by educators for curricular creativity, at least at the inception of the idea (Karp, 2013). Charter schools are a form of public school, often privately run, that operate with different regulations than traditional public schools. Proponents argue that reduced regulation and greater curricular choice introduce needed competition into the US public school system, which benefits both children and traditional public schools, which will be compelled to make improvements in order to attract students (Lubienski, 2001; Wells et al., 2002). Because charter schools are public schools, they became eligible to receive the ECBG funding.

Mary Myers, a former director of a school district’s preschool program, provided insight into the impact of charter schools:

Right now, because it is $19 million that you spread across the whole state you have charters and districts who are receiving under $2,000 for this grant. What can you do with $2,000? You can buy some pencils and you can buy some paper. Is that impacting your early childhood? I think not. (Personal communication, 22 March 2008)

But the issue was not just the increased competition from childcare, Head Start, and charter schools over a limited resource. School districts were competing over this funding as well, but in new ways that differed from when the original At-Risk Preschool Pilot grants were awarded.

For example, Bob Donofrio, a superintendent of a school district located in a heavily industrial urban area, was trying to address students’ needs by combining the state’s at-risk program funds for elementary grades, the At-Risk Preschool Pilot, federal compensatory education funding, district operating funds, and additional revenue generated from voter-approved bonds to cobble together an integrated compensatory education program. While a complicated undertaking, it was, in his view, a promising approach until the ECBG was created. He recalled:

Then the shit hit the fan. Waa, Waa, Waa, “Why are all these at risk kids, these at risk districts getting,” and it mainly came from the more affluent districts, “Why do they need this money? Why are they getting this? This is not equitable.” We were going, “Hey, it’s the same thing as Title I [federal compensatory education funding]. Why do we get Title I funds, and you don’t? Because you’ve got affluent kids who have been to private preschool, who have had intact parents [sic] … so low-and-behold, before I knew it, some bright-eyed legislator said, “We’re taking the whole block grant and dividing it up by the number of K–3 kids.” In one year I lost over two thirds of my funding. It was devastating because now they took the total number of dollars, which was never growing [and spread it out statewide] … most districts cut their preschool. (Personal communication, 29 April 2009)

The policy’s transformation into the ECBG not only undermined ECE expansion but also ECE’s integration into educational equity efforts.

Donofrio’s recollections highlight that one of the important details often lost in public arguments over failing public schools in the USA is the well-documented issue of the funding inequities that exist between school districts—both between states and within them (Baker et al., 2015; Manna, 2006). The simple explanation for this is that, until relatively recently, education in the USA has been a local matter, and local property taxes still form the base of school funding—a structural advantage to wealthy communities (Manna, 2006).

However, since the 1950s, public education has increasingly become a national issue, with the federal government playing a key role in attempts to desegregate schools and increase educational equity through both federal court decisions and congressional action, the first of which was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which, among other things, provided the federal compensatory education funding to which Donofrio referred—and which Arizona’s at-risk programs were supposed to augment (Bierlein, 1991; Grant, 1973).

Uneasy détente and an untimely end

The transformation was followed by a 13-year period of stability where budget appropriations leveled off. As discussed earlier, conflict largely moved into back-room aspects of the policymaking process (i.e. tinkering with regulatory language and administrative guidance from the Arizona Department of Education) and ended with the program’s budget being eliminated in 2010 in response to the global financial crisis of 2008. Despite this cut, the ECBG’s enacting legislation has not been rescinded and another state agency is funding preschool “scholarships” for children to attend Head Start, childcare, and public school programs that participate in the state’s Quality Rating and Improvement System, a voluntary system in which a fraction of ECE providers participates (Nagasawa et al., 2014). However, while state funding continues to support children’s attendance in ECE programs, the only unifying, formal ECE policy that remains active is childcare health and safety regulations, which advocates generally regard as minimal (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2018).

Discussion: a “crab-bucket mentality?”

Hard and O’Gorman’s (2007) analysis of ECE policy reforms in Queensland, Australia offers a helpful next step in considering these issues and what “the” field can do about them. First, their use of the Pushmi-Pullyu (Push-Me-Pull-You) creature from The Story of Doctor Doolittle, which had no tail and whose two heads and forelimbs faced in opposite directions, illustrates competing tensions that have “the potential to pull stakeholders in a number of directions” (51). In the At-Risk Preschool Pilot’s expansion phase, the competing tensions of the public and private spheres became further complicated as the Arizona Child Care Association’s Clyde Dangerfield, a self-described free-enterprise person, and Mary Bielous, representing Head Start and (arguably) big government, used the prevailing discourse of the USA’s failing schools to try to block the At-Risk Preschool Pilot’s expansion. Second, in another part of their analysis, Hard and O’Gorman (2007: 56), borrowing from Duke (1994), also discuss a “crab-bucket mentality” wherein “[t]here is no need to put a lid on the crab bucket because the crabs inherently drag each other back down.” The old fights over the At-Risk Preschool Pilot continued through its transformation into the ECBG.

However, rather than just viewing this case as one of competing interests (contentious local practice), it is helpful to also shed light on the bucket itself (enduring conflict). The stakeholders in the Arizona example fought each other rather than pooling efforts to break out of the crab bucket’s confines. As the Arizona Republic noted about opposition to the expansion: “Although the state purse strings are tight, the battle has not centered on money. Rather, it has focused on who can best provide quality, publicly funded programs for children whose parents cannot afford private preschool tuition” (McCowan, 1991).

Even though the expansion measure passed, rather than working together to build the high-quality, adequately funded, option-rich system William Randall wrote about to the governor in one of the quotes that opened this article, representatives of the competing positions constructed a heteroglossic (multivocal) Pushmi-Pullyu policy (one child advocate remarked that the policy was “different things to different people”, D Naimark, personal communication, 25 March 2009) that ultimately served none of the interests in ways that it might have (D Naimark, personal communication, 25 March 2009). Looking back on events, Carol Kamin, the former executive director of the state’s leading child advocacy organization and a driving force behind the At-Risk Preschool Pilot law’s passage, recalled: “I think what took us for a loop, but shouldn’t have, was the push back from the far right. We quote ‘beat them’ but ultimately we didn’t” (Personal communication, 10 April 2009).

Perhaps enduring conflict and locally contentious practice are so deeply woven into the cultural fabric that nothing can be done to alter these processes. Perhaps this was the inevitable and natural end for that policy. However, historian Howard Zinn challenges this fatalism with the observation that:

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. (Zinn, 2004)

To paraphrase Marx, people inherit social conditions but also have some say in altering them.

Conclusion: towards an aesthetics of advocacy

The inspiration I have drawn from literary criticism is more than postmodern method/play. As I claimed in the introductory section, an interpretivist focus also opens possibilities for rethinking the locally contentious practice of advocacy, which often involves authoring written arguments in support of or opposition to policies and policy proposals. While it might seem like a stretch, Bakhtinian ideas can be of use to this practice.

Bakhtin (1990) suggests that authorship is a complicated process of consciously and unconsciously projecting one’s self into characters. However, not all writing is artistic or aesthetic. What distinguishes the aesthetic from the prosaic is an interest in the character as a whole person, rather than just the visible and obvious parts—what is manifest. He calls this broader view an “excess of seeing,” and it is this perspective that introduces the potential for a “creational structure” resulting in a union between the author and the character. This relates to actual people as well, where it is common to think of one’s self, other people, and things as having a definite, independent existence rather than being the result of co-constitutive webs of interrelationships and interactions (Bakhtin, 1990).

This idea that people author each other through their interactions applies to political speech and advocacy because when advocates are formulating their arguments, they are imagining audiences and characters—but are they considering them holistically or are they essentializing them to imagined positional perspectives, what Holland and Lave (2009: 9) call “social images?” Take, for example, Dangerfield’s advocacy for the childcare industry and against public school involvement in ECE:

In this example, what are the characters? The children? Incompetent public school teachers? Entrepreneurs? Which of these is the protagonist and who are the villains? The questions apply just as much to his conversational adversary who might rush to defend public schools and argue that ECE is not a product. Perhaps advocacy practice can transcend these kinds of ritualized arguments with the help of historical and cultural analysis—a proposition I advance with students in my policy and advocacy class as they write policy memos and practice “elevator speeches.” Perhaps the needed “dramatic leadership” that William Randall wrote to the governor about in 1985 is to be found in the field, rather than official seats of power. What I am suggesting is that a lesson which emerges from this investigation is that advocates can strive for an “excess of seeing” and recognize the potential of creational structure as a part of breaking free from the confines of culturally and historically structured social images of the political other.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Mark Nagasawa is an associate professor at the Erikson Institute, an independent graduate School of Child Development. His research applies a cultural studies lens to education policy-making to examine how official policy/discourses are negotiated and embodied in in bureaucracies, classrooms, and professionals’ relationships with parents.

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An “old fight”: A case study of enduring struggle in early childhood education

Abstract

Keywords

The US context

A caveat

The contemporary relevance of this case

Background

Methodology

Methods

Constructing a historical narrative

Bakhtinian textual analysis

Enduring conflict and locally contentious practice

On translocality

Expansion

An “old fight”

An unlikely alliance

(Un)intended consequences of the neo-liberal turn 6

Care versus education

Education reform

Uneasy détente and an untimely end

Discussion: a “crab-bucket mentality?”

Conclusion: towards an aesthetics of advocacy

Footnotes

Appendix 1

Funding

Notes

Author biography

References

(Un)intended consequences of the neo-liberal turn⁶