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The Birth of Head Start Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations
By MARIS A. VINOVSKIS THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-85671-1
Chapter One Changing Views of Poverty and Early Child Development
Educational needs in post-World War II America were influenced by societal shifts. For example, educators scrambled to keep pace with demands created by the postwar baby boom. And the tensions that developed following the 1957 launch of Sputnik by the Soviets spawned a heightened emphasis on science and math education for more advanced and gifted students. The special needs of economically disadvantaged students went largely unnoticed, however. This trend changed with the belated discovery of poverty in America in the early 1960s. The new focus on domestic policy redirected educational reform efforts toward improving the education of children from poor families. Researchers and policy makers drew from changing views of child development as they began to provide early education for disadvantaged children.
The Discovery of Poverty in America
The economy grew substantially after World War II, following a slight decline between 1945 and 1950 (measured in constant 1958 dollars, personal per capita income fell from $1,870 to $1,810 in that period). In fact, most Americans saw a substantial increase in personal per capita income from 1950 to 1970. In 1955 it was measured at $2,027 and in 1960 it was $2,157, an overall increase of 19.2 percent for the decade. Real per capita personal income climbed to $2,549 in 1965, reaching $3,050 in 1970-an impressive 41.4 percent rate of growth during the 1960s.
America's growing affluence was hailed by observers from varied camps. This new prosperity stimulated a baby boom, increasing the population from 152 million to 181 million between 1950 and 1960. During this period the federal interstate highway system was launched, and more Americans purchased automobiles. Home ownership reached an all-time high as many Americans moved from cities to newly built suburbs. Further, consumers had unprecedented access to leisure products such as televisions and fast food services such as McDonald's. Medical advances such as the development of a polio vaccine, together with improved nutrition, contributed to longer life expectancies.
Not everyone shared equally in this prosperity, however. African Americans, Hispanics, and native Americans were still more likely to be poor and to face discrimination than were most whites, and large pockets of poverty remained in the South and in Appalachia. For example, according to the official 1964 measure of poverty, about one in five Americans lived below the poverty level. Whereas only about 15 percent of whites were designated as poor, almost one-half of African Americans lived below the poverty level.
Yet most Americans remained unaware of-or chose to ignore-the plight of those who remained in poverty; some analysts, policy makers, and politicians, however, made occasional mention of the pockets of poverty and economic backwardness. During the 1960 presidential primary campaign in West Virginia, for example, Appalachian poverty, a major issue, made a lasting impression on the Democratic challenger, John F. Kennedy. In 1962 Harry Caudill published Night Comes to the Cumberlands, a vivid description of the region's plight, emphasizing the suffering of poor whites as well as minorities. Michael Harrington's 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States also played a key role in publicizing the economic disparities in the United States. Noting the common belief that America now was prosperous, Harrington highlighted the simultaneous presence of widespread poverty. Indeed, much of it was invisible to middle-class America. He documented its various forms, ranging from that affecting the elderly to that affecting alcoholics and the mentally ill, stressing the pervasive culture of poverty that affected all poor individuals. He also pointed out that inferior education and absence of job skills handicapped the working poor.
Harrington's proposed solutions centered on the federal government's providing financial resources to and central coordination of the fight against poverty. He called for a comprehensive approach-including expansion of Social Security, an increase in the minimum wage and the types of jobs to which it would apply, better housing, improved medical care, and elimination of racial prejudice. Interestingly, Harrington did not highlight disadvantaged children's need for improved education.
As awareness of persistent domestic poverty rose in the 1960s, other analysts explored its various forms and chronicled the plight of the poor. The findings were usually optimistic, indicating that poverty could be eliminated in the near future. Such optimism reflected growing faith among academics that recent advances in social science provided the knowledge and tools necessary to improve American society. Thus, heightened awareness of domestic poverty in this period, together with the belief that the nation could eliminate it, inspired many policy makers and academics to search for more effective ways to help disadvantaged Americans.
Changing Roles of Day Care Centers, Nursery Schools, and Kindergartens
Children in the first half of the twentieth century had little opportunity for preschool training, in part because of the strong bias in favor of mothers caring for their children at home. Indeed, the first White House Conference on Children, held in 1909, declared that home life was "the finest product of civilization. Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons. Except in unusual circumstances, the home should not be broken for reasons of poverty."
Despite this bias, the number of day care centers and day nurseries grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Custodial in nature, these charitable institutions were intended to provide the young children of working mothers both a safe haven and instruction in proper hygiene and self-control. Although poor mothers welcomed another child care option, they resented the accompanying stigma of being charity recipients and inadequate parents. The small number of licensed day nurseries peaked at about seven hundred in 1916 but declined in the 1920s as new state-run mothers' pension programs emphasized home care and social work professionals criticized day nurseries for their lax oversight of participating families.
In the 1920s the nursery school emerged as an attractive alternative to the day nursery. Nursery schools were geared toward middle-class rather than poor families, however, and child development experts saw these institutions as providing an opportunity for middle-class children to obtain better training and education than they received at home. Many nursery schools were affiliated with a university, yet they served only a small number of eligible children. Although the increasingly discredited day nurseries hoped to incorporate the education component as well, they could not afford to provide the same set of services to their poorer clientele.
The Great Depression of the 1930s created hardships for many families, and thus the few remaining day nurseries endeavored to become more flexible in serving children and their families. In September 1993 the federal government set an important precedent for federal involvement in early childhood for the economically disadvantaged by funding emergency public nursery schools through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). In 1934 this effort was transferred from FERA to the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
At the height of operations in 1937, the WPA sponsored approximately nineteen hundred nursery schools serving forty thousand children. Federal involvement in early childhood education was justified on the basis that it provided temporary jobs for unemployed teachers, nurses, nutritionists, and cooks. The dynamics of this program proved interesting; although the WPA emphasized the education component of day nurseries, in practice the teachers had no training in early childhood development or education. The quality of federal services could not match that of the better private nursery schools. Federal day nurseries were short-lived, however. As the nation mobilized for World War II and the Great Depression tapered off, the number of WPA nursery schools declined. The program was abandoned in 1943.
The mobilization caused labor shortages in many sectors of the workforce, and women-often mothers-were recruited to staff the defense industry. The temporary labor shortage helped many Americans accept the idea that working mothers were patriotic, although others (such as staff of the U.S. Children's Bureau) opposed the entry of women into the labor force-especially those with children under the age of two. Divisions remained regarding the advisability of this practice, but the war emergency mitigated the most intense public hostility toward it.
In response to the large-scale entry of mothers into the workforce, the Community Facilities Act of 1941 (the Lanham Act) permitted the federal government to fund child care centers; approximately six hundred thousand children participated in such programs between 1942 and 1946. Many of the Lanham Act centers replaced WPA institutions, and a few defense industries even provided their own day care facilities. Although most mothers relied on relatives or neighbors for child care, some took advantage of these additional day nurseries.
Following the postwar demobilization, the Lanham Act was repealed and the federal government ceased to fund day care centers. Although many facilities closed, some survived because the cities and states where they operated continued to fund them. The postwar day care situation resembled that of the 1920s: most working mothers relied on friends and relatives for assistance and a small minority utilized day nurseries or nursery schools. Postwar society, however, nurtured a gradual acceptance of the idea that married women could work outside the home and that their young children might benefit from enrollment in good child care centers.
Although the first half of the twentieth century saw much debate about the benefits and detriments of day nurseries and nursery schools, kindergarten was becoming an acceptable component of education and was being incorporated into public school systems. In fact, the number of kindergarten students rose from 481,000 in 1920 to 723,000 in 1930 and, following a slight decline during the depression, reached one million in 1950 and two million by 1960. The nature of these institutions varied considerably, and few resembled the more rigid model initially prescribed by Friedrich Froebel and his American followers. Most kindergartens operated for only half a day and focused on play and social activities rather than improving cognitive skills. This was not unusual. On the whole, most early twentieth-century day nurseries, nursery schools, and kindergartens did not emphasize cognitive improvement. Instead, these institutions usually offered custodial care for the children of working mothers.
Changing Views of Child Development
Until the mid-twentieth century, leading child development and testing experts assumed that IQ was hereditary and fixed at birth. Moreover, most experts held that children's learning depended on their physical and mental maturation and that there was little point in trying to increase IQ by means of early childhood education. Thus, their analyses focused on groups rather than individuals, and reports detailed intergroup differences in IQ.
A few child developmentalists demurred from this consensus. The scientists at the University of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station, for example, challenged the idea that a child's IQ was innate, constant, and incapable of enhancement. Bird T. Baldwin, director of the Iowa Station, felt that early childhood training was valuable and established a laboratory to measure preschool children's mental and physical development. In 1927, as a result of his research, Baldwin called for a nationwide system of preschools to help children develop to their full potential. During the 1930s and early 1940s, University of Iowa scientists such as Kurt Lewin, George Stoddard, and Beth Wellman continued to challenge the idea of a hereditary, constant IQ, but they were unable to persuade colleagues at other institutions.
In fact, prominent scholars such as Florence Goodenough and Lewis M. Terman attacked the work of the Iowa scientists. Not only did they reject the idea that IQ was not predetermined at birth, but they criticized the statistical methods employed in the Iowa studies. Thus, dissenting research was suppressed and the prevailing view that IQ remains constant over time and that children's learning depends on maturation dominated the field of child development during the first half of the century.
Donald O. Hebb issued a major challenge to the fixed-IQ orthodoxy in 1949 when he published the ground-breaking book The Organization of Behavior. Hebb stressed that differences in IQ stemmed in large part from differences in early learning and environment rather than from variations among brains-a theory that accounted for most of the disparity between whites and African Americans on standardized intelligence tests.
In the 1950s and early 1960s academics' and policy makers' view of early childhood development and education shifted dramatically. Scholars such as J. McVicker Hunt and Benjamin S. Bloom argued that children's intelligence was not fixed at birth and could be significantly altered by improving their environment. In 1961 Hunt published his seminal book Intelligence and Experiences. He accepted the biological inheritance theory but argued that children's experiences also influenced their intellectual development. As Hunt later summarized his approach: "Man's nature has not changed since World War II, but some of our conceptions of his nature have been changing rapidly. These changes make sensible the hope that, with improved understanding of early experience, we might counteract some of the worst effects of cultural deprivation and raise substantially the average level of intellectual capacity."
This new approach, according to Hunt, was essential for overcoming the cultural deprivation of economically disadvantaged children-in part by developing effective preschool programs:
The intellectual inferiority apparent among so many children of parents of low educational and socioeconomic status, regardless of race, is already evident by the time they begin kindergarten or first grade at age 5 or 6.... These deficiencies give such children the poor start which so commonly handicaps them ever after in scholastic competition....
At this stage of history and knowledge, no one can blueprint a program of preschool enrichment that will with certainty be an effective antidote for the cultural deprivation of children. On the other hand, the revolutionary changes taking place in the traditional beliefs about the development of human capacity and motivation make it sensible to hope that a program of preschool enrichment may ultimately be made effective. The task calls for creative innovations and careful evaluative studies of their effectiveness.
Using eight longitudinal studies of children's physical, mental, and psychological development, Bloom supported Hunt's assertion that both environment and heredity played a key role in establishing IQ. He emphasized the first four years of life in particular as the "critical period" for a child's intellectual development: "Thus height growth for boys is almost as great during the 9 months from conception to birth as it is during the 9 years from age 3 to age 12. General intelligence appears to develop as much from conception to age 4 as it does during the 14 years from age 4 to age 18." Yet, reinforcing Hunt's earlier warnings, Bloom pointed out that experts could not pinpoint the strategies or specific programs that helped disadvantaged children learn more effectively-in large part because they did not understand the nature of early learning among humans.
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Excerpted from The Birth of Head Start by MARIS A. VINOVSKIS Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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