Childhoods in More Just Worlds

An International Handbook

Timothy Kinard, Gaile S. Cannella, Timothy Kinard, Gaile S. Cannella

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781975504137
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

A 2023 SPE Outstanding Book Honorable Mention Those who are younger continue to be objects of injustice and inequity; those who are younger, people of color, females, and human beings living in poverty have never been included in equitable performances of justice, care, respect, and fairness.The authors in this international volume use existing social values and institutions--and the strengths of these varied perspectives--to address justice in ways that have not previously been considered. The aim is to create more just worlds for those who are young--as well as for the rest of us.The first set of chapters, Bodies, Beings, and Relations in More Just Worlds, place at the forefront the lives of those who are younger who are commonly situated in positions of invisibility, disqualification, and even erasure. In the second section, Performances of Care and Education for More Just Worlds, the authors acknowledge that needed (re)conceptualizations of those who are younger, along with appreciation for human diversity and entanglements between the so-called human and nonhuman worlds, are the foundations for more just care and education environments. From the critique of neoliberal reform discourses to reconceptualizing human relations with nonhuman animal and material worlds, care and learning environments are rethought. The set of chapters in the final section, Stir of Echoes: 20th Century Childhoods in the 21st, take-up the 20th century critical concerns with constructions of "child" that have dominated and continue to govern perspectives imposed on those who are younger. Suggestions for becoming-with those who are younger through resources like reconceptualist scholarship, Black and Indigenous Studies, and various posthuman perspectives are provided throughout.Whatever the emphasis or focus of a section or chapter, throughout the volume is the recognition that dominant discourses (e.g. neoliberal capitalism, conservativism, progressivism, human exceptionalism) and the policies they create (and that facilitate them), influence possibilities for, and limitations to, more just childhood worlds. Therefore, each section includes chapters that address these complex discourses and policy issues. The reader is invited to engage with these complexities, to become-with the various texts, and to generate unthought possibilities for childhoods in more just worlds. Perfect for courses such as: Curriculum Theory ? Multicultural Education ? CulturalKnowledge of Teachers and Teaching ? Sociocultural Foundations ? Anthropologyof Education ? Identity, Agency, and Education ? Race and Ethnic Relations inSchools ?Philosophical Foundations of Education ? Educational Epistemologies ? Theorizingand Researching Teaching and Learning ? Qualitative Research in Education: Paradigms, Theories, and Exemplars ? Epistemologies and Theories inMulticultural and Equity Studies ? Curricular Approaches toMulticultural and Equity Studies in Education ? Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (3) ? Multicultural and Global Perspectives in Teaching and Learning ? Teachingfor Social Justice ? Diversity and Equity in Education ? 21st Century Childhood Curriculum ? Childhood and Globalization

CARE AND EDUCATION: PERFORMING JUST CHILDHOOD WORLDS

CHAPTER 7

Refusing Policymakers’ Manufactured Crisis: Countering Conceptions of School Readiness

Christopher P. Brown, David P. Barry, and Da Hei Ku

THE CRISIS OF children not being ready to succeed in elementary school has been a key driver in the expansion of early childhood education (ECE) programs across the United States and the globe (Brown, 2008a; Pérez & Cannella, 2011; World Bank, 2018). The argument is that too many children, particularly children from low-income families, single-parent families, children of color, children of immigrants, and children who do not speak “White dialects of English” (Alim, 2005) enter school not ready to succeed academically (Gullo, 2018; Nxumalo & Adair, 2019). Thus, they and their families should enroll in early education programs so that they can get the head start they need to thrive in and out of school (Brown, 2010).

While such rhetoric has been used to advocate for the expansion of ECE in the United States since the introduction of kindergarten in the 1800s (Beatty, 1995; Dombkowski, 2001), it has only increased with the expansion of publicly funded intervention programs such as Head Start in the 1960s (Zigler & Styfo, 2010) and prekindergarten beginning in the 1980s (Rose, 2010). Adding to this crisis of school readiness was the emergence of policymakers’ neoliberal reforms in the 1970s (Brown, 2009). By framing the issue of school readiness through conceptions of individualization, crisis, and recovery (Brown, 2015; Slater, 2015), policymakers and many early education advocates continue to fuel anxiety (De Lissovoy, 2018; Kane, 2016) around this issue while ignoring the historical debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and dominant White, Western European policies of colonization, slavery, and capitalism that led to and further amplify the current framing of this construct (Pérez, 2019; Soto & De Moed, 2011; Valencia, 1997).

Our goal in this chapter is to disrupt this dominant neoliberal framing that children’s readiness for elementary school is in a state of crisis. To do that, we begin by examining how these risks for school readiness were put upon children and families through ECE policies in the United States and exacerbated by policymakers’ neoliberal reforms. We then provide a brief summary of the conceptual and practical responses that emerged alongside these reforms and speak back to such deficit framings of children and families. We then connect this history to the current landscape of policymakers employing the crisis of school readiness to further enact their neoliberal reforms (De Lissovoy et al., 2015; Slater, 2015). We conclude with a discussion of potential opportunities for conceptual change and practical actions that could disrupt the dominant neoliberal framing of the crisis of school readiness.

The Problem of School Readiness and the Rise of Neoliberalism

In the United States, school readiness became a national policy problem with the implementation of Project Head Start in 1965 under the Economic Opportunity Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was part of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty (Brown & Barry, 2019). This intervention program was designed to address what was seen as the root cause of poverty: the home environment (Gomez & Rendon, 2019). It did so by providing children from low-income families with a head start for school entry by teaching them a specific set of knowledge and skills and providing their families with training and governance opportunities within the program (Zigler & Styfo, 2010).

Johnson’s policies, including Project Head Start, were unpopular among conservative politicians and business organizations (Apple, 2001; Tabb, 2003). As Harvey (2005) noted, “there was a growing sense among the U.S. upper classes that the antibusiness and anti-imperialist climate that had emerged toward the end of the 1960s had gone too far” (p. 30). To respond to these social programs, particular conservative groups, working with and through business organizations (e.g., the American Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable), sought to maintain their privilege by establishing political think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation) and supporting politicians (e.g., Nixon and Regan) to “demonstrate that what was good for business was good for America” (Harvey, 2005, p. 30). Working collectively through varied social, political, and institutional networks (e.g., Demas et al., 2003), these groups put forward a neoliberal vision of governance in which society is to be governed by “the laws of the market, free competition, private ownership, and profitability” (Apple, 2001, p. 30). Policymakers no longer sought “to govern through ‘society’ but through the regulated choices of individual citizens, now constructed as subjects of choices and aspirations to self-actualization and self-fulfillment” (N. Rose, 1996, p. 41). For citizens to attain such fulfillment, it is necessary for them to make choices that allow them to accrue the credentials and capital needed to participate successfully in the markets that define society (Lemke, 2001; N. Rose, 1996; Wright, 2012).

As Nikolas Rose (1999) pointed out, there is a “strange coupling” of power under neoliberalism (p. 276) in which, as Dahlberg and Moss (2005) noted, the “state remains strong despite appearing to dissolve” (p. 133). The revisions to Project Head Start in an increasingly neoliberal environment are good examples. The program was legislated in the 1960s in the United States for a range of reasons, both positive and negative, that included breaking what was then called the “cycle of poverty.” Head Start began as a community-based, parent-governed early education and health care program functioning differently in diverse locations as determined by community members. However, in the increasingly more neoliberal environment, some legislators became concerned that community voices were too strong and that there should be legislatively controlled accountability for such investment. Consequently, studies like the Westinghouse Learning Corporation’s (1969) evaluation were conducted. Results suggested that the cognitive gains (as defined by test scores) of students in the program quickly faded by second or third grade and raised concerns over the effectiveness of these government-funded programs (Cuban, 1998).

The strange coupling was further manifested in the Nixon administration’s creation of the National Institute of Education, an attempt to ensure that the public programs the Johnson administration implemented provided a return on the investment the federal government made in education.¹ To maintain programs of some type for young children, this strange coupling had forced some members of the early education community to attempt to describe different returns on investment (not something that educators tended to practice). As examples, they argued that while increases in test scores might not be sustainable, students who participated in such programs were more successful academically and socially as they continued through school than were those students who did not receive these services (see as an example Schweinhart & Weikart, 1980). Even for those who might disagree with this form of capitalism that literally interprets human beings (and everything) as capital, the neoliberal argument could not be easily countered. As a result, the definitions for return on investments were thus expanded in the attempt to continue the program as a support for those children and their families.

These types of circumstances and actions reinforced the neoliberal belief that public funding must always provide a “return on investment” (e.g., Reynolds et al., 2002). Nobel laureate economist James Heckman (2000) even opened the Center for the Economics of Human Development using human capital theory, a perspective dominated by the work of Adam Smith and developed by Mincer (1958) and Becker (1964, 1975). Heckman’s economic framing of ECE shifts the premise for public support from breaking the cycle of poverty for others to saving the taxpayer money. Of even greater concern for ECE is that the notion of investment also reinforces the neoliberal framing of early learning (Brown, 2007), including issues such as school readiness, around the conception of educators providing children with specific “inputs” so that children can attain particular “outputs” to move through the education system and accrue the capital needed to participate successfully in the markets that define society (Ball, 2007, p. 28).

A Brief Summary of Neoliberal Education Reforms in the United States

Since the Reagan era, there have been a series of neoliberal education reforms that extended the groundwork laid by the Nixon administration in seeking to dismantle public education systems across the United States and privatize the process of educating students (Brown, 2004). Examples of these reforms include the National Commission in Excellence on Education’s publication of A Nation at Risk (1984); the Clinton administration’s Goals 2000 legislation,² which made its first goal that every child in the United States would start school ready to learn (National Education Goals Panel, 1991); or George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; Harvey, 2008; Hursh, 2007). Across these reforms, policymakers have employed a theory of action (Argyris & Schon, 1974) that each of the stakeholders in the education system is to ensure that all students are taught the mandated knowledge and skills (i.e., content standards), are tested on their mastery of the content (i.e., performance standards), and reach the specified level of achievement they must attain on the tests (i.e., proficiency standards; O’Day, 2002). If students do not meet the proficiency standards, consequences, which are commonly referred to as “high stakes,” can be put in place to hold students, their teachers, school, and/or district accountable. While these high-stakes assessments typically do not begin until the third grade, many states and school districts in the United States have put in place instructional expectations on ECE teachers and a series of assessment measures across the early grades to ensure children are on a trajectory for success by the time they take their state’s high-stakes assessments (Brown, 2007, 2018).

Framing School Readiness as a Crisis

While each of these larger neoliberal education reforms positions public education within the United States as a failed government enterprise that must be reformed through markets, standardization, and accountability (Brown, 2009, 2015), the field of ECE becomes an increasingly important aspect in the “process of recovery” that serves to ready all children for the “neoliberal lifeworld” (Slater, 2015, p. 1), a lifeworld in which policymakers’ “rhetoric of readiness and risk seduce” teachers, families, and children from notions of “subjecthood into markethood” (Sonu & Benson, 2016, p. 243). “The process of recovery” is a necessary reaction to the crises/disasters policymakers either manufacture through their achievement tests (Berliner & Biddle, 1996) or create (Pérez & Cannella, 2011) through their “free-market ideology” (Klein, 2007a, p. 49) that disregards the impact of human behavior on the earth. This process allows policymakers and their allies “to expand sectors of potential profit accumulation” (see, as an example, Pérez & Cannella’s (2011) critical analysis of the impact of disaster capitalism and neoliberal reform on New Orleans post-Katrina); by doing so they increase their “opportunities to actualize their” neoliberal “visions” of governance (Slater, 2015, p. 4).

Slater (2015), and others (e.g., Klein, 2007b), articulated that “recovery” within a neoliberal cycle “is ultimately an empty promise” (p. 12). Rather than address the “crises” with long-term solutions, policymakers’ “neoliberal recovery merely stabilizes the circulation and accumulation of capital, and further entrenches the neoliberalization of spaces, capabilities, and potentialities” (Slater, 2015, p.12). Thus, within ECE, this “recovery” to the crisis of risks is emulated through such acts as early educators teaching all children, through technical activities, the same sets of knowledge and skills needed to succeed on academic achievement tests that begin in preschool (e.g., Brown, 2011; Lee, 2017) and in the larger world (Apple, 2001).

To survive in this market of academic achievement and accountability, early educators must become “salespeople for their own pedagogical performances” (De Lissovoy, 2014, p. 428) who can increase children’s “readiness in the now” (Brown, 2013, p. 570). Educators are expected to demonstrate skills in increasing children’s academic achievement and knowledge not only on a daily basis in their classrooms but also on the “barrage of assessments” that awaits them in the later grades (Brown & Barry, 2019, p. 25). By selling their ability to ready children for the now, early educators must push aside their culturally sustaining pedagogical practices that seek to create “humanizing” learning communities and disrupt the “legacies of educational inequities” (Cheruvu, 2020, p. 116).

Thus, by focusing on the readiness of individuals while destroying public institutions in the name of accountability, the theory of action (Argyris & Schon, 1974) under neoliberalism leads children, families, and the larger society to seek to “self-regulate themselves according to the rules of neoliberal governmentality” (Sonu & Benson, 2016, p. 232). These rules are framed as means of “recovery.” The act of recovery within neoliberalism accomplishes two goals. First, any act of recovery (e.g., Pérez & Cannella, 2011) simultaneously fuels these crises in order “to expand sectors of potential profit accumulation” (Slater, 2015, p. 3); as Klein (2007a) noted, “once a market has been created, it needs to be protected” (p. 52). Second, the acts of recovery are framed through “neoliberal subjectivity,” which suppress collective action and any “revolutionary potential” (Slater, 2015, p. 12).

For children and families in early learning settings, the crisis of school readiness is to be resolved by their participation in intervention programs or market-based solutions such as for-profit tutoring services that benefit “from parental uncertainties, confusion and unease caused by these public school reforms” (Aurini & Davies, 2004, p. 434). Thus, to refuse these policies (Gillborn, 2015; Slater, 2015) and counter such neoliberal logic is a daunting and almost impossible endeavor (De Lissovoy, 2014), particularly since policymakers continue to put in place an ever-evolving set of reforms that fuel the crisis of school readiness while simultaneously seeking to solve it (Brown & Lan, 2018).

The Current Crisis of School Readiness

Currently, the notion of crisis in children’s readiness for elementary school is perpetuated by two ‘types’ of reforms that policymakers have and continue to fund: Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS), which focus on ECE programs, and Kindergarten Readiness Tests, which focus on individual children (Brown & Barry, 2019; Pérez & Cahill, 2016).³ The rise of QRIS came out of the Obama administration...