Disrupting and Countering Deficits in Early Childhood Education

Fikile Nxumalo, Christopher P. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351592840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This powerful edited collection disrupts the deficit-oriented discourses that currently frame the field of early childhood education (ECE) and illuminates avenues for critique and opportunities for change. Researchers from across the globe offer their insight and expertise in challenging the logic within ECE that often frames children and their families through gaps, risks, and deficits across such issues as poverty, language, developmental psychology, teaching, and learning. Chapters propose practical responses to these manufactured crises and advocate for democratic practices and policies that enable ECE programs to build on the wealth of cultural and personal knowledge children and families bring to the early learning process. Moving beyond a dependence on deficits, this book offers opportunities for scholars, researchers, and students to consider their practices in early education and develop their understanding of what it means to be an educator who seeks to support all children.

1

INTRODUCING THE TEXT AND EXAMINING THE EMERGENCE, MAINTENANCE, AND EXPANSION OF GAPS, DEFICITS, AND RISKS THROUGH EARLY CHILDHOOD POLICY

Christopher P. Brown

The catalyst for this book was a level of discomfort felt by both Dr. Nxumalo and myself over the framing of early childhood education (ECE) across a range of contexts throughout the world (e.g., UNICEF, 2016). Essentially, children are born into a world in which they are often defined as lacking across a range of developmental, cultural, linguistic, and individual domains. As such, they require early interventions to correct as well as inoculate them against current and future gaps, risks, and deficits so that society will not have to be burdened by them as they become adults. Moreover, those involved in children’s lives, be it their families or the early educators who work with them on a daily basis, are often framed as lacking as well (e.g., Reardon & Portilla, 2016).

While our discomfort over issues of gaps, deficits, and risk have been felt by many throughout the fields of ECE specifically (e.g., Cannella, 1997; Heydon & Iannacci, 2008; Swadener & Lubeck, 1995) and in education in general for decades (e.g., Margonis, 1992), we feel this current response is needed because the field of ECE is in a precarious position. It is currently riding a global wave of interest from a range of stakeholders in and outside the field. This interest has arisen from the findings of researchers representing a variety of disciplines demonstrating the positive impact, both proximal and distal, of high quality early education experiences on young children deemed at-risk for school success (e.g., Reynolds, Ou, & Temple, 2018).

Policymakers and advocates for early education (e.g., Heckman, 2000) have taken up these findings to argue for the expansion of access to such programs as publicly supported pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) to address such policy problems as the word and/or language gap, academic achievement gap, the executive function gap, physical-fitness gap, school-to-prison pipeline, and even a military readiness gap (e.g., www.championsforamericasfuture.org; www.missionreadiness.org; www.readynation.org). This gapification of ECE defines the field is neoliberal (economic) rather than democratic terms; that is, investing in ECE will save taxpayers money in the long run by reducing the likelihood that these at-risk children and their families who participate in these programs will need additional educational and/or social services.

Still, many have picked up this human capital argument and employed it to argue for access to high-quality early education as an equity issue (Britto, 2012). For example, failing to provide access to such programs perpetuates the status quo (Ahmad & Hamm, 2013). Still, at its core, this neoliberal argument frames children as human capital whose “gaps” must be filled (e.g., https://cehd.uchicago.edu), and as such, this argument dismisses the notion of government as a public interest that needs to educate its future citizens and support the growth and development of families it serves.

We worry that such rhetoric and research positions the field of ECE as being dependent upon finding risk in children, their families, and possibly their early educators to receive government support. Without these gaps, risks, and deficits, the logic undergirding the need for ECE within the current political and policy discourses falls to the wayside. Thus, researchers, advocates, and policymakers who support ECE are often dependent upon positioning children and their families as potential failures.

We contend that logic must be disrupted and alternative conceptions of early education proposed to counter the increasing dependency on gaps, risks, and deficits, be it in the child or the family, for governmental, empirical, and practical support for the field of ECE. Thus, we sought the insight and expertise of researchers from across the globe who examine issues central to ECE and asked them to offer a critique of and response to deficit-oriented rhetoric in ECE policy and practice. This book represents a collection of their thinking around such issues as poverty, language, developmental psychology, teaching, and learning.

Before turning to their expertise on these and many other issues that interact with the care and education of young children and their families, I provide some history about how gaps, risks, and deficits emerged within ECE policy within the United States (U.S.), and I provide some insight into how others, who are not a part of this text, have thought about addressing the issues I highlight in this chapter. I also introduce you, the reader, to the chapters that present in this text and how these distinguished authors unpack the logic of gaps, risks, and deficits across a range of issue and offer strategies to counter such thinking within ECE.

The Emergence and Maintenance of Gaps, Deficits, and Risk in ECE Policy within the U.S.

Head Start

One of the primary drivers for this continued focus on gaps, deficits, and risk in general and ECE specifically in the U.S. was the emergence of Project Head Start in 1965 under the Economic Opportunity Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as a part of the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty. While the emergence of other ECE programs in the U.S., such as kindergarten, were often framed by advocates as a form “child rescue” or the Americanization of the influx of immigrants that were arriving in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century (Beatty, 1995), Head Start was different. It was a federally-funded government program designed solely to provide children and their families deemed “at-risk” for school success with a head start so that what these policymakers framed as the “cycle of poverty” could be broken. These policies identified the cause of academic and economic failure in the child’s home environment.

While legislators were stating that poor children have the capacity to succeed in school, which has not always been in the case in the U.S., they also promoting a conceptual framing of families through what Keddie (1973) and others (e.g., Banks, 2004; Pearl, 1997) have identified as cultural deprivation theory. At the same time, they were enacting theory of action (Argyris & Schon, 1974) to address this policy problem with reforms that defined Head Start as necessary early learning experience that can prepare children and their families for later academic and economic success. This framing of how ECE “works” continues through the promotion of neoliberal reforms that frame ECE as a form of human capital development.

Standards-Based Accountability (SBA) Reform

While Head Start only marked low-income children and their families as being at-risk for school success, the standards-based accountability movement identified even more children and families as possessing gaps, risks, and deficits. This movement emerged from the release of such reports as the National Commission in Excellence in Education’s (NCEE) publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission in Excellence in Education, 1984), which framed the entire education system at risk, and the nation’s governors pursuit of education reform initiatives that sought to affect change through employing academic accountability as a means to improve student performance (e.g., National Governor’s Association, 1986). While there were coalitions and researchers (e.g., National Coalition of Advocates for Students, 1985) who attempted “to elucidate the institutional and structural forces that placed children at risk, at-risk status was commonly reduced to an internalized trait or inherent characteristic and rapidly became synonymous with ‘minority’ status” (O’Connor, Hill, & Robinson, 2009, p. 2).

Politically speaking, these calls for reform led to President George H. W. Bush’s failed America 2000 legislation that eventually became the Clinton Administration’s Goals 2000 legislation, which made its first goal that every child in the U.S. would start school ready to learn. As such, large portions of children, primarily children from low-income families, children of color, immigrant children, and children who do not speak “White dialects of English” (Alim, 2005), were seen as not being ready for school (National Education Goals Panel, 1993). Thus, children, prior to kindergarten entry must be measured, and if deemed not ready for school, interventions provided. However, rather than use this legislation to expand access to ECE, many within the field worried that this legislation would lead to the inappropriate use of assessments to determine kindergarten entry (Gnezda, & Bolig, 1988; Meisels, 1992), which in turn, could be used to deny children access to “participating in the school curriculum” necessary to succeed in elementary school (Shepard, 1994, p. 207).

As policymakers across the U.S. focused on readying at-risk children for school, other nations were also focusing in on this same issue through a range of reform initiatives (Dockett & Perry, 2015). For instance, Australian researchers began to take interest in the age of children at school entry in the 1990s (Gifford, 1992). Moreover, organizations such as UNICEF (2002) began to employ similar language as the NEGP when advocating for providing opportunities to prepare children across the world for school success.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act

This history of educational failure and gaps, deficits, and risk laid the groundwork for NCLB, which employed severe accountability measures to motivate school personnel to improve children’s academic achievement. The marker of success under NCLB was through the adequate yearly progress (AYP) of students on their state’s academic achievement tests, and if schools and/or districts failed to improve student performance, the consequences were an opening for market-based interventions, such as families accessing tutorial services run by private companies.

This focus on the AYP of students in reading, math, and science led to stakeholders paying further attention to what types of leaning experiences children had prior to the mandatory third grade tests (Brown, 2007)—that is, do kindergarteners, first, and second graders possess the skills the state assessments demand they have? Schools responded to this pressure by shoving down (Hatch, 2002) the content and performance expectations and the didactic instructional practices of the older grades into younger-grade classrooms. This shovedown not only frames learning as a lock-step process where student outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of teachers, but it also further erases the individual, cultural, and developmental abilities to and desires for learning among children and their families from the curriculum.

Additionally, the George W. Bush Administration implemented the Good Start, Grow Smart (GSGS) initiative (Office of the White House, 2002). Part of GSGS directed early childhood stakeholders at the state level to define and align a set of pre-reading, language, and mathematics knowledge and skills with the content and performance standards found in elementary school. In doing so, policymakers narrowed the purpose of publicly-funded ECE programs as a school readiness programs that increased students’ academic skills and knowledge so that they were prepared to attain high levels of academic performance as they entered elementary school, which in turn would close the achievement gap.

In nations such as Australia (Sumsion & Wong, 2011) and New Zealand (Duhn, 2010), policymakers adopted national curricula that inform all stakeholders about what children should be learning and doing each step of the way in their early education systems. Such policies, which MacNaughton (2007) framed as a “technocratic ‘quick fix’ model of change” (p. 193) have been shown to alter the expectations (e.g., Jones & Osgood, 2007) and practices (e.g., Booher-Jennings, 2005) of public school teachers in varying countries around the world (e.g., Jensen et al., 2010).

The Continued Push for Accountability

NCLB amplified the idea that large numbers of children and their families are entering public education with a range of gaps and deficits that put them at risk for school success. Such legislation mirrors the history of education reform in the U.S. where policymakers have used education reform as a means to control the social, economic, and political participation of those who have been “othered.” For instance, 19th-century immigrants “as ardent Americanizers saw it, not only had to learn new skills but also had to shed an old culture” (Tyack, 1974, p. 235). Moreover, this push for accountability that delineated NCLB from earlier federal reforms has been furthered by policymakers through such recent SBA initiatives as: the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge Grant (RTT-ELC) in 2013, Common Core, and the passage of Every Students Succeeds Act in 2015, which replaced NCLB (Pérez, 2018).

Even prior to entering elementary school, policy documents, such as Head Start’s Early Learning Outcomes Framework (Administration for Children and Families, 2015), Pre-K operating guidelines that mandate the implementation of specific curricula (e.g., Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning, 2018), or state mandated early learning standards (e.g., Scott-Little et al., 2006), demonstrate how policymakers’ SBA reforms have been shoved down into the early years. For example, the Head Start framework presents specific age-based achievement goals children are expected to attain across several developmental domains (approaches to learning; social emotional development; language and literacy; cognition; perceptual, motor, and physical development) from zero to age five. Not only does this framework create more opportunities to find gaps/deficits and identify risks in children and their families, Bullough Jr., Hall-Kenyon, MacKay, & Marshall (2014) found the requirements for increased use of student and teacher assessments within Head Start overwhelmed classroom teachers and forced them to engage in practices that conflict “with what they believe most needs to be done for the children” (p. 63).

Essentially, policymakers’ reforms have brushed aside a core belief within the history of ECE that curricular decisions should be based on the individual personal, sociocultural, linguistic, and developmental capabilities of children (Brown, 2009). These policies create an ECE context in which “learning becomes nothing more than a means to an end”; its “inherent value is lost” and children never get “the chance to experience the exhilaration of learning as an inherently valuable human activity” (Hatch, 2015, p. 115). At the same time, these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1. Introducing the Text and Examining the Emergence, Maintenance, and Expansion of Gaps, Deficits, and Risks through Early Childhood Policy
• 2. Dismantling Racialized Discourses in Early Childhood Education and Care A Revolution towards Reframing the Field
• 3. Pláticas on Disrupting Language Ideologies in the Borderlands
• 4. Rejecting Deficit Views of Children in Poverty in Favor of a Philosophy of Abundance
• 5. A Capability-Oriented Lens Reframing the Early Years Education of Children with Disabilities
• 6. Fighting for the Unity of Care and Education in Early Childhood Understanding and Disrupting Challenges to Professional Knowledge and Action
• 7. Disrupting Standardized Early Education through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies with Young Children
• 8. Deconstructing Child Rights in Special Educational Needs Representations of Deficit and Development in Educational Psychology
• 9. More-than-Human Kinship Relations within Indigenous Children’s Picture Books
• 10. Listening to and Telling a Rush of Unruly Natureculture Gender Stories
• 11. Disrupting Racial Capitalist Formations in Early Childhood Education
• Index