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681
History of Early Childhood Education Policy
kindergarten was mandatory in 15 states and the
District of Columbia, according to the Education
Commission of the States.) The kindergarten
curriculum either focused on total learning and
growing or became a watered-down version of
first grade. School readiness became an issue with
the 1994 passage of the Goals 2000: Educate
America Act, leading to some parents keeping
their children from entering kindergarten until
they reached 6 years of age, rather than enrolling
them at the expected age of 5 years old, to ensure
their future academic success as some of the oldest
children in the class.
Early childhood education and programs have a
complex and rich history in the United States.
Debates continue that ensued over 100 years ago—
appropriate age for a child to begin kindergarten,
whether a child should attend an early childhood
education program or stay at home, funding and
resourcing for early childhood programs—to name
a few. Having a historical perspective of where
nursery, prekindergarten, and kindergarten educa-
tion began, and the theory behind these programs,
will allow for informed decisions about the future
of programs for young children.
Betty Liebovich and
Blythe Hinitz
See also Child Development and Early Childhood
Education; Curriculum and Early Childhood
Education; Early Childhood Education; Kindergarten;
Play and Early Childhood Education; Prekindergarten
Further Readings
Beatty, B. (1997). Preschool education in America: The
culture of young children from the colonial era to the
present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hewes, D. (1996). NAEYC’s first half century,
1926–1976. Washington, DC: NAEYC.
Hinitz, B. F. (2013). The hidden history of early
childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge.
Lascarides, V. C., & Hinitz, B. F. (2011). History of
early childhood education. New York, NY:
Routledge.
McMillan, M. (1919). The nursery school. New York,
NY: E. P. Dutton.
Peltzman, B. (1998). Pioneers of early childhood
education: A bio-bibliographical guide. Portsmouth,
NH: Greenwood.
Read, K. H., & Patterson, J. (1980). The nursery school
and kindergarten: Human relationships and learning
(7th ed.). New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Ross, E. D. (1976). The kindergarten crusade: The
establishment of preschool education in the United
States. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Shapiro, M. S. (1983). Child’s garden: The kindergarten
movement from Froebel to Dewey. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Snyder, A. (1972). Dauntless women in childhood
education, 1856–1931. College Park, MD: Association
for Childhood Education International.
Steedman, C. (1990). Childhood, culture, and class in
Britain: Margaret Mcmillan, 1860–1931. London,
England: Virago.
Whitebread, N. (1972). The evolution of the nursery-
infant school: A history of infant and nursery
education in Britain, 1800–1970. London, England:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
HISTORY OF EARLY CHILDHOOD
EDUCATION POLICY
Early care and education (ECE) programs in the
United States comprise center-based child care,
family child care, preschools, and kindergarten pro-
grams. According to the National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development, ECE programs
differ by quantity and quality. A review of the his-
tory of ECE programs and policy in the United
States reveals that much of child care was estab-
lished in the United States as a substitute to mater-
nal care when mothers were not available to care
for their children (due to work) or when they were
deemed “inadequate” (as in culture of poverty pol-
icies for poor families). However, ECE support for
families has been and continues to be undervalued
and inadequate (in terms of quality and scope).
The 1800s
In the early 1800s, early childhood care policies
provided child care support for women who went
Copyright © 2016 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.
682 History of Early Childhood Education Policy
to work in the factories. These “day nurseries”
proliferated due to the need to keep children out
of the streets. The first day nurseries in the United
States were designed after French day nurseries,
Crèche, and they only supervised children and
provided basic care.
By the late 1800s and early 1900s, day nurseries
provided care that was protective, custodial, and
physical in nature. However, only a small percent-
age of working mothers used these day nurseries.
Boston Infant School was established in 1828 and
the Nursery for the Children of Poor Women
opened in the city of New York in 1852. During the
Civil War, women were needed at the factories and
at hospitals. Therefore, in 1863 the first permanent
day nursery opened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
to care for children of Civil War workers. Day nurs-
eries were designed to keep children out of orphan-
ages. Most of the day nurseries around this time
were subsidized by charitable organizations. By
the end of the 19th century, ECE was primarily
custodial—and mainly for poor mothers, immi-
grants, and minorities in need of charitable care.
The Progressive Era
Toward the latter half of the 19th century, early
childhood programs experienced a transformation
and an increase in professionalization. The kinder-
garten, based on the theories and practices of
Friedrich Froebel in Germany, came to the United
States. Froebel invented kindergarten, and he
developed an educational philosophy grounded in
four principles: creativity, social participation, free
self-expression, and motor expression. He also
acknowledged that education begins in infancy
and viewed mothers as ideal teachers; thus, his
educational programs were run by female teach-
ers. After the German Revolution in 1848, many
Germans immigrated to the United States. Among
them were female educators trained in Froebel’s
kindergarten educational system. These female
educators are credited for bringing the kindergar-
ten to the United States. Educationalists such as
Caroline L. Frankenberg and Margarethe Schurz
opened private and independent kindergartens in
the United States, but it was Schurz who established
the first kindergarten program in Wisconsin for
German immigrants, in 1836.
Froebel’s educational methods underscored kin-
dergarten curricula during the last half of the 19th
century. By 1914, every main city in the United
States had public kindergarten programs. Froebel’s
theory and educational methods motivated and
influenced the work of prominent educators, such
as Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner. By the
early 1900s, Froebel’s educational philosophy was
widely accepted in most kindergartens in the
United States.
Despite the popularity of Froebel’s philosophy,
progressive educators questioned Froebel’s meth-
ods due to the rigid implementation of them at the
time (which left little room for individual creativ-
ity). A leading critic was Patty Smith Hill, one of
the main leaders in the kindergarten movement.
She challenged the practice of a strict adherence to
Froebel’s methods. She studied other leading edu-
cators such as John Dewey and Francis Walker.
Her work created the foundations for the modern
kindergarten programs in the United States. Patty
Smith Hill and John Dewey contributed to the
field of education by extending kindergarten pro-
grams to the West Coast of the United States.
In addition to the kindergarten movement, by
the early 1900s, day nurseries became “nursery
schools” and shifted from purely babysitting to
promoting cognitive and social development in
children under the age of kindergarten entry. As
kindergarten programs extended throughout the
United States, nursery schools built momentum
across the country. Many of these ECE programs
lacked quality and, according to Sonya Michel,
some progressives argued that placing children in
programs where they received inattentive and sub-
standard care, while their mothers sought low-
wage and physically arduous jobs, was neither an
improvement nor a goal for society. Therefore, a
counter to ECE programs was a maternal pension
that would allow mothers to stay home and care
for their children. This gained widespread popular-
ity and by the 1930s most states had some form of
a mother’s pension for poor mothers. According to
Michel, the mother’s pension achieved greater suc-
cess than the ECE movement due to the fact that it
Copyright © 2016 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.
683
History of Early Childhood Education Policy
supported rather than challenged conventional
gender roles.
The Mid-20th Century
Due to federal and state funding cuts in the 1930s
during the Great Depression, kindergarten
programs went from being full-day to half-day
programs. During both the Great Depression and
World War II, only a handful of full-day kinder-
garten programs were still in service. From the
1930s to the 1950s little changed with kindergar-
ten programs.
Due to World War II and the absence of
able-bodied men for the factories, women took the
men’s place in the workforce. This created a need
for more nursery schools and child care centers.
The United States government allocated $6 million
in 1942 to support working mothers with young
children. Children of women in the workforce
were eligible for child care, and many states sup-
plemented this federal aid. In 1946, after World
Word II ended, many women were forced to return
to their homes, and the federal government stopped
funding child care programs in most states. Only
California, New York City, and Philadelphia con-
tinued to utilize public funding for child care pro-
grams. Due to public outcry, President Truman
allocated $7 million to continue the child care
program through 1946.
There was a lack of consistent public funding
for nursery schools or day care centers until the
mid-1960s. Between 1948 and 1966 the percent-
age of married women with children in the work-
force increased from 10.8% to 24.2%. The child
care programs that remained opened provided care
for those married women who remained in the
workforce. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy
signed a bill approving federal funding for child
care programs. Then in 1967, the Work Incentive
Program extended federal funding for child care to
low-income families in jobs or job-training pro-
grams. In 1969 the Federal Office of Child Devel-
opment was established in the United States. In the
mid-1970s, indirect benefits such as income-tax
reductions for child care and deductions for wel-
fare mothers became popular again. ECE was, by
this time, bifurcated by class and race, with middle-
class, predominantly white families experiencing
predominantly private child care while poor fami-
lies of color were in subsidized or informal forms
of child care.
Subsidized Child Care
and Welfare Reform
Although the first prekindergarten (pre-K) pro-
grams were established in 1922, only three states
provided prekindergarten programs before 1960.
Pre-K intends to prepare young children for kin-
dergarten and lay the foundation for continued
success through third grade. All pre-K programs
share three goals: (1) high standards, (2) school
readiness, and (3) serve 3-year-old children or a
combination of 3- and 4-year-old children. Studies
find that the majority of ECE programs for young
children in the United States suffer from low to
mediocre quality, high staff turnover due to low
wages, and too few spaces for too many young
children in need of early childhood education.
One of the longest-running pre-K programs is
Head Start, which was created during the War on
Poverty in January 1964 under President Lyndon
Johnson. In 1965, President Johnson initiated the
project Head Start and utilized the Office of Eco-
nomic Opportunity (OEO) to launch this program.
Head Start began as an 8-week summer program
under the supervision of nursery school teacher
Jule Meyer Sugarman. The goal of the program at
its inception and still today is to get children in
poverty ready for elementary school. The Office of
Head Start reported in 2010 that it serves about
900,000 low-income children and their families. In
1994, the reauthorization of Head Start developed
a new initiative to extend Head Start to infants,
toddlers, and pregnant women and their families
(Early Head Start). In the 1980s, ECE programs
took a hit in funding due to cuts to federal spend-
ing for child care support for low-income families.
During this time, private child care programs pro-
liferated but the majority of these programs were
out of reach for low-income families. However, the
Child Care and Development Block Grant of
1990, which distributed $825 million to states,
Copyright © 2016 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.
684 Home Visitation With Mothers and Infants and Children
provided some support for low-income families
during this time.
The division in ECE between the middle- to
upper-income versus low-income families widened
during the Reagan era, and this division was exac-
erbated by welfare reform initiatives during the
Clinton era in the 1990s. Welfare reform programs
created stringent work requirements on welfare
recipients, many of whom were mothers with
young children. Due to the realization that requir-
ing mothers to work will also require child care
support, Congress created the Child Care and
Development Fund, which replaced the Child Care
and Development Block Grant from 1990.
ECE Today
Many educators, policy makers, and parents
advocate for universal preschool. In 2013,
President Barack Obama announced a proposal to
provide high-quality preschool for every American
child. In December 2014, President Obama
announced an investment of over $1 billion for
the early education and development of American
children. The 2016 federal budget includes $750
million to help states create and expand high-
quality preschool programs in low-income com-
munities. Furthermore, strides are being made to
improve quality in, primarily, center-based care
through quality rating and improvement systems
that many states have adopted. As of 2015, with
the exception of one state, states are implementing
or in the planning stages of putting systems in
place to improve child care quality.
Young children continue to be in less formal
forms of ECE than the center-based forms of care.
This is particularly the case for very young children
from low-income and ethnic minority families.
Informal care accounts for a substantial percentage
of child care (estimates range from one-third to one-
half of children under 5 years of age) but it is less
studied and much is unknown about the experiences
of children in these less formal forms of ECE. There-
fore, policies that target center-based care will not
cover the majority of children in child care.
There continues to be variation in regard to
quality, availability, and spending. All forms of
child care struggle with maintaining or achieving
high quality given the rates of staff turnover (due
to low wages and low regard for the work) and
rising costs of care. The United States lags behind
other industrialized countries in its support for
quality ECE for all families. In countries such as
France and Denmark, ECE is free and considered
a necessity for the full functioning of society. ECE
in the United States has experienced significant
developments since the 1800s and challenges
remain before all families, rich or poor, of any eth-
nicity or language, can assume that quality, nonpa-
rental care will be available and affordable.
Kay Sanders and
Nora Obregon
See also Center-Based Care; Child Care; Child Care
Policy and Practice; Early Childhood Education;
Family Child Care; Head Start
Further Readings
Cryer, D., & Clifford, R. M. (Eds.). (2003). Early
childhood education and care in the USA. Baltimore,
MD: Brookes.
Goffin, S. G. (2013). Defining early childhood
education for a new era: Leading for our profession.
New York, NY: Teacher College, Columbia
University.
Lascarides, V. C., & Hinitz, B. F. (2013). History of early
childhood education (Vol. 982). New York, NY:
Routledge.
Michel, S. (2000). Children’s interests/mother’s rights: The
shaping of America’s child care policy. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
HOME VISITATION WITH MOTHERS
AND INFANTS AND CHILDREN
For about half a century, home visitation has been
an essential ingredient of programs for low-in-
come, low-education families with the primary
goals of enhancing the quality of mother–child
relationships and supporting enriched mother–
child language and learning interactions.
Copyright © 2016 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.