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June 2007 > Faculty > Publications
Book Review:
Raising All Kids Is Focus of Fuller's 'Standardized Childhood'
When Bruce Fuller took an unpopular stance against California’s Preschool for All Initiative on the June 2006 state ballot, his progressive friends and colleagues welcomed him with about as much warmth as a wet blanket on a cold, foggy San Francisco morning.
In late January 2006, Fuller wrote a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed arguing that No Child Left Behind could morph into No Toddler Left Behind if voters didn’t take a more careful look at the details of the reincarnated preschool measure. Rather ironically, he noted that it was “old-line liberals who now press, even inadvertently, a rather illiberal education”: centralized, micromanaged education policy.
At the time that the op-ed was published in the Chronicle, Proposition 82 had the support of about two-thirds of likely voters, according to polls. Five months later, the Preschool for All Act was rejected by 61 percent of voters despite a huge turnout of Democrats. Exit interviews by the LA Times revealed that it was well-educated Democrats and self-identified moderates who sealed the proposition’s fate.
That Fuller was, in a sense, vindicated by the resounding defeat of the Preschool Initiative, might suggest that Standardized Childhood is anti-climactic. But Fuller knows that most other states will eventually grapple with the complexities of how to make early education policy workable. He writes:
“The new campaign to expand and improve preschool is seductive and has been welcomed by important constituencies. Children should benefit from equal access to warm and stimulating environments, the ability to enter a quality preschool should no longer be driven by where a family lives or their capacity to pay high fees. At the same time, the assumption that a centrally regulated, mass institution can be responsive to America’s rainbows of families is no longer tenable. But the elite organizers of the UPK movement, typically liberal in their social ideals paradoxically continue to drift from their humanistic, democratic moorings. Rather than asking parents and early educators how diverse children’s settings should be organized, they press forward with their own solution, often more worried about tactics, than about substance, more about winning in the halls of state capitols than carefully building up from neighborhoods.”
Traveling to Oklahoma, Georgia, New Jersey and Florida, the country’s primary breeding grounds for this ”brave new world” of child rearing, Fuller probes both the claims of advocates and the proliferating scientific evidence, uncovering the promise and pitfalls of what’s already a $54 billion industry nationwide.
In the hands of a well-traveled sociologist, it could make for a nice scholarly exercise. But Fuller’s educational policy expertise, political insights and journalistic style make Standardized Childhood a provocative read that leaves no angle behind, and even offers readers a sane and equitable policy direction.
Had the director of Policy Analysis for California Education simply raised red flags, he might fairly be lumped together with the anti-tax crusaders who opposed California’s preschool initiative from the beginning for more predictable reasons. But the School of Education professor advocates for a strong public investment in preschools that remain rooted in neighborhoods and are focused on children who empirically benefit the most — those from low-income families. And he challenges political leaders to avoid the standardized childhood trap set by No Child Left Behind by nurturing forms of early education that are responsive to all of America’s families.For background and ordering information, click here.
—Steven Cohen
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