The Debate Over Child Care: 1969-1990 offers a new perspective on the pervading problem of providing child care services in the United States. The author traces the contemporary debate over the sponsorship of child care services and compares this to the past debate over the sponsorship of kindergartens during the Progressive Era. Klein compares the function of child care across societal sectors, and points out that turf fighting and imbedded ideological differences have prohibited the development of a proactive social policy for providing needed child care services. She analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of five different sponsors: the public schools, the church, private enterprise, non-profit organizations, and corporations. Past and present federal legislation is discussed in relation to the divisive issue of sponsorship.
Who Will Mind the Baby? explores how working mothers negotiate their responsibilities and contrasts the limited childcare policies of the United States and Canada with the more advanced situation in Europe and Australia.
Over the years, educational scholars have proposed different conceptions of the curriculum. It is as if each scholar, researcher, university educator, and practitioner has developed her or his own personal definition. Unfortunately, there is no one single definition that everybody has agreed upon. Table 1 presents a sample of these definitions. A universal definition for curriculum may continue to be elusive and may even change through the years to address changes in the social forces and changes in related school goals. Nonetheless, the approach in curriculum development is consistent. Curriculum developers establish goals, develop experiences, designate content, and evaluate experiences and outcomes. Most curriculum developers consistently use such terms as curriculum planning, curriculum development, curriculum implementation, and curriculum evaluation, and many others to describe curriculum related activities. Unfortunately, without a consistent definition of curriculum, it is difficult for the curriculum developers to identify what it is that needs to be planned, developed, implemented, or evaluated. If curriculum developers rely on the curriculum experts’ definitions, they will find that their definitions identify a product, a program, determine goals and objectives, and learner experiences. However, its heterogeneity may be inspiring if curriculum developers rely on the components of each definition that depict the richness of the field, which in turn, can provide a foundation for contemporary content, concepts, and creativity. A curriculum is an anthology of learning experiences, conceived and arranged based on a program’s educational goals and the community’s social forces. Each curriculum manifests an image of what children "ought to be and become" (Biber, 1984, p. 303) grounded on the awareness of social values and a system that interprets those values into experiences for learners. The concept of curriculum, as a distinctive domain of study within education, arose from the demand to arrange, organize, and translate such awareness into educational programs of study. It integrates the historical study of the goals and content of schooling, analyses of curriculum documents, and analyses of the children’s experiences in school. The first formal curriculum text was published in 1918 (Bobbit, 1918), although in the United States contemporary curriculum study goes back to the early 1890's, when lead committees challenged the form and structure of public schooling. Presently curriculum development is fundamental at all educational levels.
Focusing on the fate of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, this comprehensive history of the thirty year war over welfare shows how stubborn allegiance to the male-headed household undermined the struggle for economic justice.
Based on more than 100 interviews with government officials and extensive archival research, this book looks at the politics behind child care legislation. Identifying key times at which major child care bills were introduced, Cohen examines the politics surrounding these events and subsequent political negotiations. Cohen also looks at the impact President Clinton had on child care policymaking and how child care legislation became part of other issues, including welfare reform and tax policy revisions.
President Obama has signaled a sharp break from many Bush Administration policies, but he remains committed to federal support for religious social service providers. Like George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, though, Obama’s version of the policy has generated loud criticism—from both sides of the aisle—even as the communities that stand to benefit suffer through an ailing economy. God’s Economy reveals that virtually all of the critics, as well as many supporters, have long misunderstood both the true implications of faith-based partnerships and their unique potential for advancing social justice. Unearthing the intellectual history of the faith-based initiative, Lew Daly locates its roots in the pluralist tradition of Europe’s Christian democracies, in which the state shares sovereignty with social institutions. He argues that Catholic and Dutch Calvinist ideas played a crucial role in the evolution of this tradition, as churches across nineteenth-century Europe developed philosophical and legal defenses to protect their education and social programs against ascendant governments. Tracing the influence of this heritageon the past three decades of American social policy and church-state law, Daly finally untangles the radical beginnings of the faith-based initiative. In the process, he frees it from the narrow culture-war framework that has limited debate on the subject since Bush opened the White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001. A major contribution from an important new voice at the intersection of religion and politics, God’s Economy points the way toward policymaking that combines strong social support with a new moral focus on the protection of families and communities.
More than one in five American children live below the poverty line, a proportion that exceeds that of any other advanced nation. Although large numbers of Western European children live with single or unemployed parents, or belong to disadvantaged minorities, they are better shielded from severe deprivation by carefully designed public assistance programs. Saving Our Children from Poverty describes one of the most successful European systems of assistance for families, that of France, and through comparison with American programs offers a valuable guide to improving our own safety net for children and reforming our dysfunctional welfare system. Saving Our Children from Poverty details the array of benefits available to both high- and low-income families in France. Government-run nursery schools provide free, high-quality care for almost all children between the ages of three and six. Children also receive guaranteed medical care under a national health insurance plan. The French system offers married couples most of the same benefits as single parents, and creates strong incentives to seek and hold jobs rather than remain on welfare. A French single mother who chooses to work still receives substantial income supplements, housing assistance, subsidized health care, and access to public child care facilities. In stark contrast, her American counterpart loses most of her cash benefits if she takes a job and receives no government assistance with child care. Because American policies focus disproportionately on aiding the poorest non-working families, parents forced to rely on low-wage jobs are frequently left without the resources to provide their children with an adequate standard of living. As the public debate on welfare reform continues to rage, ever more American children fall into poverty. Why does the nation remain so unresponsive to their plight? Saving Our Children from Poverty probes the American aversion to national assistance programs, citing the negative attitudes that have seeped into the current political discourse. A lack of faith in the federal government's administrative abilities has bolstered a trend toward decentralization of programs, as well as a growing resistance to taxation. Racial antipathies and a belief that financial support encourages irresponsibility further undermine the development of programs for those in need. Saving Our Children from Poverty illustrates what a nation no wealthier than ours can realistically accomplish and afford, and concludes with a viable blueprint for successfully applying aspects of France's system to the United States.
The Handbook examines contemporary trends and issues in the formation of families over the different stages of the life cycle and how they interact with family-oriented social policies of modern welfare states, mainly in the OECD countries of Western Europe, East Asia and the U.S. Focusing largely on family needs in the early stages of the life course, the conventional package of policies tends to emphasize programs and benefits clustered around measures to support marriage, childbearing, care, the reconciliation of employment and childcare during the preschool years. Drawing on a multidisciplinary group of experts from many countries, this book extends the conventional perspective on family policy by also looking at later phases of the family life course. In taking a life course perspective, this Handbook extends the purview to encompass the three main stages of family life. These are (1) cohabitation, marriage and starting a family; (2) the early years of parenting, care and employment, and (3) the period of transitions and later life: family breakdown and intergenerational supports across the life course.
This book examines the interactions of gender and race, developmental psychology, and public policy and how, collectively, they influenced the marginalization of early childhood caregivers’ and educators’ roles. In order to learn how their roles came to be both externally and internally marginalized—in public esteem, research attention, compensation, and valuation—Goffin traces the origins of the early childhood care and education field and its evolution over time. Also taken into account is the influence of the early childhood care and education field’s insufficient attention to practitioners’ emerging stature. Chapter by chapter, the book (Left Behind for short) calls attention to the historical influences of its racial and gender context, its long-standing reliance on developmental psychology, and its dependence on public policy, along with how, when intertwined, these influences led to the marginalization of early childhood caregivers and educators’ role, which helped shape early childhood care and education as a field of practice. This work is ideal for early childhood care and education’s undergraduate and graduate faculty, its undergraduate and graduate students, early childhood care and education policy advocates, those in state department administrative roles, those who self-identify as change agents, plus early childhood caregivers and educators who want to learn more about their history.
Recipient of a 2022 Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA) Social Welfare Policy in a Changing World is an approachable and student-friendly text that links policy and practice and employs a critical analytic lens to U.S. social welfare policy. With particular attention to disparities based on class, race/ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and gender, authors Shannon R. Lane, Elizabeth S. Palley, and Corey S. Shdaimah assess the impact of policies at the micro, meso, and macro levels. The authors provide students with a brief foundation in history, the policy process, and theory, while primarily focusing on helping students recognize the many ways that policy affects their lives and the lives of their clients and communities. Connecting description, theoretical analysis, and advocacy, this new text challenges readers to examine the development, consequences, and future implications of core policies. Students will come away with a newfound understanding of how to use the political process to address social justice issues and enact meaningful policy change. FREE DIGITAL TOOLS INCLUDED WITH THIS TEXT SAGE edge gives instructors and students the edge they need to succeed with an array of teaching and learning tools in one easy-to-navigate website.
