Inventing Universal Public Preschool: The Politics of Welfare State Expansion on Neoliberal Terrain

• In Event: 4432 - Welfare State Origin and Expansion

Abstract

Compared to every other advanced democracy in the world, the U.S. government plays a shockingly limited role in helping working families with the cost or provision of child care. Despite reform efforts dating back to World War II, the assumption that the care of small children is the responsibility of the family rather than the state has stubbornly persisted. Yet there are signs that the politics of child care—re-framed today as “early childhood care and education”—are changing dramatically. Today, 43 states spend a total of almost $8 billion on publically funded preschool programs for 4-year-olds, and 29 states have extended such services to 3-year-olds. That this political transformation from “child care” to “early education” has occurred during an era of shrinking welfare state commitments and growing privatization of education, makes the shift all the more remarkable. How do we explain the dramatic expansion of the state’s role in solving a problem so stubbornly cast in American politics as a family dilemma? The answer, we argue, lies in a shift in institutional “ownership” of the problem. By shifting institutional responsibility for a given social problem, reformers potentially access a new repertoire of rights, frames, and political allies. In this paper, we trace how reformers triggered such an institutional shift by coupling “arts” of government associated with neoliberalism—in particular, the logic of social investment—with the norms and values of public education to shift the “problem” of child care from the family to the institution of education.

Authors

• Sandra R. Levitsky, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Kelly Russell, University of Michigan