Foregrounding the Local in Comparative Early Childhood public policy research

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Early Childhood policy studies exist based on the assumption that carefully crafted equity-minded policies will benefit children. There is hope; there is promise. The reality and practice, however, may differ. To ensure children's full support before compulsory school age, nation-states have increasingly adopted federal early childhood standards and policies and sometimes standardized ECEC curricula for young children, typically 0-5. Indeed, ECEC policies globally are being developed at breakneck speed, with various degrees of consultation by and with local communities. Educational policy studies in ECEC are often concerned with macro-level policy formation and efficacy. However, to truly understand the impact of these macro-level educational and social policies on children's classroom learning and development, policy studies must turn to the local.

This 90-minute session, Foregrounding the Local in Comparative Early Childhood public policy research, concerns the interrelationships of power, policy, and practice pertaining to educational and societal justice for ECEC. Here we bring together four critical, comparative empirical studies of early childhood policy. These studies were conducted in Argentina, in the United States- in occupied territories in four distinct ethnolinguistic communities across the US and three new immigrant settlements in Pennsylvania.


Our session uses systems and network approaches to discuss, trouble, and draw parallels between ECEC policy in these diverse geographic contexts (Kagan, 2018, 2020; Urban et al., 2012). In each, ECEC provisions and policies were developed under their respective federal umbrella. Cohesively, these papers demonstrate the gulf between global and federal policy and local levels. As neoliberal linkages and global movements of people and ideas have increased in speed and ferocity, the need for critical, multi-sited comparative policy-making studies has never been greater.



Why the Local?

Often policymakers (NGOs and government entities alike) create a policy at Global or national levels with the understanding or assumption that through enough work and adjustment, "good" policy will translate to improved educational practice. Globally, research on ECEC systems is still dominated by cross-national standardized comparisons, which use large-scale, often quantitative approaches to analyze nation-states. This is, unfortunately, short-sighted and problematic for several reasons:

1. It assumes local nation-state environments are somewhat homogeneous, erasing differences and power relations.

1. It ignores that local environments arguably play an equally essential role in policy-making.

Theoretically, this panel draws from subnational research and federalism studies (Giraudy & Luna, 2017; Giraudy et al., 2019, 2021; Snyder, 2001), post-colonial and globalization studies, and other critical social research as we investigate the linkages between power, policy, practice, and justice. While many ECEC policy studies seek to understand policy creation and dissemination, few approach Early Childhood Policy-making as a social, cultural, and political practice (notable exceptions include Wilinski, Bartlett, and Adair). Here we foreground local (from municipal to programs) in understanding policy in light of local knowledge, belief systems, and power relations.

Educational policy is often conceptualized as directives handed to teachers from macro levels, such as from lawmakers in federal and state buildings. However, we open our understanding of policy to include policy made in everyday spaces. Educational policy is official and overt decrees; it is also mundane and banal, made as an everyday social practice. From Congress to federal and state-level conference rooms to professional development training and in the block center of preschools, policy is made, remade, and transformed in space- and ECEC policies at the local level greatly impact children's learning and development.

Among the four papers, there are strong connections between their respective analysis and attention to macro public policy in situ. Systems and network analysis combine these papers, informed by theoretical and methodological approaches from critical social policy researchers in Comparative and International Education. Rather than adopting modeled, linear assumptions of policy efficacy, these researchers trace and link the interconnectedness of systems that connect and impact policy, practice, and research. Crucial to this approach is foregrounding how actors (human and nonhuman) who exist at different social and educational levels shape policy (Vavrus & Bartlett). In other words, social, political, and material actors at various levels, from courtroom to classroom, are involved in policy-making.


We begin with three studies that trace federal policies and local enactions by attending to the interrelationships in diverse social and cultural contexts and conclude with a more extensive global analysis of the ways local matters in equity issues. Together, they demonstrate patterns that speak to the particular context of each policy but also suggest commonalities in power and policy-making in and between each nation-state.

1. The first paper is a study of ECEC policy in Argentina. Using comparative qualitative approaches, the Author documents and compares the municipality's role in policy-making in Buenos Aires (La Matanza, Pilar, Quilmes y Vicente López).

1. Second, we move north to the United States. In the second and third papers, we examine how local Head Start (HS) actors understand and shape how the most comprehensive US federal early childhood and care policy in history is taken up in diverse local environments.

The second paper examines language policy-making in HS for Dual Language Learners in three new Spanish language settlements in Pennsylvania. The third focuses on HS policy enactment in colonized lands (American Samoa, a US territory in the South Pacific, and La Frontera, the Borderland area separating the present-day US and Mexico). New Language Studies, Culturally Sustaining Approaches, and ethnographic comparison foreground classroom teachers and intermediary agents (directors, grantees, and municipal/ state level leadership) as crucial in configuring local resistance in light of national pressures.

Our panel concludes with the fourth paper, a critical investigation of recent global early childhood policy developments (e.g., T20, 2022; Tashkent Declaration, 2022; Abidjan Principles, 2021; SEAMEO-CECCEP, 2023)/ As this paper argues, Universal rights-based, and integrated approaches to ECD/ECEC are imperative, but only achievable by a necessary reframing of priorities by many international actors (NGOs, donors, and transnational bodies). It shows that local countries must be supported in developing, implementing, and evaluating public policy rather than promoting, funding, and delivering programs and services from outside.

Sub Unit

• Early Childhood Development SIG

Chair

• Mathias Urban, Dublin City University

Individual Presentations

• Early childhood public policy: towards a global common good - Mathias Urban, Dublin City University

• Language Policy-making in new immigrant Head Starts - Kiyomi Umezawa, The University of Hawaii at Manoa