The Global Adoption of Early Childhood Education Reforms, 1970-2018

• In Event: World Education Reforms to Improve Learning and Teaching, 1970-2018

Proposal

Early childhood education has become an increasingly important reform agenda for many countries around the world. The gross pre-primary enrollment rate at the global level was just 16 percent in 1970, which quickly rose to 61 percent in 2020. This dramatic increase in access to pre-primary education in the last several decades have been attributed to several factors, including countries’ level of economic and education development, women’s status, and linkages to a global cultural environment that enables a massive educational expansion (Wotipka et al. 2017). The cultural ideology of “childhood” has also transformed the discourse around early childhood education as well. While earlier discussions of the need for early childhood education emphasized the human capital logic in cultivating socially and economically productive citizens, discourse since the 1990s has also increasingly stressed the “whole child” with full rights as individuals (Schaub et al. 2017). The dominant literature in early childhood education focuses on evaluating the effect of early childhood education on later life outcomes (e.g. school readiness or achievement outcomes in education or earnings) and finding effective early intervention practices in various contexts. In contrast to these lines of scholarship, this paper hopes to examine the global and national macro-social factors that may motivate countries to adopt early childhood education reforms. Drawing on a unique cross-national dataset of education reforms from countries in all regions of the world (from 1970 to 2018), I analyze what drives countries to adopt reforms that target early childhood and whether there are different factors that have greater influence in different time periods. Building upon previous literature, I propose examining several hypotheses related to global and national factors, including pre-primary enrollment rate, countries’ economic and educational development, women’s status in different countries, the birth and/or fertility rates of countries, linkages to world society or certain international organizations, adoption of human rights and human capital reform discourse, and regional characteristics.

Author

• Minju Choi, Stanford Graduate School of Education