The Seeds for Special Early Childhood Care and Education - Thesis Example

This paper, therefore, proposes a nationwide policy for early childhood care and education reform that is informed by the evidence revealed over the years. Early childhood education and care policies in the US are three dimensional in nature. First, the federal government or state governments may make provision for early childhood care and education either directly or they can offer subsidies or reimbursement relative to partial casts of private education and care. Secondly, state governments may provide child care and/or education to all US children or they may provide support to a specific class of children.

Thirdly, the purpose of child care and education may be looked upon as providing for the child’s development or as a means of supporting working parents. In other words, child care and education policies in the US may be seen as either providing a child development service or a support system for working parents (McCartney and Phillips 2006). This part of the paper examines the development of federal legislation and policies relative to early childhood education and early childhood special education by reference to federal legislation from 1965 to the present.

The Head Start project is characterized as among President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society’s “most popular and enduring legacies” (Vinovskis 2005, p. 1). The identification of the “other America” at the beginning of the 1960s, drew official attention to the fact that approximately one-fourth of Americans were decidedly poor and were segregated from “the mainstream of American culture” (Washington and Bailey 1995, p. 21). Then-President John F. Kennedy theorized that preventing poverty among adults necessarily required starting with the child who is receiving welfare on account of parental death, disability, abandonment or parental unemployment. Society should not permit those children to go hungry or suffer from a lack of basic needs or opportunities.  These children must not be forced to become dependents for the rest of their lives.  When children are subjected to perpetual “deprivation” and are denied “adequate protection”, they will likely not be able to function as responsible adults  (Kennedy 1962).  Early childhood learning policies were developing a perception that poverty could be cured by creating equal education opportunities for America’s disadvantaged children.