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Poverty and Parenting: Transforming Early Education's Legacy in the 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Elizabeth Rose
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Head Start, the federal program that provides preschool education, health, and social services for children from poor families, is one of the United States' most popular government programs. Created in 1965, it has endured as a symbol of commitment to children, serving just fewer than one million children a year in neighborhood sites across the country. Most accounts of Head Start's history do not start much before 1964 when Sargent Shriver, charged with directing Lyndon Johnson's antipoverty campaign, decided to focus funds on young children. Neither Shriver nor most of those he consulted in planning the new program were particularly conscious of earlier efforts to combat poverty by educating young children. Nevertheless, the program they designed carried forward important aspects of turn-of-the-twentieth-century free kindergartens and day nurseries, as well as the nursery schools sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 2009 , pp. 222 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 History of Education Society 

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References

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8 As quoted in Rose, A Mothers Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960, 115.

9 See Rose, , A Mother's Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960, 144–152; Beatty, , Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present, 177–185; and Michel, Sonya, Children's Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 118–127.

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16 Greenberg, , “Origins of Head Start and the Two Versions of Parent Involvement,” 50.

17 “Mothers Learn To Cook,” Vol. 1, no. 7 (November 1966), 6; Head Start Newsletter, 1966–70; descriptions of other parent education classes from 1966 to 1970 can be found in other issues of the newsletter published by the Office of Economic Opportunity; Kagan, Josh, “Empowerment and Education: Civil Rights, Expert Advocates, and Parent Politics in Head Start, 1965–1980.” Teachers College Record 104, no. 3 (2002): 538.

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21 Gonzales, Jack, “Too Many Cooks? “ Head Start Newsletter 2, no. 1 January 1967): 1, 3.

22 Project Head Start, Head Start: Manual of Policies and Instructions (Washington, DC, Office of Child Development, 1967), 11.

23 Stirling, Nora, “Stop, Look, & Listen: Children Ahead” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Child Development [OCD 72–61], 1972).

24 Kirschner Associates, A National Survey of the Impacts of Head Start Centers on Community Institutions (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1970), 7, 9.

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