A foundational tenet of early childhood education (ECE) is the proposition that children from birth to age eight should be educated and cared for in specialized ways that are responsive to young children’s developing needs and abilities.Footnote 1 This idea first arose in the US in the decades following the arrival of the Froebelian kindergarten in the 1850s.Footnote 2 And this led, in turn, to the emergence of the ECE project in the US. One of the first individuals to articulate the full breadth of this project was Arnold Gesell, who wrote, in 1925, that the country needed “a unified, interrelated program of early education” that extended from infancy through the early primary grades.Footnote 3
The US pursuit of universally accessible early educational programming—a pursuit that continues today—began with establishing and expanding settings where early instruction might occur. In the early twentieth century, this principally involved instituting kindergartens in public school settings. As kindergartens gained a foothold in the public schools, subsequent steps in the ECE project included extending and defending implementation of ECE pedagogy.Footnote 4 Extending ECE pedagogy entailed advocating for the upward extension of child-centered, activity-based teaching practices into the early primary grades. Defending ECE pedagogy entailed resisting the downward extension of teacher-centered, skill-based teaching practices from the primary to the lower levels.
Over the last 125-plus years, ECE proponents have at times largely focused their efforts on defending ECE practices; at other times, on extending them. This paper will describe, within the context of a historical overview of the ECE project in the US, the two periods where ECE proponents mounted concerted unification efforts that included prominent and forceful calls for the upward extension of early instructional practices into the primary grades. The first such initiative began in 1915 with the founding of the National Council for Primary Education (NCPE), which sought to ensure that instructional practices in the early primary grades were aligned with child-centered instructional practices in the kindergarten classroom. This effort quickly became nationally recognized: in the mid-1920s, the US Commissioner of Education wrote, “Perhaps the most outstanding characteristic for the past year in the field of education for young children has been the desire to coordinate the entire period of childhood,” which he referred to as a “modern tendency toward unification.”Footnote 5 This movement receded from prominence in the 1930s, however, after having seemingly achieved its goals.
The second such initiative began in the early twenty-first century, when proponents of pre-K-3 alignment called for early primary pedagogy to be aligned with early instructional practice.Footnote 6 A second part of this effort emerged in 2015, when the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council published a unifying foundational plan for developing the ECE workforce.Footnote 7 A third part arose in 2020, when the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) joined with fourteen organizations to form the Power to the Profession (P2P) Task Force and published a unifying framework for the ECE profession.Footnote 8
The objective of this essay is to explore similarities and differences between past and current efforts to unify early instruction in the US. Among the questions to be pursued are: What goals were ECE unifiers seeking to achieve in the early twentieth century, what did they achieve, and what goals are ECE unifiers working toward in the 2020s? Answers to these questions make it possible to compare the first and second unification efforts and thereby comment on the extent to which certain goals of the overall ECE project have been achieved and on how unifiers then and now have sought to extend and defend early educational practice.
Emergence of the ECE Project, 1856-1915
A watershed event that contributed greatly to the emergence of the concept of ECE in the US occurred in 1856 when Margarethe Schurz, a German immigrant who was deeply influenced by the educational thought of Friedrich Froebel, opened the country’s first kindergarten in her home in Watertown, Wisconsin. Beginning in the 1860s, Elizabeth Peabody widely heralded the educational and social value of the kindergarten.Footnote 9 In the late 1800s, Free Kindergarten Associations fostered the spread of kindergarten classrooms across the nation.Footnote 10 Throughout this period, the ideas underlying the Froebelian kindergarten were further developed by transatlantic exchanges between Europe and the US.Footnote 11
Concurrently, two reactions to the kindergarten movement, which posited children’s self-activity and self-expression as the goals and methods of early education, also spread.Footnote 12 One such reaction consisted of calls for kindergarten methods to be adopted in the primary grades. For example, Henry Barnard mused about the day when “the primary school will modify its classification and methods so as to continue the work of development begun in the kindergarten by further application of Froebel’s methods.”Footnote 13 An example of such upward extension occurred when Felix Adler, who had previously opened a free kindergarten in 1878, founded a private primary school, the Workingman’s School, in 1880, to ensure that the “very large benefits” of a kindergarten education would not be “lost because the rational method which … [had begun in kindergarten was] not followed up in the later education of the child.”Footnote 14
The second kindergarten-related reaction consisted of challenges to the orthodox kindergarten methods practiced by acolytes of Froebel. One of the earliest and most influential critics of such practices was Anna Bryan, a kindergarten teacher and teacher educator who asserted, in a speech to the National Education Association in 1890, that many American kindergarteners (a term that then referred to teachers, not children) followed Froebel’s methods so slavishly that their teaching ran counter to the spirit of kindergarten and repressed children’s creativity and purposeful activity.Footnote 15 Another prominent critic of orthodox kindergarten practice, G. Stanley Hall, the founder of the child study movement, wrote that while “we should lose no syllable of the precious positive philosophy of Froebel … we must profoundly reconstruct every practical expression that he attempted of his ideas.”Footnote 16 The most influential individual to undertake the reconstruction of not just kindergarten but all of American education was John Dewey. His thinking about how to teach young children was deeply influenced by Anna Bryan, whose insights also informed the educational practices employed at Dewey’s University of Chicago Laboratory School.Footnote 17
By the early twentieth century, as ever more school systems added kindergartens, progressive early educators became increasingly concerned about the gap between the educational methods employed in play- and activity-based kindergartens and in the content-based primary grades that followed. For example, the preface of the seventh yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) referred to “the chasm which lies between … [kindergarten] and the primary grades.”Footnote 18 It was not until 1915, however, that progressive educators formed an organization, the NCPE, specifically dedicated to advocating for the unification of activity-based teaching practices across the early grades.
It is important to note, though, that the unification efforts that I describe next emerged from a common critique of the methods used in both orthodox Froebelian kindergartens and traditional primary classrooms. Julia Wade Abbot, a prominent kindergartener, succinctly articulated that critique when she wrote, “Large numbers of children engaged in doing the same thing at the same time and in the same way has too often been regarded as social education in the formal kindergarten and in the formal elementary school.”Footnote 19 Consequently, it was necessary for progressives to reconstruct both kindergarten and primary practices.
It is also important to note that much progress toward the reconstruction of kindergarten at this time occurred when the International Kindergarten Union (IKU) appointed a panel of experts—the Committee of Nineteen—to resolve the sharp conflicts that had arisen between orthodox Froebelian conservatives and progressive liberals. After six years of contentious discussions, this committee abandoned seeking consensus and issued three reports that represented three different conceptions of kindergarten practice: a liberal position authored by Patty Smith Hill, a conservative perspective by Susan Blow, and a liberal-conservative compromise by Elizabeth Harrison.Footnote 20 By the time these reports were published in 1913, though, the progressive reconstruction of kindergarten was well under way, and Susan Blow had confided to friends that her (orthodox Froebelian) position was in decline.Footnote 21
First Concerted Unification Effort, 1915 to Early 1930s
The Founding of the National Council of Primary Education
In 1915, educators attending a professional conference in Cincinnati formed the National Council of Primary Education (NCPE) to advocate for the alignment of progressive teaching practices in grades K-3, and they held their first formal meeting in Detroit in 1916. The first chair of the NCPE, Ella Victoria Dobbs—an industrial arts teacher, not a kindergartner—later summarized the organization’s three principal goals thusly: “First, a greater use of activities in the primary school; second, greater freedom of method for the teacher; and third, a closer coordination, in fact a unification, of the work now done in the kindergarten and primary school.”Footnote 22 She advocated pursuit of these three goals in order to address the stark gap between kindergartens and primary settings: “We feel that the work of early education is one work, and that there should be no break, either in the form or the atmosphere, and that children should feel no difference in the transition. There should not be the possibility of going out of the warm, cheery, happy period of a kindergarten into a cold, frozen atmosphere in a primary school.”Footnote 23
Progressives also advocated for the adoption of two secondary goals that would help move the country toward the goal of a unified, progressive approach to early pedagogy. Specifically, they called for (1) unified teacher preparation (i.e., for aspiring kindergarten and primary teachers to be prepared in a common teacher preparation program, or TPP) and (2) unified teacher supervision (i.e., for in-service early grade teachers to be supervised by a common school administrator who was experienced in and knowledgeable about both primary and kindergarten methods).Footnote 24 Before describing the progress that the NCPE made toward these goals, it is necessary to consider a related initiative that arose after the NCPE first met in 1915: the nursery school movement.
The Nursery School Movement
The nursery movement began in England in the early 1910s when Rachel and Margaret MacMillan adopted Froebel’s (and others’) methods for the care and education of children under school age. In the later 1910s, figures such as Caroline Pratt, Abigail Eliot, and Harriet Johnson imported the MacMillans’ approach to the US and applied their methods to the care and education of children two to four years old.Footnote 25 This Anglo import differed from prior American approaches to the care of younger children, because it was largely based on the downward extension of ideas introduced in the reconstructed kindergarten methodology, which served as a corrective to prior approaches that were more custodial than educative.Footnote 26 In addition, nursery school innovations, such as the involvement of health professionals, were later upwardly extended into kindergarten and early primary settings.
The nursery movement spread so rapidly that, in 1923, Gesell referred to the emergent field of preschool education as being in “an extraordinary state of ferment and formativeness.”Footnote 27 In 1925, the journal Progressive Education dedicated an entire issue to the topic of preschool education. Between 1920 and 1930, the number of nursery programs reported to the US Department of Education increased from 3 to 262.Footnote 28
Not surprisingly, proponents of unification added the education of three- and four-year- olds to the scope of the early educational unit. However, unlike their kindergarten colleagues, preschool proponents were disinclined to become part of or to partner with the public schools. Speaking in her capacity as chair of the Nursery School Committee of the Association for Childhood Education, Hill wrote, “We who have been interested in introducing the nursery school in this country are not at all eager to see it pushed rapidly into public education. We want Boards of Education to understand far better what we are trying to do before such movement takes place.”Footnote 29 Among the school-induced problems that Hill hoped to avoid were the elimination of home visits, which many principals had terminated, and excessive emphasis on teaching content.
In 1925, Gesell also wrote about the possibility of further expanding the educational unit to include birth: “The great goal ought to be a unification of policy for the whole sphere, from the lower primary to nethermost level.”Footnote 30 Further, he saw such policy as responsive to the totality of children’s needs: “Do we not need a conception of a unified, interrelated program of early education? Organically bound to infant welfare service on the one hand and to the primary school on the other, the child is indivisible.”Footnote 31
Progress toward the NCPE’s Goals
By the early 1930s, the NCPE had progressed toward attaining its goals. For example, substantial progress occurred on the two secondary goals related to the preparation and supervision of early grade educators. While there was only one joint kindergarten-primary teacher preparation program (TPP) in the country in 1913, 72 percent of early grade TPPs (sixty of eighty-three) had joint programs in 1922.Footnote 32 By 1930, most in-service early grade educators were supervised by a common school administrator.Footnote 33
The NCPE had also made progress on one of its three principal goals: increasing the use of purposeful activities in the early primary grades. By the early 1930s, Hill wrote, “the primary school reflected the principle of self-activity,” a feat which coincided with the progressives’ reconstruction of the kindergarten classroom.Footnote 34
Unifiers also reported progress in closing the gap between kindergarten and primary settings by implementing a unified instructional approach across these settings. In 1925, Gesell wrote: “A primary school no longer considers itself modern unless it is informed with the spirit and method of the progressive kindergarten.”Footnote 35 In 1929, the authors of the NSSE yearbook observed that unification was solidifying throughout the early grades.Footnote 36 In 1932, Hill asserted that unification efforts had largely succeeded, noting that progressive methods were now commonly found in the nursery, kindergarten, and primary grades.Footnote 37
Interestingly, little explicit discussion occurred, then or since, about the status of the third goal—freedom of method for teachers—although some concerns were expressed about this goal.Footnote 38 Larry Cuban’s research suggests, however, that in school systems where administrators encouraged teachers to use progressive, child-centered methodologies, only about a quarter of elementary educators implemented these practices; and lower percentages did so in less supportive settings. Cuban saw this finding as consistent with Dewey’s observation that the progressive movement had changed “life conditions [e.g., movable furniture] and little else” in elementary classrooms.Footnote 39
At the outset of the 1930s, there was widespread agreement among unifiers that they had largely succeeded.Footnote 40 Concurrently, the two principal organizations involved in unification merged: In 1930, the IKU expanded its mission to include the education of children from ages two to eleven and changed its name to the Association for Childhood Education (ACE); a year later, the NCPE dissolved and became a part of ACE.
Period of Early Instructional Equilibrium, Early 1930s to Early 1960s
From the early 1930s to the early 1960s, the push to unify the nation’s approach to early education receded from view, largely because it had apparently succeeded.Footnote 41 These were also years of remarkable pedagogical stability in kindergarten teaching practice, with broad agreement that play should form the foundation of all kindergarten programming and that children’s needs and interests should be the departure point for most curricular planning. Indeed, there was so much curricular continuity across these years that Marvin Lazerson wrote, “Kindergarten teachers in the 1960s would have felt only slight discomfort in kindergarten classrooms forty years before.”Footnote 42
This is not to say that there was little activity in the amount or type of early educational programs offered then, because there was indeed much variation. Between 1931 and 1933, the number of kindergartens fell from nearly 725,00 to just over 600,000 and only began to return to former levels by 1944. In the early 1930s, preschools numbered in the low 200s; in 1934-1935, there were, however, 2,979 government-funded Emergency Nursery Schools; in 1942, that number dropped to nearly 1,000 and then rapidly fell further. During World War II, a 1943 budget allocation under the Lanham Act provided funding for over three thousand childcare centers, which allowed women to join the workforce as part of the war effort. Shortly after the war ended, though, all such funding ceased.Footnote 43
During this time frame, portentous changes also occurred in the educational landscape, most notably in attitudes toward and participation in the progressive educational movement. The 1930s marked the beginning of three decades of withering criticism of progressive education, which was frequently portrayed as feckless and ineffective because it was overly student-centered.Footnote 44 Concurrently, the Progressive Education Association (PEA), beset by internal disagreements, shriveled in the 1940s and disbanded in 1955.Footnote 45 Two years after the demise of the PEA, the launch of Sputnik created nationwide angst about educational outcomes that, not surprisingly, prompted even more attacks on progressive, child-centered pedagogy and its purported neglect of curricular content.Footnote 46
Period of Early Instructional Disequilibrium, Early 1960s to Early 2000s
The 1960s were like the 1920s in that preschool education was, once again, undergoing a time of ferment and formativeness. This round of ferment may be attributed to two concurrent “rediscoveries.” First, the rediscovery of poverty in the early 1960s—the initial discovery having occurred in the early twentieth century—focused policymakers’ attention on ways to address this issue, particularly among urban and minority populations, and led to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty.Footnote 47 Second, the rediscovery of the young child and her education in the 1960s—the prior discovery took place in the 1920s with the rise of the nursery school movement—occurred within the social sciences, with the advent of research suggesting that early educational interventions may mitigate or compensate for adverse outcomes associated with childhood poverty.Footnote 48 Particular attention was paid to how early education may take advantage of early cognitive plasticity and stimulate young children’s intellectual and conceptual development.Footnote 49
The preceding rediscoveries altered the early pedagogical equilibrium that had existed since the early 1930s in two ways. First, they further solidified the notion that the early educational instructional unit should begin in pre-K, not K, and, more importantly, they suggested to some that pre-K should have a place in the public schools. Evidence of this shift is apparent in Martin Deutsch’s pioneering vision of and experimentation with what is now referred to as “pre-K-3 alignment”: “What I would hope for is a move toward an early childhood conception, running from three years of age to the end of the third grade, with early childhood centers built into the architectural plans of the school.”Footnote 50
Second, these dual rediscoveries focused the attention of both researchers and policymakers on the child’s cognitive capacities. This newfound focus on early intellectual development was further advanced by yet another rediscovery: the rediscovery of Piaget, whose research corpus, initially recognized in the 1920s and then often overlooked through much of the 1950s, was being reread and greeted with great enthusiasm in the early 1960s.Footnote 51
The 1960s also saw the onset of another factor that disturbed the early pedagogical equilibrium that had persisted for thirty years: the downward extension of elementary teaching practices into the early grades.Footnote 52 From the 1960s onward, persistent and ever-strengthening waves of pressure were exerted on the early grades to adopt skills-based, teacher-centered pedagogy. Early educators responded to this pressure by endeavoring to identify and propagate a firmer, social scientific justification for child-sensitive, activity-based early instructional practice.
In the 1960s, for example, James Hymes described the influence of first-grade expectations on kindergarten practice as “disheartening,” and Bernard Spodek quoted a participant at an NAEYC conference who described the nation’s schools as “factories.”Footnote 53 In an apparent response to such perceptions, the teacher educators who edited the 1964 volume titled Piaget Rediscovered expressed the hope that the revival of interest in Piaget might “serve as a leveling agent to the aspirations of [post-Sputnik] curriculum reformers bent on ignoring children’s cognitive development in the name of acceleration.”Footnote 54
A similar search for a firmer foundation for early instruction occurred in the early 1970s, when the NAEYC sponsored a conference on open education with the hope that this approach, which was characterized as a legacy of progressive education, might possibly serve “as a basis for meaningful learning which is ‘person-centered’” as opposed to the “object-centered”(i.e., skills- and content-based) practices then perceived as dominant.Footnote 55 Open education was unable to provide, however, a solid foundation for the field, because it did not have a coherent philosophical or psychological foundation. Even its sympathizers characterized its principles as elusive, inchoate, and a set of guesses.Footnote 56
As open education receded from the national scene in the 1970s, a vigorous back-to-basics movement arose, energized by reports of falling test scores that were commonly attributed to the usual suspects: overly permissive, child-centered teachers.Footnote 57 This push for increased attention to academics strengthened in the early 1980s with the publication of A Nation at Risk, an intentionally alarmist report that captured the nation’s attention with the assertion that American schools were failing, and that if they continued to fail, the nation’s then faltering economy would surely fail as well.Footnote 58 This report prompted widespread calls for schools at all levels to adopt higher standards and to implement accountability measures to assure that these standards were met.
One year before the publication of this remarkably influential report, though, Spodek, a former president of the NAEYC, asserted, “The kindergarten is again being reconstituted, this time essentially as a downward extension of primary education.”Footnote 59 One year after its release, Evelyn Weber wrote, “All efforts to bring about the unification of kindergarten-primary education in their own terms seem lost… . The direction of unification is quite the reverse of that which early optimism foresaw.”Footnote 60
The NAEYC responded to this situation by seeking, once again, to establish a firmer basis for early instructional practice. It did so this time by publishing the first edition of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) in 1987.Footnote 61 Despite such efforts, the downward extension of elementary pedagogy unleashed by A Nation at Risk continued throughout the 1990s, as more and more states adopted increasingly rigorous standards and accountability measures. This downward momentum was further accelerated, in 2001, by the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which marked the onset of a nationalized approach to the standards and accountability movement.
Second Concerted Unification Effort, 2005 to Today
The current effort toward ECE unification began with Kimber Bogard and Ruby Takanishi’s call in 2005 for pre-K-3 alignment.Footnote 62 These authors asserted that the promised benefits of preschool education—benefits that increasing numbers of policymakers were beginning to recognize—would not be realized by just one or even two years of quality preschool, but rather by four to five of years of quality early instruction from preschool through third grade. According to extant research, however, quality early instructional methods were rarely applied consistently in the nation’s schools; instead, there was ample evidence of “variability in classroom quality … [and] a lack of unifying vision and planning for how children’s experiences connect, overlap, and build on earlier stages even within the same school.”Footnote 63
In the 2010s, multiple national organizations—including the Education Commission of the States, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and the National Governors Association—advanced the pre-K-3 approach.Footnote 64 These efforts were bolstered by the formation of the FirstSchool initiative at the University of North Carolina. To facilitate the spread of pre-K-3 alignment, FirstSchool has forged partnerships with multiple states, offered online courses, and provided professional development to schools and school districts on the pre-K-3 approach.Footnote 65
The most prominent and comprehensive calls for unification have emanated, though, from collaborations of national-level organizations. In 2015, the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council published an overview of the implications of developmental science for early education. The authors specified principles and practices that support the professional preparation of early educators and made multiple recommendations for improving the abilities of early educational teachers and leaders. These recommendations included developing competency- and practice-based requirements for educators, constructing a new paradigm for evaluating personnel, and ensuring that the preparation of early educational leaders is grounded in developmental science.Footnote 66
The other prominent call for unification came from the P2P Task Force, which in 2020 published a unifying framework to “establish unity and clarity around the career pathways, knowledge and competencies, qualifications, standards, accountability, supports, and compensation to define the early childhood education profession.”Footnote 67 Much of this report focused on fixing the nation’s dysfunctional approach to early education and care that is characterized by incoherent and inconsistent practices and a hodgepodge of preparation programs of uneven quality. This chaotic approach harms aspiring educators, particularly those without power and privilege.Footnote 68
Concurrently, the P2P Task Force also suggested that many early grade teachers in the nation’s public schools may be ill-prepared to teach young children. To redress this issue, the Task Force recommended that all TPPs be required to have experienced early educators serve on their faculty; align their programs with the NAEYC standards for the preparation of early childhood professionals; achieve national accreditation or recognition; and require program completers to pass a national assessment to demonstrate competency in early instructional practices.
Principal Differences between Past and Current Unification Efforts
One of the principal differences between past and current unification efforts is the age/grade span that advocates have sought to unify. In the early twentieth century, ECE unifiers initially focused exclusively on grades K-3, later considered preschool as part of the ECE unit but did not advocate for its inclusion in public schooling, and rarely mentioned the birth-to-two-years age span. By contrast, the scope of the current unification effort extends to the entire ECE age span, with some unifiers focused on the pre-K-3 years and the Institute of Medicine and P2P Task Force concerned with all the early years.
Another difference is that ECE unifiers in the early twentieth century focused almost entirely on proximal influences on instruction in public school settings—specifically, the preparation, supervision, and instructional practices of early grade teachers. While today’s proponents of unification, especially advocates of pre-K-3 alignment, also focus on proximal influences on instruction, the P2P Task Force also addresses distal factors, such as accountability, credentialing, career pathways, standards, compensation, and funding.
A third difference is in the psychological thought that dominated these two eras. While proponents in both periods envisioned having early grade classrooms staffed with autonomous early educators ready and able to nurture the agency, curiosity, and creativity of young learners, dissimilar social sciences informed their respective educational efforts.
In the early twentieth century, there was a strong romantic streak among many of the prominent proponents of unification. According to Grace Langdon, Dobbs described how the NCPE sought to make the K-3 years of schooling “a beautiful garden in which human plants are developed to the full extent of their capacities.”Footnote 69 Two of the most influential social scientists of that era, G. Stanley Hall and Arnold Gesell, both posited maturational theories of development that emphasized biological growth as the primary influence on development and the principal focus of educational efforts. Finally, there was a pervasive belief among progressive early educators about the educational value of psychometrics. Hill, who authored one of the principal variants of a unified early educational program—the conduct curriculum—wrote that IQ testing was an effective tool for sorting and making decisions about promoting children.Footnote 70 The authors of the other principal unified curriculum—Samuel Parker and Alice Temple—justified their approach, in part, on “the large amount of overlapping in mental ages between groups of kindergarten and first-grade children.”Footnote 71
Current unification efforts are informed, however, by a social science that has benefited from more than a hundred years of collective efforts. For example, during the latter twentieth century, social science began to move away from theories based on universal accounts of child development and toward theories based on non-universal, socioculturally sensitive psychologies. The most current of this research is presented in NAEYC’s fourth edition of DAP.Footnote 72 In order to advance the field toward greater equity, this edition places less emphasis than prior editions on universal, stage-based theories of development that previously invited deficit-based thinking about children from the non-dominant culture, and places more emphasis on sociocultural theories that lead not to “one best practice” but rather to multiple ways that educators might teach responsively to a diverse classroom of early learners. Toward that end, the fourth edition of DAP reemphasizes and expands on the “both/and” approach to early educational practice initially articulated in the 1997 edition.Footnote 73 For example, it highlights the notion of an instructional continuum that extends from self-directed play to direct instruction. Finally, it discusses the importance of having early educators be aware of the contexts that have influenced the children they are teaching and of the contexts and circumstances that have influenced the teachers themselves.Footnote 74
There are also substantial differences between the educational landscapes that unifiers confronted in the two eras. Kindergarten enrollment of five-years-olds ranged from 11 percent in 1920 to 15 percent in 1930.Footnote 75 In the 1990s, however, approximately 98 percent of first and second graders had attended kindergarten.Footnote 76 Preschool enrollment evolved from an emergent phenomenon in the early twentieth century—the US government reported a total of 226 nursery schools in 1933Footnote 77—to a common option for caregivers in 2018, when 54 percent of three- and four-year-olds were enrolled in preprimary programs.Footnote 78
There is also variation in the composition of the actors involved in unification in these eras. While unification proponents in both eras included academics, developmentally oriented psychologists, and professional educational organizations, there were many professional educators involved in the twentieth century (i.e., much of the membership of the NCPE); by contrast, many foundations have advocated for unification in the twenty-first century.
Principal Similarities between Past and Current Unification Efforts
The three areas that the NCPE dedicated itself to addressing in the early twentieth century—increased child activity, enhanced teacher autonomy, and closer cooperation and coordination between the early and primary grades—are also goals of today’s unifiers. The need and desire for closer cooperation between these levels is evident in the language that ECE unifiers in both eras used to characterize the divide between early educational and primary settings. In the early twentieth century, Dobbs, the first chair of the NCPE, referred to this divide as a”gap,” Parker and Temple as a “break,” and Stella Woods as a “chasm.”Footnote 79 Today’s unifiers use similar but starker terms such as “two different worlds,” “colliding worlds,” and different “galaxies.”Footnote 80 The current language is stronger because today’s gap is due not only to instructional but also to administrative differences between our public school systems and the nation’s chaotic approach to early education and care.
Calls for increased use of activity-based instruction were and are a central focus of past and present proponents of unification. For example, the theme of the NCPE’s first conference was “The Use of Activities in the Elementary School.”Footnote 81 In the present era, Takanishi asserts that children’s learning should be “based on play and their own activity”; FirstSchool proponents advocate for child-initiated play; and the latest iteration of DAP states that “opportunities for agency … must be widely available for all children.”Footnote 82
The importance of freedom of method and its relationship to children’s purposeful activity was clearly articulated in 1929 by Julia Hahn, the then president of the NCPE, who wrote, “A program of work which aimed to encourage in children initiative, independent thinking, and cooperation demanded a teacher with the same characteristics.”Footnote 83 FirstSchool proponents articulated a similar sentiment in 2013: “School leaders must develop a parallel process in which they create for the adults the same type of environment they want adults to create for their students. Everyone in the school environment must be viewed as a learner for whom the cultures of caring, competence, and excellence are cultivated.”Footnote 84
A fourth and final similarity expressed by past and current unifiers is a shared concern about school administrators’ unfamiliarity and sometime discomfort with early educational practice. In 1928, Olive Gray observed that the kindergarten and primary grades were “more or less occult” to most public school administrators.Footnote 85 In the same year, Winifred Bain reported, in her Teachers College dissertation that was overseen by, among others, Hill: “For years many school supervisors and administrators have evaded the responsibility of evaluating what happens in the kindergartens in their charge because they have felt themselves incompetent to interpret the subtle procedure and subtle outcomes which they have observed in these grades.”Footnote 86 Bain went on to say that the possible addition of nursery programming to principals’ oversight responsibilities presented “new perplexities,” because nursery-level education was so new that few administrators had even contemplated being responsible for a nursery program.
Similar concerns about principals’ apparent lack of knowledge about and/or reluctance to support early instruction are also commonly expressed in the current era. FirstSchool researchers reported that early grades teachers found it difficult to implement DAP in schools without the support of their principal.Footnote 87 And Takanishi asserted that the chief impediment to achieving aligned instruction in the early grades was a dearth of principals willing and able to support collaborative efforts to implement appropriate learning experiences.Footnote 88
Explaining Differences and Similarities between the Two Unification Efforts
The current analysis identified differences and similarities between past and current efforts to unify the field of early education. The differences documented here—between (1) an earlier unification effort, which was principally informed by a social scientific approach both naturalistic and universalist, that focused mostly on proximal influences on instruction in grades K-3, and (2) the current unification effort, which is increasingly informed by non-universal and sociocultural accounts of human development, that considers both proximal and distal influences on children, in any setting, from birth to age eight—may be largely attributed to the remarkable societal and scientific changes that have occurred over the last century in an increasingly industrialized society that has been transformed by the entry of women into the work force. The nearly singular focus on instruction in the 1920s may also be partly attributable to the number of practitioners who were engaged in that unification effort.
And yet, despite the remarkable changes that have occurred over the last hundred-plus years, current proponents of ECE are seeking to realize aims that include, with only minor variations, the same three goals that the NCPE set out to achieve in 1915. Moreover, today’s proponents are still commenting, like their predecessors, on how their efforts to unify ECE are often constrained by public school administrators’ unfamiliarity and/or discomfort with early educational principles and practices.
The principal question raised by the current analysis is this: Why are early educators still pursuing today the same three goals that the NCPE pursued in the early twentieth century? Part of the explanation is that, even though the NCPE achieved some of its goals, it did not achieve as much as its proponents claimed. It did prevail in the realm of policy talk (e.g., educators and administrators in the 1930s apparently agreed about what constituted a “modern school”), and it did indeed change the conditions that existed in many schools—which came to have smaller class sizes, moveable furniture, and less reliance on recitation as a form of instruction in the primary grades. Nevertheless, while less formal than before, the classroom has remained largely teacher-centered.Footnote 89
Another part of the explanation for the persistence of these issues is that adding an early educational grade to an elementary school not only provides an opportunity for the upward extension of child-sensitive ECE methodology but also provides an avenue for the downward extension of skill-based ELED methodology. The possibility of such a downward extension is not new, however. It was first identified in 1929 by prominent preschool proponents who asked this prescient question: “Is it possible that the present-day kindergarten will crystallize into a primary schoolroom and that the future will necessitate an ironically similar readjustment between the kindergarten and other preschool agencies?”Footnote 90
Recent research indicates that the downward extension did occur and that kindergarten has been transformed into the new first grade.Footnote 91 Jennifer Lin Russell studied the transformation of kindergarten in the US and described it as a struggle between two different logics of instruction: a developmental logic that seeks to foster the growth of the whole child and an academic logic that seeks to build the child’s skills and knowledge.Footnote 92 Kristen Dombkowski compared the pressures the kindergarten classroom had faced to being caught in a squeeze—a squeeze between the efficiency-driven approach of the primary grades and the whole-child approach of the preschool.Footnote 93
The result of this transformation is that kindergarten, which was seen in the 1920s as part of the solution to the problem of excessive formal instruction in primary education, is now part of the problem presented by primary education. Concomitantly, preschool has become both the principal educational site where developmental instructional practices are implemented and a model for the upward alignment of higher grades.
Conclusion
In the early 1920s, Gesell articulated a vision for the field of early childhood that included widespread implementation of a specialized pedagogy for children from birth through age eight.Footnote 94 The current analysis suggests that the upward extension of this vision has not been achieved, as evidenced by contemporary ECE unifiers’ efforts to achieve three of the same goals that the NCPE pursued in the early twentieth century: increased child activity, increased teacher autonomy, and consistent use of early educational pedagogy in the early primary grades.Footnote 95
While some of the goals of ECE unification have remained the same, the pivot point for extending and defending early educational practice has changed. Analyses of the first round of unification indicate that, throughout much of the twentieth century, kindergarten served as both the model for the upward extension of early instructional practice and the locus of efforts to defend against the downward extension of elementary practice.Footnote 96 The current analysis of the second round of unification indicates that, in the twenty-first century, preschool has become the pivot point for extending and defending early instructional methodology.
Evidence of preschool’s position as an instructional model for the upper grades may be found in an article written by the principal of an elementary school in Michigan. Writing about her school’s participation in a FirstSchool initiative, the principal wrote, “For curriculum-heavy kindergarten programs … a pre-K program can remind us of some of the most important things about teaching and learning: the power of choice and student-centered learning.”Footnote 97
There is also evidence that whereas kindergarten was once the locus of the struggle between academic and developmental logic, now preschools, especially those located in public schools, are becoming the locus.Footnote 98 An analysis of teaching practices in preschools in Tennessee found a “dominating focus on teacher-directed instruction, with little time for children to construct learning themselves from independent activities, and no time at all to play.”Footnote 99 Researchers who investigated the teaching practices of pre-K to grade 2 educators in a public school district reported that “the majority of teachers consistently used whole class, didactic, teacher-centered instruction practices,” and that “there were no instructional differences by grade level.”Footnote 100
Other research indicates that principals of schools that house preschools tend to see pre-K not as a “new perplexity,” as principals reportedly did in the early twentieth century, but rather as a “useful tool” for getting an early start on raising test scores in the upper grades.Footnote 101 Another set of investigators reported that elementary administrators who oversaw state-funded pre-Ks, in programs nominally aligned with developmentally appropriate standards, exerted downward pressure on teachers to implement didactic instructional methods.Footnote 102
The transformed position of preschool in the ECE project has brought renewed attention to questions that James Hymes posed at the annual meeting of the NAEYC in 1966: “Can we wed a quality program for young children to the public schools? … Will young children be welcomed, or will they have to take on the behavior of much older children?”Footnote 103
Based on what had occurred in kindergartens in the early 1960s, Hymes suggested that preschools would likely be changed by, and not bring change to, elementary schooling. He wrote that to expect existing primary grades to adapt willingly to preschools would be akin to expecting a miracle. And that to protect preschools from the downward extension of primary pedagogy would require an even greater miracle: that of “help[ing] public schools achieve quality primary education.”Footnote 104
In an authoritative book on the promise of preschool, Elizabeth Rose examined concerns about pre-Ks becoming part of the public school system. While she affirmed that such partnering is a good strategy for garnering the enormous resources necessary to ensure that all children have access to preschool, she also asked, given the fate of kindergarten, whether such partnering is good policy.Footnote 105 Her answer was a qualified yes, and she endorsed pre-K-3 alignment as a possibly fruitful way to advance the ECE project.Footnote 106
As the ECE project encounters some of the same struggles in pre-K that it previously encountered in kindergarten, it is important to ask, What are the principal obstacles to ECE unification? According to Kristen Nawrotzki, one of the principal impediments is the marked difference between the values and practices of schools as they have existed and the values and practices espoused by teacher educators and educational theorists.Footnote 107 A prominent early educator predicted the probable outcome of attempts to upwardly extend ECE practice in schools as they are: “The age-graded, teacher-centered curriculum driven model of elementary schooling has been in place for more than a century and is likely to be a ‘lethal obstacle’ to the full implementation of DAP” in the early primary grades.Footnote 108
It is also important to ask this question: Are there any features of the current unification effort that might help it succeed where the prior one did not? Indeed, there are some. One such feature is the size and breadth of the respective coalitions. The first such initiative began with the NCPE’s initial meeting of thirty individuals, which increased to a meeting of three thousand individuals some ten years later.Footnote 109 The current initiative is, however, broader and deeper: it includes the fifteen members of the P2P Task Force as well as the Education Commission of the States, the National Governors Association, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine.
A second factor is that the education reform movement may have peaked in 2010, when forty states adopted the Common Core, and then abated shortly thereafter, when many states abandoned this initiative. While this shift in momentum will not relieve downward pressures exerted by testing and accountability measures that are currently in place, it seems likely that such pressures will not be increasing for the time being. The US may have entered an era when, in what Cuban has described as the nearly two-century-long ideological contest between educational progressives and conservatives, momentum may be swinging back in the direction of child-sensitive instruction.Footnote 110
In addition, there are some relatively new factors in the educational landscape that may influence public schools. Part of the reason that the heretofore bipartisan reform movement has abated is because conservative parts of that coalition are no longer seeking to improve but rather to defund public education by using public dollars to support private and religious schools.Footnote 111 More importantly, other parts of the conservative movement are currently making education a part of the culture wars, with attacks on critical race theory, LGBTQ students, and, most recently, the NAEYC’s latest iteration of DAP that refers, rightly, to the importance of confronting institutional racism and addressing implicit bias.Footnote 112
It is not currently clear how the contemporary ECE unification effort will fare in this changing sociopolitical context. What the current analysis makes evident, though, is that preschool has replaced kindergarten’s position in unification endeavors as the model for extending and the locus of defending early instructional practice.
Limitations
Methodology
It is necessary to highlight a methodological limitation of this discourse analysis: it is based on a relatively narrow range of selected texts. Therefore, it does not carry the authority of an analysis based on rigorous triangulation of a wide array of sources. This inquiry may demonstrate to other investigators, though, the value of continuing to pursue this topic using other methods.
Positionality
The issues discussed in this paper are informed and influenced by the author’s many years of experience as both a pre-K and kindergarten teacher and an early childhood teacher educator, roles in which he sought to implement and expand the use of activity- and play-based instruction. A writer/researcher/historiographer with extensive roots in other areas of education might have addressed the issues discussed here in other ways.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
R. Clarke Fowler professor emeritus at Salem State University (rfowler@salemstate.edu), has published articles on socio-moral development, Piagetian and Vygotskian perspectives on education, teacher licensure testing, fast-track certification, and how early instruction may be undermined when states award overlapping early and elementary educator licenses. He is indebted to Barbara Beatty for commenting on an early draft of this article and to HEQ’s editors and three anonymous reviewers for commenting on later versions.
