Preschool policy is a fragmented hodgepodge, writes Andrew Karch, as he traces early-education policy since the 1970s. He starts with President Nixon’s veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act—for some, a missed opportunity; for others, the beginning of the private and public program-mix we have today. Karch doesn’t focus on the effectiveness of this patchwork system (for that, read Reroute the PreSchool Juggernaut), but he’s not surprised that policymakers remain dissatisfied. The current system is the result of stakeholders protecting their entrenched interests and the status quo. True, they support tweaks—just as long as their own policy sphere is not changed; so most reforms efforts—a la President Obama—run amuck and we are left with the stasis we have today. (This more-than-obvious explanation could be used to describe any policy debate underway in Congress and many of our state houses.) Still, readers interested in early education or public-policy development at large would be wise to peruse this book for its insight into how we got the policies we have today and why we see so much paralysis in attempts to reform them.
SOURCE: Andrew Karch, Early Start: Preschool Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, April 2013).
