You’re Doing Fine, Oklahoma!
Thirty years ago, the national movement for universal preschool came heart-breakingly close to success. But Richard Nixon’s 1971 veto of such a measure — it “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach” — proved to be Washington’s last…
What Would Jefferson Do?
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism By Susan Jacoby • Metropolitan Books • 432 pages • $27.50 Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Christians and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain By María Rosa Menocal • Back Bay Books • 272 pages • $26.95 The Pity of It All: A Portrait of…
Cloak and Swagger
To Washington’s small and sometimes fractious community of Iran experts, it was becoming obvious: What to do about Iran and its fast-developing nuclear program was set to rival Iraq as the most pressing foreign-policy challenge for the person elected president in 2004. By the spring and early summer of this year, the city was awash…
A World Apart
George W. Bush and John Kerry could agree on one point in the first presidential debate: Nuclear proliferation — specially the risk of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons — represents the most serious threat we face. But the difference in how the two candidates approach the problem illustrates a more fundamental political divide that will stretch…
Too Young to Test
Last fall and again in the spring, the government administered a standardized literacy and math test to all children in the Head Start program. It’s being given again this year. Four-year-olds are asked to count objects, name alphabet letters and simple geometrical shapes, understand directions, characterize facial expressions, and identify animals, body parts, and other…
Leave No Parent Behind
Forty years ago, as Marian Wright Edelman and her fellow pioneers at the Child Development Group of Mississippi were organizing sharecroppers, fending off Jim Crow, and cobbling together a model for the nation’s Head Start program, Betty Hart and Todd Risley were up in Kansas City working on an early childhood program of their own.…
Figures of Speech
One of John Kerry’s stronger moments in the first presidential debate came when he explained that, contrary to what George W. Bush would still have had inattentive viewers believe, Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States. To this cold reminder, Bush snapped back defensively, “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I…
Where Do We Go From Here?
An important reason why quality early education and care is not universally available in America is because the public is not demanding it. Many of the people most affected by current supports for young children are not engaged in the conversation about it, and some natural allies feel ignored. Many parents scramble for care when…
Raising the Bar
Lilliana Diaz has operated a child-care business in her Lowell, Massachusetts, home for more than four years. Often rising before dawn and putting in 10-hour days, she guides eight toddlers through a busy schedule of reading, playtime, meals, and more. To get to this point, Diaz completed a 63-hour training course, then earned a Childhood…
Keeping Faith With Our Children
Education for all is a defining value of our country, and living up to it takes more than lip service. It takes dedication, hard work, and financial commitment. It means working in partnerships to create the best federal, state, and local policies to increase educational opportunities for all. It also means starting early. States across…
Dream On
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare By Jason DeParle • Viking • PAGES • $25.95 Remarkably little has been heard about the poor from the Bush administration during the past four years. The administration has focused more on rewarding its base — “the haves and the have-mores”…
The Good Guys
On July 5, John Edwards slipped into a high-rise at One Boston Place to greet some of his and John Kerry’s top contributors among plaintiffs’ attorneys. At the offices of Robinson & Cole, Edwards shook hands with Alex MacDonald, a partner there who had helped raise $600,000 for the campaign. Much of the crowd was…
The European Model
To judge from public debates on everything from marriage promotion to educational standards, the United States is exceptionally concerned with the well-being of children. But as American families struggle to balance work and family demands, our government is doing little to help. Parents in countries such as Sweden and France also balance work and family…
Past, Present, and Future
The movement to universalize preschool education is not new. Americans have been attempting to get public support for educating our youngest children for more than 150 years. Why has it taken so long? What are the obstacles? And what do past successes suggest about promising strategies for the future? In 1830, a petition to formally…
Swifter Than Truth
Historians of the mad pageant in which Americans chose their president in 2004 will someday note with astonishment that the quote-unquote Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, many of its members inveterate liars more swift than truthful, succeeded in hijacking the presidential campaign for the better part of the month of August, nearly one-third of the…
The Israel Deal
Iraq, it’s true, isn’t precisely Vietnam: Vietnam is hellishly hot and humid, whereas Iraq is infernally hot and dry; Americans aren’t dying as quickly in Iraq as they did in Nam; the justifications used to pull the United States into Iraq have proven false even more quickly than the arguments for fighting in Southeast Asia…
Starting November 3
The real work for progressives starts November 3, either fighting a newly unleashed George W. Bush or helping a sure-to-be besieged John Kerry. But to be effective, progressives must understand why the right has been so successful at shaping the national debate. The conventional view sees the right’s success as a reaction to the left’s…
Head Start Under Assault
Who would have thought a 40-year-old program that has helped millions of our nation’s poorest preschoolers get a head start could come under attack? Despite its many successes, recorded by researchers and lived by families, Head Start’s future is now uncertain as policy-makers debate a Bush-administration proposal that could effectively dismantle the cherished program. This…
Of Human Bondage
On August 6, Christina Arnold found herself in Svay Pak, Cambodia, an area full of wooden shacks, bars, and brothels 11 kilometers from the capital city of Phnom Penh. Arnold, the 29-year-old director of Project Hope International, a nonprofit organization committed to assisting survivors of human trafficking, had traveled there to visit with social workers,…
It’s Your Money They’re Wasting
In September, my group, Citizens for Tax Justice, released a major study on corporate tax avoidance. We looked at 275 of the largest and most profitable Fortune 500 companies and found that almost a third managed to pay nothing (or less) in federal income taxes in at least one of the first three years of…
Shaping the Brains of Tomorrow
What would happen if the best minds in the country concluded that investments in early-childhood development are necessary and cost-effective? That the early years present an opportunity, unequaled later in life, to enhance inborn potential and avert harm? What if they could identify the “active ingredients” of healthy psychological development, and how to enhance these…
