Conforming to reform: Teaching pre-kindergarten in a neoliberal early education system

Abstract

Policymakers’ neoliberal education reforms have altered the landscape of publicly funded early education in the United States and across the globe. Practically speaking, these reforms expect early childhood teachers to prepare their students for success in elementary school and later life by providing them with a specific set of knowledge and skills. This creates a new set of challenges for early educators who strive to prepare their culturally and linguistically diverse students for school in a manner that addresses their individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs. The study discussed in this article set out to examine how teachers who were identified as meeting their students’ various needs prepared them for success in elementary school. In doing so, it became apparent that these teachers struggled to define their practices as well as the construct of effective teaching in ways that went beyond policymakers’ neoliberal conception of the early education process. This article examines this tension and considers what is possible for teachers and the field of publicly funded early education in these highly structured neoliberal systems of governance.

Keywords

culturally relevant teaching high-stakes reform neoliberalism pre-kindergarten preschool

Introduction

Over the last decade, the context of publicly funded early childhood education (ECE) in the United States and across the globe has changed significantly (e.g. Barnett et al., 2011; Simpson, 2010). Policymakers have expanded and streamlined these governmental programs through neoliberal reforms that frame the early learning process as an economic enterprise (e.g. Krieg, 2011). Such programs are to produce learners who succeed in school so that they can become earners who succeed in life (Ball and Vincent, 2005).

Many (e.g. Cannella and Swadener, 2006; Hatch and Grieshaber, 2002) worry this framing of ECE has led to learning environments that focus solely on teaching academic skills, which in turn limit the instructional practices of teachers and cause them to ignore the individual, cultural, and linguistic needs of their students (e.g. Parker and Neuharth-Pritchett, 2006). This is particularly troubling in contexts like the United States where children entering and participating in these publicly supported ECE programs have and will continue to become more culturally and linguistically diverse (Frey, 2011).

To address these challenges, the case study (Stake, 1995) discussed in this article located and then documented the knowledge, skills, and wisdom of three pre-kindergarten (pre-k) teachers whom other early educators identified as effective teachers who prepare their culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students for a high-stakes elementary school program.¹ The goal of this project was to develop descriptive case studies of their work (Ryan and Goffin, 2008).

In conducting this study and then beginning to generate illustrations of how these practicing teachers pedagogically and conceptually addressed these challenges, it became apparent that they struggled to define their practices as well as the construct of effective teaching in ways that went beyond policymakers’ neoliberal conceptions of early education. These tensions in the data are examined in this article. Doing so illuminates the struggles that many early educators face in being effective within these tightly structured systems of ECE and raises questions about what is possible for them and for the field of publicly funded ECE.

Context

Neoliberalism and publicly funded early education in the United States

Neoliberalism is “a particular economic rationality that underlies” a theory of governance in which policy problems are framed in economic rather than democratic terms (Kaščák and Pupala, 2011: 146).² Such reforms do “not seek to govern through ‘society,’ but through the regulated choices of individual citizens, now constructed as subjects” who are to make “choices” that foster “aspirations” for “self-actualization and self-fulfillment” (Rose, 1996: 41). Moreover, defining government-supported programs in economic terms leads to a framing of public education programs as institutions that are to produce learners who become earners and consumers (Ailwood, 2008).

To adhere to the self-governing discourses of consumerism, families are to view their decisions about their lives as well as the education of their children as “calculated acts and investments” (Rose, 1999: 164). To help them do this, they need ECE programs to make visible what it is they teach and to be held accountable in meeting such standards (Adcock and Patton, 2001). Doing so creates what Rose (1999) terms a strange new coupling of power in which the role of the individual, which in the case of ECE is the guardian of the child, appears to take center stage in determining the early learning experiences of his/her child. Yet, as Dahlberg and Moss (2005) point out, the “state remains strong despite appearing to dissolve” in the ECE process (p. 133). These strong acts of governance can be seen in Australia (Sumsion and Wong, 2011) and New Zealand (Duhn, 2010) where policymakers have adopted national curricula that inform all stakeholders about what children should be learning and doing each step of the way in their early education systems.

In the United States, a publicly funded system of ECE for all children to attend does not exist. Instead, those who adhere to neoliberal principles of governance argue that if public monies are to be used to support ECE, they should be invested in only the most at-risk children (Goldsmith and Rees, 2007). The term risk is a marker that policymakers and early education advocates (e.g. Neuman, 2009) have tied to children that will somehow prevent them from succeeding in school. In the short term, such an investment aims to ready at-risk children for school by providing them with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed on the standardized measures of academic achievement that await them in kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) public school systems (US Department of Education and US Department of Health and Human Services, 2011). Over the long term, these investments are to pay for themselves through reduced expenditures on future social and educational services for these children (i.e. Reynolds et al., 2011). An example of this type of investment is state-funded pre-k. Up until the recent recession, pre-k could be found in 38 states and served over two million children (Barnett et al., 2011). Most serve only at-risk children (e.g. Kansas’ At-Risk Four-Year-Old Children Preschool Program),³ and policymakers have identified the preparation of children for academic success in elementary school as a primary goal for these programs.

The pre-k program in this study

The pre-k teachers in this study worked in public pre-k classrooms located in a mid-western state. Their pre-k program was a state-supported voluntary intervention program offered to 4-year-old children who state’s policymakers deemed at-risk for school success. Policymakers deemed these markers of risk to be: an inability to speak or comprehend the English language, low-income status, homelessness, or in the foster care system. Additionally, policymakers did not mandate an adult-to-child ratio for this pre-k program.

The pre-k-12 school district

These teachers worked in a large and diverse urban pre-k- 12 public school districts. The district identifies almost 10% of its pre-k students as being African–American, almost 80% Hispanic, 5% Asian, and 5% White. Almost 95% of the students are identified as economically disadvantaged and almost 60% are identified as bilingual or as English language learners (ELL). Finally, this full-day pre-k program employs over 300 pre-k teachers who possess a state teaching license, certifying them to work in early childhood programs up through grade 6.⁴

What they were expected to teach

Unlike their K-12 counterparts, pre-k teachers in this state do not have a set of mandated content standards they must teach their students over the course of the year. Instead, their state’s department of education issued voluntary pre-k content standards. These content standards are to assist educators in designing and/or selecting a curriculum that teach their pre-kindergarteners the knowledge and skills needed to be ready to learn the state’s K-12 content standards upon kindergarten entry. They include learning expectations framed around traditional notions of content such as language arts, science, math, and social studies.

In addition to these pre-k standards, the school district these pre-k teachers work in put in place an Aligned Curriculum (AC) for grades pre-k through 12. The AC links the state’s testing system with the district’s curriculum, textbooks, teacher training, and accountability measures so that teachers have a clearly articulated idea about what is to be taught and what students should learn on a day-to-day basis. This AC provides teachers with daily lesson plans that link instructional materials, including the district’s pre-k curriculum with particular pre-k standards and/or the state’s K-12 content standards in each of these core subject areas.

These pre-k teachers are also expected to turn in weekly time sheets that document what they are teaching their students each day and for how long. District administrators put these measures in place to ensure all the teachers across the district are teaching all of their students the same knowledge and skills through a similar set of practices for an appropriate amount of time to ready them for the state’s high-stakes tests that begin in grade 3.

In terms of assessment, these teachers use a standardized report card that documents students’ academic performance and personal development. Once the pre-k teachers’ students enter kindergarten, state policymakers require every school district to assess their kindergarten and first-grade students’ emergent literacy skills using a state-approved standardized assessment measure over the course of the year. The K-12 education system their graduates will enter is governed by legislation in which the state’s policymakers mandated that public school teachers provide their students with the knowledge and skills found in the state’s K-12 content standards.⁵ This state’s policymakers try to ensure public school students learn the K-12 content standards by requiring students in grades 3 through 11 to take the state’s high-stakes tests. These high-stakes for students, which use their achievement scores to determine grade promotion or high-school completion, begin in grade 5 and appear again in grades 8 and 11. Finally, the stakes for schools and school districts occur under a statewide ranking system that determines whether or not students in these schools and districts are attaining an acceptable level of progress in improving students’ academic achievement. If not, this triggers a series of mandated interventions and sanctions, which can eventually lead to schools being closed or reconstituted and district administrators replaced.

Conceptualizing these teachers’ practices within this neoliberal context

To capture the complexity of the context in which these teachers worked and document how their teaching prepared their students for success in elementary school and fostered their students’ cultural competence and sociopolitical awareness, this study turned to Ladson-Billings’ (1994, 2006) conception of culturally relevant teaching (CRT). CRT offers a complex understanding of the impact of culture on children’s development and learning and attends to the sociopolitical context, which includes both the neoliberal politics and policies, in which early educators and their students are working. CRT is a “pedagogy that [empowers] students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Ladson-Billings, 1994: 17–18). To engage in CRT, classroom teachers must foster academic achievement among all their students, cultivate their cultural competence, and develop their sociopolitical consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Such practices require teachers to help their students not only be aware of how the process of schooling works but also how success in school aligns with and possibly contradicts their home and cultural experiences.

When employing this lens in the process of developing case studies detailing how these teachers successfully prepared their students for elementary school, tensions appeared in the data between their efforts to produce successful students within a publicly funded neoliberal ECE program and implementing practices that were culturally relevant. This piece examines some of these tensions.

Methods

This article comes from a qualitative case study (Stake, 1995) and presents answers from one of the central questions that guided it: how do these teachers, in their practices and statements about early education, attend to children’s individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs in relation to policymakers’ neoliberal reforms? Case study methodology assists the researcher in maximizing what can be learned about “something we do not sufficiently understand” through generating an in-depth account that examines the complexity of the phenomena under investigation (Stake, 1995: 133).

Case selection

These three teachers (the case) were purposely selected (Merriam, 2009) through recommendations of 17 district pre-k supervisors, school administrators, pre-k teachers, and university-based teacher educators. Each was asked to identify skilled pre-k teachers who engaged in instructional practices that attended to children’s individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs while at the same time prepared them for their state’s high-stakes standards-based accountability education system. Their responses generated a list of 12 potential participants, and out of those 12, there were three who were identified by at least three of these knowledgeable informants. All three potential participants were contacted, and agreed to participate.

The pre-k teachers

The three teachers, Ms Mould, Ms Mason, and Ms Schneider (all names are pseudonyms), taught within the same large urban school district at three different elementary school campuses (see Table 1 for details about each participant and their schools.) All three identified themselves as Caucasian, non-Hispanic.

Table 1.

Participants.

Ms Mason	Ms Schneider	Ms Mould
Pre-k teacher with 22 years teaching experience; 21 years in pre-k	Pre-k teacher with 15 years of experience; 12 years in pre-k	Pre-k teacher with 21 years of school administrator experience; 18 years of teaching experience; 2 years in pre-k
24 students: 23 Hispanic; 1 African–American	11 students: 4 Chinese; 2 Korean; 2 Caucasian; 1 Pakistani; 1 Filipino; 1 German/French	21 students: 16 Hispanic; 3 African American; 2 refugees from the Congo
School student population: 5% African–American; 94% Hispanic; 1% Caucasian	School student population: 4% African–American; 14% Asian; 20% Hispanic; 1% Native American; 61% Caucasian	School student population: 3% African–American; 4% Asian; 91% Hispanic; 2% Caucasian
Additional student information at the school level: English as second language 3.1%; low income 96.7%; limited English proficiency 55.0%; at-risk 64.5%; bilingual 50.6%; first year US enrollment 0.3%	Additional student information at the school level: English as second language 8.2%; low income 7.9%; limited English proficiency 8.9%; at-risk 12.6%; bilingual 0.1%; first year US enrollment 0.8%	Additional student information at the school level: English as second language 5.8%; low income 94.2%; limited English proficiency 59.0%; at-risk 65.0%; bilingual 52.4%; first year US enrollment 3.2%

At the time of this study, Ms Mould had been teaching pre-k at her current school for 2 years. Prior to teaching at this school, she had taught as a physical education teacher and coach for 9 years, ran a childcare program for almost 15 years, taught early elementary school for 7 years, worked as an assistant principal for 7 years, and finally, took her current position. Ms Mason had been teaching pre-k at the same school for 21 years. Ms Schneider had been teaching at her current school for 7 years, and 5 of those were in pre-k. This was not her first experience as a pre-k teacher. She had begun her career as a pre-k teacher 22 years ago and taught at a different school in the same district for 7 years. She left the classroom for 8 years to start a family and returned to her current school as a third-grade teacher. She taught third grade for 2 years and then started the pre-k program at her school with a colleague who taught the bilingual pre-k class. Overall, these pre-k teachers had a range of teaching experiences, and each was identified as being successful in preparing their CLD pre-k students for success in their district’s elementary classrooms.

Data sources

Data were collected from five sources from September 2009 to May 2010 to capture how these teachers, in both their practices and statements about early education, attended to children’s individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs in relation to policymakers’ neoliberal reforms. First, each teacher was observed at least eight times over a 3-week period for 2 to 6 hours at a time. Field notes were taken at each observation and were transferred into a digital document within 24 hours after each visit (Emerson et al., 1995). Second, each teacher was then videotaped at least three times for 2 to 6 hours at a time over an additional 2-week time frame. Third, artifacts from each teacher’s classroom were collected, including lesson plans, school memos, teacher newsletters, handouts, and worksheets. Fourth, each teacher engaged in three semi-structured interviews (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002)—each lasting between 1 to 2 hours. Finally, to further confer the success of these teachers in readying their students for elementary school, the administrators who supervised these teachers were interviewed. For Ms Mason and Ms Schneider, their principals were interviewed, and for Ms Mould, her assistant principal was interviewed.

Data analysis

Traditional qualitative analytic methods were used to analyze the data (Erikson, 1986). First, all interviews, field notes, and videos were transcribed. They were then analyzed deductively using a set of external codes that reflected the theoretical framework that framed this piece (Graue and Walsh, 1998). After this deductive analysis, an inductive analysis was conducted using a set of internal codes that reflected the researchers’ immersion in the data and represent that which came up in the data and did not fall under the external codes (Graue and Walsh, 1998).

Upon finishing the coding process and rereading the coded documents several more times, a set of themes was developed that reflected how these teachers, in their practices and statements about early education, attended to children’s individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs in relation to policymakers’ neoliberal reforms. These themes were success beyond the test, a little bit of culture, and where is the political? They were read against the text in search of contradictory evidence and refined through further analysis (Wolcott, 1994). In the end, four themes emerged from this analytic process—“Complexity in the Mundane,” “Success beyond the Test,” “Culture Tangentially,” and “Sort of Socio but not really Political”—and were transformed into this interpretive document (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003).

Limitations and issues of trustworthiness

This investigation addressed a limited set of issues in one school in district in one state in the United States (Yin, 2009). To enhance the trustworthiness of this piece, the strategies of member checking, triangulation, and peer debriefing were used (Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Stake, 1995).

Findings

Complexity in the mundane

The pre-k teachers in this study taught in a tightly organized system of instruction and assessment. While there were instances in each classroom where these teachers strategically resisted (Fenech and Sumsion, 2007) this pressure to conform (i.e. Ms Schneider following a sequence of instructional themes she developed over the course of the school year rather than the AC), their practices mirrored much of what these documents and artifacts wanted these teachers to teach. These acts of conformity demonstrate the subtlety of governance that exists with these teachers’ classrooms (Rose, 1999).

The most common example of this conformity was the implementation of routines such as morning work, calendar and songs, centers, and so on. Ms Mason pointed out that these routines help her class “build community, build responsibility, and teach them basic skills” (video interview, April 2010). From a developmentally appropriate perspective, routines offer “valuable learning opportunities” for children that can address a range of their developmental needs (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009: 40). For these pre-k teachers, their routines were complex acts of instruction in which they provided their students with learning experiences that addressed the knowledge and skills needed to help prepare them for academic success in elementary school.

For instance, Ms Schneider’s attendance activity illustrates how these pre-k teachers developed and/or reinforced their students’ academic as well as social and physical skills.

For their daily attendance activity, the students are to come up front and put a cube on a hook that is on a large piece of cardboard under a picture of them and their first names. To begin the routine, Ms. Schneider says, “I’m going to ask a tricky question to get you to come up and put your cube on your name. If you were wearing a shirt or pants that have a letter on them, come put your cube on the chart.” She adds, “The boys are to use green cubes and the girls red.” Thomas, a Chinese boy stands up and says, “I have a letter on my shirt,” and he comes up front. She says who else has letters on their shirts or their pants? Two more children come up and show her their letters on their clothes, Ms. Schneider acknowledges them, and they put their cube on the chart … This ritual continues with Tom counting the cubes with Ms. Schneider and the class so that they can check his work. They then talk about why Lauren is absent and then compare the number of girls to boys in the class. As they finish their daily attendance routine, they transition into the calendar routine and then sing songs that match the unit of study they’ve been working on that week. (Field Note, 4 November 2009)

Instructionally, this attendance routine depends on the students’ social interactions as a whole class, and it provides the opportunity for Ms Schneider to help her students form the intellectual habits to solve both academic and everyday problems.

From a political perspective, this routine addresses state and district policymakers’ expectations for academic development. The state pre-k content standards note that creating an attendance chart is a substantive activity that teaches children not only about numbers and counting but also about independence and responsibility. The AC for Ms Schneider’s school district states that creating and implementing a classroom-based daily attendance routine provides children with an authentic context for addressing counting and problem-solving skills. This type of routine also instructs children in the social as well as work-based expectations of schooling (Apple, 2004). By publicly identifying who is and is not at school, this routine informs students of the significance in being present at school. It demonstrates to each individual student how they are to participate in the school system in particular ways to show to their teacher as well as their classmates that they possess certain types of knowledge and skills.

Absent from these developmental, instructional, and political framings of this routine are the roles of children’s cultural backgrounds and the opportunity to question the sociopolitical framing of schooling. Their repetitive nature and political framing as academic learning opportunities create an institutional environment that displaces teachers’ “internal logics of expertise” in working with their students (Rose, 1999: 154). The sheer number of routines teachers engage in across the day also limits the space for culture to be the axis upon which these skills are learned as well as for the teacher and/or the students to question this sociopolitical framing of the education process (Rogoff, 2003).

This is not to say that the importance of these children’s cultural and linguistic differences are not acknowledged by state and district documents (i.e. the state standards note that it is important to have materials in the classroom that reflect children’s culture and background). Rather, these aspects of the children as learners are to be acknowledged in a way that helps them learn what is of value in this neoliberal framing of the schooling process. These teachers did find opportunities for resistance within their highly structured teaching environment, but their statements and acts of instruction typically fell short in pivoting their teaching of children’s individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs. Their struggles can be seen in the following three themes.

Success beyond the test

State and district policymakers defined success for these teachers through their ability to ready their students for kindergarten, and their administrators consistently framed each teacher as a professional who achieved this objective. Still, academic success was not these teachers’ only goal for their students. Rather, each saw it as their responsibility to create a safe learning environment that would foster their students’ potential as community members as well as foster an interest in participating in school. For instance, Ms Mason noted,

I believe that every child has huge potential, and what could be better than to develop that potential in that child. You have to think about how you are going to entice them to learn. How you are going to meet, first of all, their physical and sometimes their emotional needs, and you need to meet those needs before you can teach them academically. (Initial interview, September 2009)

For Ms Mason, her success as well as her students’ success depended on her ability to attend to students’ social, emotional, and personal needs.

As part of this social, emotional, and personal development, all three teachers stressed the importance of helping children become what Ms Schneider termed “good people.” Such a person is one who knows, “How to problem solve, how to verbally talk through issues. I want them to be responsible. I want them to be able to take a friend to the nurse if they’re hurt” (initial interview, October 2009). Tied with their ideas about developing these children into good citizens, these teachers believed that it was their responsibility to help their students develop what Ms Mould labeled, “A love of school” (final interview, February 2010). As Nieto (2002) points out, these pre-k teachers’ goals for their students frame learning as more than “simply a matter of transmitting knowledge,” and such skills are necessary so that children can “reflect, theorize, and create knowledge” that goes beyond the content embedded in each activity (p. 7). Even so, their goals for their students ultimately align with the goals of the neoliberal education system. This illuminates what Rose (1999) identifies as the strange coupling of power within these reforms for the children as well as the teachers. Success in this system implicitly teaches the students how to become life-long learners who gain the knowledge and skills needed to enter the marketplace so that they can become earners who narrate their lives through self-regulated “acts of choice in the world of goods” (Rose, 1999: 86). Such success in school and/or in life does not require children to understand their cultural background or develop a sociopolitical understanding of the education system in which they participate. For these teachers, their desire for their students to succeed in school and in life ultimately constricts the possibilities for them to adapt the system to the child. Instead, when exploring such issues as how they developed the cultural competency of the children in their classrooms, their statements and actions tend to align the child with the system.

Cultural tangentially

While one goal of CRT is to use children’s culture as a crucible for their development (Edwards, 2003), these teachers framed it more as a gift that was to be acknowledged and respected. Each came to know their students on a personal level. For instance, during her morning sign-in activity, which had the students sign their name sometime during morning centers to note they were in school, Ms Mason noted that

It’s a time where I sit and talk with the kids and find out what’s going on. I ask about their day and about what they did last night; those kinds of things. And they feel comfortable sharing that with me. (Final interview, October 2009)

These teachers also sought out support from their students’ families. Ms Mould noted, “I talk to parents about what they do with their children at home. I think just being more aware of the culture, to honor and respect the culture by including parts of their cultural traditions in what you do” (final interview, February 2010). These statements reflect these teachers’ positive attitude toward addressing their students’ cultural backgrounds, which Vaughan (2004) notes is an indicator of how culturally responsive these teachers will be in their instruction.

Still, their responses reflect the language of state and district documents. For instance, their state’s pre-k content standards frame culture, including the students’ home language, as part of who the learner is and should be accessed in helping them attain the knowledge and skills outlined in that document. With ELL, the state standards note that teachers should use their students’ primary language as a tool to help them gain the English language and literacy skills needed to learn the state’s standards. Their district’s AC mimics the state’s standards. Under the language arts domain, the AC suggests that teachers invite students’ families to share traditional tales from their own native cultures, and then through a shared writing activity, make a chart that documents various tales that are shared. These teachers engaged in multiple activities that reflect the expectations outlined in these standards. For example, Ms Schneider, whose 11 students⁶ speak eight different languages, noted,

I have all the parents come in and teach the kids about their culture. You know, just individual days they’ll come in. I think it’s very important that we appreciate everyone’s culture … I have a big family potluck for the winter holiday, and they’re all bringing traditional foods, and they’re dressing in traditional outfits, and come in. I welcome them any time, anytime they want to come in. (Final interview, December 2009)

To be clear, building a sense of community is important and is a necessary step by early educators so that their students develop the social and emotional security needed to learn in school (Stipek, 2001). However, in Ms Schneider’s statement as well as in policymakers’ neoliberal reforms, culture is something that is part of the learner that needs to be respected so the early educators can ensure their students’ school success. It is not the linchpin through which children learn (Fleer, 2006; Rogoff, 2003). Rather than use children’s cultural knowledge and experiences to shape their pedagogical decision-making in their classrooms, these teachers as well as policymakers’ reforms appear to frame culture as merely a characteristic that influences students’ choices and tastes as consumers. For instance, the state pre-k standards assert that students’ home cultures are to be used as tool to help them identify similarities and differences among each other, but ultimately, they are to learn the important customs, symbols, and celebrations that represent American beliefs and principles and contribute to a US national identity. Such a conception of culture ignores and/or silences the cultural discrimination and violence of the past and, instead, frames the education process through the individual (Nxumalo et al., 2011). As such, teachers are to recognize and respond to these cultural differences so that they can teach each student how to succeed as a learner, earner, and consumer within school and the larger society.

In terms of these pre-k teachers’ practices, Ms Mould noted that when thinking about culture in relation to the instructional activities she engaged in, “I don’t necessarily do anything different. I just might do a little bit more of it with those children. They might have a lesson presented, the same lesson presented to them in a couple of different ways” (final interview, February 2010). The goal for Ms Mould as well as the pre-k program in her state is to ensure her students achieve academic success, and while she is willing to do whatever it takes to help her students attain that objective, there seems to be a tension between striving for academic success and incorporating children’s cultural background in the process of instruction. For Ms. Mould, it appears that she prioritized teaching her students the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in school, which mimics what is outlined in state and district documents.

Sort of socio but not really political

Finally, the data revealed that Ms Schneider, Ms Mason, and Ms Mould struggled to cultivate their students’ sociopolitical understanding of their community so that they “better understand and critique their social position and context” (Ladson-Billings, 2006: 37). Instead, they often set out to foster an understanding of community that mimicked their state and district standards, which reflect the dominant White middle-class norms of the school system.

For instance, the state’s pre-k standards and the district’s AC, under the content area of social studies, address the notion of community through the constructs of consumers and producers. The state pre-k standards note that in learning about their community, children are to explore the roles and relationships of consumers and producers, and in doing so, they are to become aware that people produce services as well as goods. They are also to learn that their community benefits from many different people working in many different ways. These standards were translated into the teachers’ AC through lessons on community that have teachers showing their students photos of community workers and then discussing the ways in which these workers are the children’s friends. Additionally, the AC recommends that pre-k teachers schedule field trips to places where different community workers are employed so children can see them engaged in their work.

These teachers attended to these state and district expectations by having different family members come into each of their classrooms to discuss their roles in the community with their students. They also planned field trips to such places as the fire station and a local gardening store. While these acts addressed the state’s neoliberal conception of being a consumer and producer within the community, these teachers did not expand upon them to help raise their students’ consciousness of their social context and/or critique their positioning within it. Instead, they tried to create learning environments that reflected and responded to the realities in which their students lived. Ms Mould, who worked with low-income Latino/a children as well as recent refugees from various countries in Africa, noted, “Some of these children have seen a lot for their little first four years and we have to be sensitive to those needs” (initial interview, January 2010). So rather than problematize the neoliberal system of education or the structures/policies/politics shaping their students’ communities, these teachers sought out ways to make their students feel comfortable within their school environment.

An example of this sensitivity can be seen through Ms Mason openly challenging her administrators’ interest in putting in place a jail at her school’s annual Fall Carnival. The carnival was used as a vehicle to raise money for the school so they could purchase extra materials as well as hire assistants to support school personnel. As part of the carnival, the jail was to raise money by allowing people to put someone into jail for a specific amount of time for a fee. The person can then “post bail” to get out of jail early or just wait a certain amount of time to be released (e.g. 10 minutes). Ms Mason stopped this from happening because of her students’ personal experiences with jail. She explained,

I said to my administrator that I have a very hard time with this because I know what it’s like for my four-year-olds to go visit their parents in jail, and I said I know it takes them three days to get over it. I asked them what type of message are we sending to the students; that jail is fun? Because we’re having it at a festival and everybody is having fun? Is that what we want to say to our students? That’s part of their lives, and part of my job is to look at what my children bring to the classroom and accept that.

The school did not use the jail in their Fall Carnival, and Ms Mason’s actions exemplify how she understood the sociopolitical issues her students faced on a daily basis (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Still, Ms Mason as well as the other pre-k teachers did not step beyond protecting and respecting their students. They did not teach their students to question or critique the larger political or social community that creates the power dynamics in which they lived. Instead, each worked for change in their students’ lives through creating a comfortable learning environment that the children loved to be a part of so that they could teach them how to succeed in the larger system, which they were consistently successful at as teachers.

Discussion

The findings of this study make apparent that to prepare their students for kindergarten, these teachers engaged in instructional practices that prioritized policymakers’ neoliberal reforms over the histories, experiences, and expectations of their students and families. This is not to say these pre-k teachers ignored their students’ cultural and sociopolitical backgrounds. Instead of using their children’s cultural knowledge and experiences to shape their pedagogical decision-making, they used their students’ experiences to make them feel comfortable in their classroom. In doing so, these teachers appeared to frame such comfort as a necessary step their students had to take to develop a love of school. They saw this love of helping their students foster the attitude and skills needed to not only achieve academically but also persist in the larger education system. So rather than resist policymakers’ neoliberal reforms, these teachers used their students’ personal histories to help them conform to this education system.

Others have documented the struggles of teachers in fostering students’ sociopolitical awareness in their instruction (e.g. Morrison et al., 2008; Young, 2010) as well as the constraints policymakers’ neoliberal reforms place on teachers who attempt to attend to the whole child (e.g. Gay, 2010; Howes, 2010; Nxumalo et al., 2011). This piece adds to these conversations by demonstrating how even if early educators are able to work beyond these neoliberal reforms and begin to address the cultural and sociopolitical needs of their students so they succeed in school, the priorities of the neoliberal system appear to remain unchanged. Meaning that, these publicly funded early education systems prepare a nation’s future citizenry in such a way that they will frame their lives through such neoliberal ideals as the power of the market and the importance of consumption and production.

These findings occurred in very specific context that had policies in place that created particular norms of practice, and for those early educators and early childhood programs that are not supported by the government, spaces for critique and goals that go beyond academic success can and still do exist. However, for those programs that are publicly funded, they are becoming more tightly controlled by policymakers’ reforms and their success is increasingly tied to their students’ academic achievement (e.g. “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review of Head Start,” Executive Order No. 13563, 76 F.R. 3821, 2011). Additionally, 28 states in the United States that educate 74% of that nation’s students have, without any prodding from the federal government, adopted policies that require students to pass an exit exam to graduate from high school (Dietz, 2010). As such, these policies in the United States that align ECE programs with K-12 education systems creates a link between what happens in these programs and how they are preparing their students for assessments that await them in the later grades.

Implications

For those who want to move beyond these neoliberal reforms, opportunities for change do exist (e.g. Nxumalo et al., 2011). To do so requires early educators, advocates, teacher educators, and so on to remember that these policies merely project a way of life that limits how governance, teaching, and child development are to be viewed (Mayer et al., 2008; Rose, 1996). As Ladson-Billings (2006) argues, educators need to think beyond specific instances of instruction and instead reflect upon how they think about teaching and their conceptions of pedagogical practice—be it with CLD children or in a high-stakes early education context. For instance, Ms Mason’s rejection of her administrators’ proposal for the use of a jail at the annual school fundraiser illuminates a sociopolitical awareness of her students’ lives. Yet, she did not transfer this awareness into her instruction with her students so that they might question or critique the sociopolitical context in which they were being raised. This missed opportunity could be the result of her conceptions of what her students are ready to learn, or it may reflect how the discourses of learning in a high-stakes neoliberal early education system constrain her ability to connect the sociopolitical realities of children with the instruction she engages in with them in the classroom. Interrogating her beliefs might have helped her envision a way to respond to this strange new coupling of power within the pre-k system in which she works so that she not only respects her students’ sociopolitical context but also incorporates their realities into the lessons she teaches them (Rose, 1999).

Another way to become aware of such openings is to become attentive to what is being left out of these conversations politically, culturally, and practically surrounding the core components of the early education process. Politically, these reforms embrace culture so that citizens will either reinterpret or replace their culture’s unique features through notions of consumerism. Individuals are to reposition these cultural aspects of who they are (including their linguistic diversity) so that they can become life-long learners who gain the knowledge and skills needed to enter the marketplace so that they can become earners who narrate their lives through self-regulated acts of consumption (Rose, 1999).

To instructionally counter these acts of cultural and linguistic coercion, the three teachers in this study could have constructed an investigation or project (e.g. Katz and Chard, 1994) around an issue that is of utmost concern to these students in their community. Implementing such a project requires the students to not only learn academic skills but also apply those skills in a way that changes their everyday lives; this is a project teacher educators could ask their teachers-in-training to complete as well. Coming up with such a project may require an action research project by the teacher (Souto-Manning and Mitchell, 2010), and it necessitates a bit of caution to ensure that a glaring issue for one child (e.g. an incarcerated parent) does not push out other sociopolitical issues that affect many others within the classroom. Nevertheless, such a project could bring in the unique cultural and linguistic aspects of the children’s local community to be part of the solution in addressing the issue under investigation. Furthermore, bringing in local voices could possibly create spaces for the silenced cultural discrimination and violence of the past found in that community to resurface and be addressed by the teacher alongside her students and their families (Nxumalo et al., 2011).

Politically, challenging or working against the neoliberal framings of early education are the most difficult and possibly most dangerous acts for practicing public educators. Any type of resistance or change within their instruction could have negatively impacted how these three pre-k teachers’ administrators viewed the effectiveness of their teaching. In this study, each teacher was evaluated on her ability to provide all of her students with certain skills and knowledge found in the AC that was to prepare them to perform in the later grades. Achieving this goal not only gave these teachers status among their administrators but also ensured they had employment within the system. Thus, any attempt to counter neoliberal reforms could ultimately cost teachers their jobs.

Finally, those who are interested in countering or altering these neoliberal reforms must recognize, as McLeod (2001) points out, that any proposed solution or counter argument has its “own dangers and disciplinary effects” (p. 280). Moreover, the reality for many public early educators in the United States is that the amount of expectations they have to meet in their teaching is overwhelming. Whereby, any suggestion for change should strive to inspire rather than overwhelm teachers so that they become vested in reform rather than overwhelmed with work and or guilt about being effective educators.

Future research

While this investigation addressed a limited set of issues using a particular conception of instruction (CRT), these findings point to a need for continued research in examining how international, national, state, and local neoliberal reforms affect publicly funded early education programs and their teachers. A comparison between teaching contexts that do and do not have neoliberal reforms in place would provide insight into what space does exist for teachers who strive to implement practices that attend to and empower children—be it CRT, funds of knowledge (Moll and Gonzalez, 2004), or other theories of practice (e.g. Edwards, 2006). Moreover, there is a need for studies that evaluate the impact of teachers who employ culturally relevant theories of instruction in their classrooms on preparing children for the academic demands of elementary school. Such data would add an important piece to the puzzle of understanding how best to align ECE with K-12 education systems in a manner that allows teachers to attend to children’s individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of this journal, the anonymous reviewers, and the Friendly Frogs Learning Community for their thoughtful suggestions in strengthening this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation and its Small Grants Program.

Notes

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