Child Care Justice

Join the authors of this book in starting a movement of hope and possibility for an antiracist child care and early childhood education system. This volume disrupts mental models regarding where the work of early care and education began—with enslaved African women—and how the stigma of that beginning relegates present-day child care workers to a low-status, low-wage field of practice. Expert authors contribute their wisdom, experience, research, and practical knowledge on issues related to equity and social justice. They examine the historical, political, economic, educational, and cultural systems that continue to oppress early care educators and, by extension, racialized children and children in poverty. The interrogation and litigation of past and current issues and grievances of injustice and inequities in the field are addressed, while threading the needle of social justice and critical consciousness throughout the chapters. Child Care Justice calls on educators, activists, and their allies to rethink, reimagine, and reconstruct a more equitable and just system for all who receive and provide care to our nation’s youngest children. When historically marginalized child care workers are held in high esteem, then, and only then, will America live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all.

Book Features:

• Centers the historic and current oppression of Black people in the United States as foundational to the disregard for child care workers today.
• Uses Paulo Freire’s critical consciousness framework to guide readers to see, analyze, and act.
• Calls for a multiracial coalition of activists for racial justice, gender justice, and economic justice.

Maurice Sykes is the executive director of the Early Childhood Leadership Institute in Washington, DC, and a senior associate at M. Russell & Associates. Kyra Ostendorf is an early childhood educator, publisher of Free Spirit Publishing, and former vice president of education at Kaplan Early Learning Company.

“This book challenges us to take stock of where we’ve been to figure how we might move forward. It challenges us to think, to analyze—to understand and plan—and then to take action to transform the system of care for young children in this country…The roadmap has been drawn, but it requires inspired and knowledgeable advocates to implement. Read, be inspired, build community, and take up the mantle for change.”
—From the Foreword by Barbara T. Bowman, Irving B. Harris Professor, Erikson Institute