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.

“ Child Care Justice is a soul-fulfilling book, one that urges vigilance in an effort to bolster ECCE teachers and advocates so that power, rightly, returns to those for whom it is intended: teachers, families, and children in ECCE settings.”

—Teachers College Record

“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

“This groundbreaking, well-researched book powerfully reveals how deeply entrenched the inequities of child care are, and why our traditional efforts have failed to achieve quality programs for children of poverty and Black and brown children who most need them. It raised my consciousness of the pervasiveness of white privilege and the deep roots of racism that created unjust child care, defeating all our efforts to achieve quality programs and equity for educators and families. Child Care Justice should serve as a beacon to all teacher educators, guide the work of professional organizations, and move us all to disrupt the systems that sustain inequities.”
—Diane Trister Dodge, early childhood curriculum specialist; founder, Teaching Strategies

“The authors of this timely book root our nation's failure to provide the essential public good of early child care and education in our foundational system of racialized slavery. Each carefully curated chapter provides the intersectional analytical tools necessary to understand the historic barriers to a high-quality and accessible child care system in America. Not content to just analyze the problem, the authors provide us with essential reading on the strategies for action to achieve child care justice for children, workers, and parents alike.”
—Dorian T. Warren, co-president, Community Change

Contents

Foreword Barbara T. Bowman  vii

Acknowledgments  x

Introduction: Is This the Moment for a Movement?  1
Maurice Sykes

1.  Wet Nurses, Nannies, and Mammies  9
Maurice Sykes

2.  Liberatory Education: We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For  20
Alexis Jemal and Sarah Ross Bussey

3.  Child Care Justice, A Human Right  48
Michael Gramling

4.  From a Pedagogy of Poverty to a R.I.C.H.E.R. Framework  70
Iheoma U. Iruka

5.  Broken Promises, Power, and Privilege  87
Rebecca Berlin and Kyra Ostendorf

6.  Preparing Teachers to Deal with Race, Culture, and Hegemony  102
Ed Greene, Hakim M. Rashid, James C. Young

7.  The Tomorrow Builders: A Case Study of Systems Change  124
Joey Saunders

8.  Child Care Justice, Lessons from #BlackLivesMatter  149
Denisha Jones

9.  Toward Building a Child Care Workers Matter Movement  163
Maurice Sykes

About the Editors and Contributors  181

Name Index  186

Subject Index  191