06/03/2009

The Politics of Child Care

The response to last Friday's ExchangeEveryDay ("Yes We Can!"), highlighted the complexity of politics in the early childhood arena. To begin with, when it comes to national politics, our field is as divided as the country itself. In Exchange Insta Polls on the last three U.S. presidential elections, the combined results have been relatively evenly divided between the Republican and Democratic candidates.

When you take a closer look at our profession, there are no obvious dividing lines. Some respondents on Friday seemed to suggest that those in the for-profit sector are conservatives and those in the non-profit sector are liberals. However, while there may be a slight bias along these lines, we have encountered many strong liberals operating for-profit child care companies and many extremely conservative individuals operating non-profit centers. In the non-profit sector alone, people working in religious-affiliated, Head Start, military, Montessori, United Way, government operated, and community programs have widely diverse political perspectives.

This great diversity makes for the richness of our profession, but it also explains why our field has been so unsuccessful in uniting behind any specific funding and regulatory initiatives.

Given the complex politics of child care, it would be counterproductive for Exchange to try to promote any one political point of view. In fact, we challenge those who think we have a bias to read the 1,860 past issues of ExchangeEveryDay on display on our web site, or the 2,014 past articles from Exchange magazine in our online articles database. We would be surprised if anyone could attribute a political bias to more than 5 or 6 of these 3,874 articles.

But that does not mean we shy away from sharing perspectives of others. And, when we share views from people with strong perspectives, we expect to continue to stir up some healthy discussions. We welcome everyone's perspectives.

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