Critical Examinations of Quality in Early Education and Care ― Regulation, Disqualification, and Erasure

Quality rating systems discourses and practices are increasingly dominating early childhood care and education around the globe. These rating systems are constructed with the assumption that universally appropriate environments can be constructed for all those who are younger. This deterministic, ratings, and measurement oriented perspective is consistent with neoliberal discourses that privilege competition, accountability, consumer materialism, and notions such as human capital; this contemporary neoliberal condition does not support concern for the common good, democracy, equity, justice, or diversity (unless the support can facilitate new forms of capitalist gains). Ultimately, this is not a positive situation for those who are younger. The chapters in this book have two goals: (1) to provide the reader with an opportunity to engage with some of the specific problems that result from putting forward ‘quality’ as a dominant construct, and (2) to generate conversations and locations from diverse knowledges and multiple ways of being that could lead to the rethinking of quality, understandings of quality as a narrowing construct/practice, and/or going beyond (and outside of) notions of quality.

Gaile S. Cannella is an independent scholar and series editor for Childhood Studies (formerly Rethinking Childhood) and Post-Anthropocentric Inquiry (Peter Lang). She held the Velma E. Schmidt Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Studies, University of North Texas and was tenured professor at Arizona State University-Tempe and Texas A&M University-College Station. Published in English, Korean, and Spanish, her books include: Deconstructing Early Childhood Education; Critical Qualitative Research Reader (with Shirley Steinberg), an American Education Studies Association Critics Choice Book Award winner in 2012; and Critical Qualitative Inquiry (2015, with Michelle Salazar Perez and Penny A. Pasque).
Dr. Cannella has published in a range of journals including Qualitative Inquiry and Cultural Studies-Cultural Methodologies.
Michelle Salazar Perez is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood at New Mexico State University. She has been a practitioner in a variety of early childhood settings and coordinated an urban education student teaching program in Houston, Texas. Her research uses marginalized feminist perspectives and critical qualitative methodologies to examine contemporary performances of neoliberalism within public policy.
I-Fang Lee is Senior Lecturer of Early Childhood Education and Education Policy Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests focus on contemporary issues relating to changes and reforms in early childhood care and education, constructions of Asian childhoods, and global knowledge on appropriate pedagogical practices in the early
years. Lee’s recent research projects focus on early childhood care and education reforms concerning issues of equity.