LAUSR

The field of Early Childhood Education, which in the United States typically includes children from 3 years of age to 7 or 81, is today rife with pressures, contradictions, challenges and resistance in the form of local organizing, grass-roots movements, transformational practices and critical analyses and projects. It is a time when destructive neoliberal policies, promising and problematic government legislation and the contested implementation of national curriculum standards have resulted in a panoply of standardized and other tests2 used to (mis)label young children and rate their teachers in order to determine their salaries in the name of ‘accountability’. It is a time when the historic failure to educate many children of Color, children from low-income communities and emergent bilinguals3 has inspired an outpouring of deficit rationales, parent-blaming and ... more testing as well as anti-racist projects and culturally relevant and bilingual curricula that foreground children’s strengths and prepare them for valued school literacies and beyond. Advocates for these disruptive projects and curricula point to discrimination as systemic and demand not only diversity but equity and justice. It is a time when calls for a renewal of play and developmentally appropriate practices have been, on the one hand, drowned out by an emphasis on ‘teaching to the test’ and ‘college and career readiness’ while, on the other, they have been critiqued as culturally situated and grounded in White, middle class, English-only norms that privilege such practices as ‘universal’. It is a time when the status quo is challenged by new technologies, new literacies, transformative and critical practices and perspectives and innovative programs for children and for teachers and teacher candidates that engage them with families, while teacher deprofessionalization, privatization and funding challenges consume energies. This special issue of Early Years is a small effort to generate conversations about what is happening in our field in the US, to analyze critically where we are and to help us chart where we might go and what we might do. It is also an opportunity to share some counternarratives to the dominant narratives promulgated by many politicians, education officials and so-called education reformers and accepted by some, convinced that narrow norms of appropriate practice, testing, accountability and the curtailed school achievement of children of Color, those from low-income communities and emergent bilinguals are just ‘common sense’. These counternarratives are shared in the articles collected in this issue, some about transformational analyses and projects that have created innovative perspectives and practices and some detailing critical analyses and projects that have gone beyond to explore issues of power,