Important public policy decisions are made in a variety of institutional settings in the United States, and this decentralization gives policy advocates an incentive to focus on the venue in which they are most likely to be successful. The phenomenon of venue shopping has long been recognized as a crucial element of the policymaking process, but less attention has been paid to its long-term consequences.Footnote ¹ Recent scholarship on policy feedback, however, suggests that successful venue shopping may alter the terrain on which subsequent decisions are made. Advocates’ ability to achieve their objectives in a particular setting may affect temporally distant developments by creating constituencies with a stake in existing arrangements, in terms both of the government officials who are granted jurisdiction over policy decisions and of the program beneficiaries with a stake in the choices these officials make.

This article assesses the long-term consequences of venue shopping by tracing the evolution of American preschool education. In December 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed a bill that would have dramatically expanded the role of the national government in this policy area. Preschool advocates shifted gears, experiencing greater success at the state level and expanding the reach of less comprehensive national programs. The entrenchment of these programs influenced subsequent congressional debates over preschool education, as the officials who ran the programs and the constituencies who benefited from them appeared before Congress to defend the status quo. Thus the evolution of American preschool education suggests that successful venue shopping can affect the future possibilities for policy change.

VENUE SHOPPING AND POLICY FEEDBACK

Scholars often describe the United States as a “laggard” where social policies developed later, grew more slowly, and are less generous than corresponding programs in the advanced industrial democracies of Europe. Some attribute the distinctive shape of American social policy to the degree to which American political institutions diffuse power.Footnote ² The United States is a “federal state that divides authority and gives legislatures and courts pivotal policymaking roles.”Footnote ³ This decentralized structure impedes the adoption of social policies because it gives opponents of policy initiatives multiple opportunities to block them. Opponents can thwart an initiative by succeeding at a single veto point, but its supporters must clear every hurdle placed before them.Footnote ⁴

In considering the institutional hypothesis, it is important to recognize that decentralization is a double-edged sword. The dispersal of political authority provides multiple veto points for opponents of a reform, but each of these settings is also a point of access for supporters. Frustrated in one venue, reformers can try to achieve their goals in another setting. After losing a congressional battle, for example, advocates can turn to the executive branch or to the state or federal courts. Those who object to a court ruling can turn to the legislative process. Policy issues may be assigned to any of a variety of institutions, and “there are no immutable rules that spell out which institutions in society must be charged with making which decisions.”Footnote ⁵ Decentralization can therefore lead to venue shopping, in which advocates focus on the institutional setting in which they feel they are most likely to experience success.

What are the long-term consequences of venue shopping? If reformers achieve their objectives in a given institutional setting, does their success affect what is possible in other venues? To answer these questions, it is necessary to adopt a developmental perspective that is attentive to how political processes play out over considerable periods of time.Footnote ⁶ This perspective suggests that public policies function both as the outcomes of political processes and as something that shapes those processes. The existing policy repertoire has a dynamic impact on policymaking, serving as a “vital force shaping the alternatives perceived and the policies adopted.”Footnote ⁷ Policymaking is an iterative process, and scholars must consider both the short- and long-term causes of policy change.

A core claim of the developmental perspective is the significance of policy feedback, the notion that “policies with specific qualities can produce social effects that reinforce their own stability.”Footnote ⁸ One form of policy feedback is the empowerment of social groups with a stake in the policy’s maintenance. The adoption of a policy can facilitate the organization and the empowerment of its beneficiaries, and these constituencies may protect the policy against attack and press for its extension. Groups that reach a certain size are politically powerful, and even policymakers who prefer another policy arrangement may feel pressure to accommodate the groups that benefit from existing arrangements.Footnote ⁹ Thus the political power of program beneficiaries can become a source of stability that constrains the options that policymakers possess. To illustrate the impact of policy feedback and explain the persistence of a particular arrangement, it is necessary to determine who is invested in a specific policy and how that investment is sustained over time.Footnote ¹⁰ The emergence of politically active beneficiaries makes the retrenchment of existing policies difficult.Footnote ¹¹ In contrast, reforms that do not mobilize a supporting coalition may not have a long shelf life.Footnote ¹²

Policy feedback implies that successful venue shopping may have long-term consequences. Constituencies that benefit from the decisions made in a specific institutional setting may work to ensure that future decisions are also made in that venue, because shifting the locus of decision-making responsibility to another setting may introduce an element of uncertainty that puts their previous gains at risk. Government officials with jurisdiction over a program may also work to preserve the status quo. These actors may be elected officials who view existing programs as an opportunity to credit claim or program administrators who want to protect their bureaucratic turf. As a result, successful venue shopping may affect future policymaking by causing the “filling up” or the “preemption” of a policy space.Footnote ¹³ Officials who favor policy change may find their options constrained by what previously transpired in other venues.

American federalism is an appropriate arena in which to examine the feedback effects of venue shopping. Federalism has long affected the making of social policy.Footnote ¹⁴ Many policies have traditionally fallen under the jurisdiction of states and localities, and recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented state resurgence in terms of institutional capacity, policy responsibility, and political power.Footnote ¹⁵ Reformers who are shopping for a favorable venue frequently turn to the states, sometimes as an arena in which to begin their campaign and sometimes after being stymied at the national level.

When policies are established at the state or local level, officials with jurisdiction over them may defend their authority against encroachment by their counterparts at the national level. State and local officials value money and authority, and once they exercise control over a policy arena they may be loath to give it up to actors in another institutional venue. Like program beneficiaries, state and local officials may become ardent defenders of the status quo. This dynamic may limit the possibility of policy change by forcing reformers to overcome the opposition of the policymakers empowered by existing arrangements.

An important difference between program beneficiaries and government officials is their relative electoral clout. There is an inherent electoral logic embedded within the policy feedback concept. The groups empowered by existing policy arrangements, whether they are senior citizens defending Social Security or veterans empowered by the GI Bill, are constituencies to whom elected officials must appeal if they wish to win reelection.Footnote ¹⁶ Advocating the retrenchment or elimination of the groups’ preferred programs can put a candidate at electoral risk. State and local officials may not be as politically powerful, but it is important to remember that members of Congress represent geographically defined districts, giving them an electoral incentive to accommodate the preferences of state and local officials. Frayed relations can lead to a charge that a representative or senator has “lost touch” with his or her district or state.

In sum, successful venue shopping at the state level may have important long-term consequences. Once state officials gain jurisdiction over a program, they may attempt to maintain their authority, thereby constraining future possibilities for policy reform. The remainder of this article examines this possibility by tracing the evolution of American preschool education, and its analysis suggests that such a dynamic occurred. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, preschool advocates were unable to achieve their most ambitious goals at the national level. They shifted their attention to the state level, where several states initiated or expanded public preschool programs, and lobbied for less ambitious congressional initiatives. When national officials revisited preschool education in the late 1980s and 1990s, the constituencies that benefited from existing programs objected to initiatives that attempted to expand the role of the national government. Program beneficiaries and state officials generally favored the extension of preschool programs, but they were skeptical of proposals that affected their existing prerogatives.Footnote ¹⁷

THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN PRESCHOOL EDUCATION

In examining preschool education, this article emphasizes a specific subset of programs that often fall under the broader heading of child care or early-childhood care and education.Footnote ¹⁸ Preschools include “programs offered under public and private education auspices or providing compensatory education under special legislation, usually serve children from age 2–3 to compulsory school entry, are largely half-day or cover the normal school day … and cover the normal school year.”Footnote ¹⁹ These programs share an educational component, but it is difficult to overstate their diversity. Preschool education in the United States encompasses a kaleidoscopic array of organizations and funding streams that has been characterized as a “hodgepodge,” a “mishmash,” and an “uneven patchwork.”Footnote ²⁰ This highly decentralized sector is marked by an institutional pluralism that includes Head Start, public school prekindergartens, schools housed in religious institutions, schools housed in private schools and private homes, and various other programs in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Further complicating matters, the public-sector programs are administered at the national, state, and local levels.

Examining the evolution of this decentralized and fragmented policy arena provides two analytical advantages. One advantage of examining preschool education is that it is especially well suited to assessing the core claims of a policy development approach. On several occasions since the late 1960s, members of Congress have debated the appropriate role of the national government in preschool provision. The debates surrounded such legislative proposals as the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, the Child and Family Services Act of 1975, the Child Care Act of 1979, Smart Start: The Community Collaborative for Early Childhood Development Act of 1988, and various initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s.Footnote ²¹ These recurrent debates provide analytical leverage over the questions of constituency organization and empowerment that lie at the heart of the developmental perspective. Changes over time in the identities and the positions of key actors would suggest the impact of policy feedback, whereas stability along these dimensions would suggest that such a dynamic did not occur. In addition, preschool education, like other programs advanced by children’s advocates during the twentieth century, highlights the enduring impact of federalism.Footnote ²² This component of preschool education makes it possible to investigate the potential long-term impact of venue shopping.

A second advantage of examining preschool education is that it provides an opportunity to reassess the claims made by policy development scholars. Existing research tends to focus on “those prominent moments of contention and change about which so much is written.”Footnote ²³ Standard topics include the New Deal programs of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s, with a corresponding emphasis on Social Security and health care.Footnote ²⁴ Many of these accounts make general claims about social policymaking in the United States, and to evaluate those claims it is essential to extend the frame of analysis across time and policy arenas. This article examines a time frame, the early 1970s to the present, and a policy arena, preschool education, which have received less scholarly attention.

The value of the political science concepts emphasized here lies in their ability to provide a common analytical framework through which the historical complexities of social policy can be examined. Constructing and testing general claims about processes of long-term policy development promises to develop “a genuinely analytical history” that is attentive to substantively and theoretically challenging questions of temporality and periodicity.Footnote ²⁵ The complex world of political actors described by political science scholarship might also help political historians develop fresh approaches and frameworks for the study of the policymaking process.Footnote ²⁶ Drawing on social scientific questions, propositions, theories, and methods might enable political historians to produce problem-oriented, wide-scope work “without any sacrifice of their grounding in the particularities of time and place.”Footnote ²⁷

This article assesses the long-term consequences of venue shopping in three steps. First, it examines the events of 1971, when Congress passed and President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. This legislation would have mandated the national provision of a wide range of educational, nutritional, and health services for preschool children. Even though Congress did not override the president’s veto, this episode has been characterized as a “watershed event.”Footnote ²⁸ The early 1970s more generally have been called “the high-water mark” in efforts to establish public responsibility for the education and care of young children.Footnote ²⁹ Existing scholarship rightly acknowledges the significance of Nixon’s veto but underestimates its short- and long-term consequences. The veto is a critical juncture. It provoked responses in alternate institutional venues that provided the basic framework within which American preschool education subsequently evolved.

In assessing the impact of critical junctures, scholars distinguish between their “aftermath” and their “heritage.”Footnote ³⁰ The aftermath of a critical juncture includes its immediate or short-term consequences. The second step in our assessment is therefore to examine the reactions and counterreactions that occurred in Congress and at the state level in the 1970s. The heritage of a critical juncture refers to its long-term consequences and the extent to which it affects temporally distant developments. The third step in our analysis is therefore to examine the debates of the late 1980s through the present to assess how the responses to Nixon’s veto and the dynamics of federalism affected the prospects for policy change.

A CRITICAL JUNCTURE: THE COMPREHENSIVE CHILD DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1971

In the 1950s and 1960s, several forces helped place early childhood education on the national political agenda. The first force was demographic. The mothers of young children entered the labor force in large numbers, and the employment rate of married women with children under six increased from less than 12 percent in 1950 to more than 30 percent in 1970.Footnote ³¹ This demographic trend increased demand for programs serving young children. Day care had traditionally been seen as a charity for poor single mothers but was increasingly viewed as a “socially legitimate “need” of normal families, and even a potential responsibility of the state.”Footnote ³² The second force was intellectual. Developmental psychologists Benjamin Bloom and J. McVicker Hunt challenged the prevailing notion that intelligence was fixed at birth.Footnote ³³ They argued that carefully controlled stimulation was critical to children’s mental, physical, and emotional growth during the early years of life. Other forces, including the women’s movement and an interest in using day care to promote welfare reform, galvanized interest in preschool education. These varied forces prompted a debate over the proper role of the national government in providing preschool education, in part because they converged in a political environment in which expansionary government programs were common.Footnote ³⁴

After holding a few hearings in the late 1960s, Congress devoted considerable energy to preschool services in 1971. Its efforts centered on the Comprehensive Child Development Act.Footnote ³⁵ Backed by a bipartisan coalition, Senator Walter Mondale (D-Minn.) and Representative John Brademas (D-Ind.) introduced the act in their respective houses of Congress. The bill represented a sharp break with the past. Previous preschool programs, including the nursery schools authorized during the Great Depression and the child-care centers funded during World War II, had been temporary and did not attempt to provide universal access.Footnote ³⁶ In contrast, the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971 sought to create a permanent national framework for the universal provision of educational, nutritional, and health services for preschool-age children. The original Senate language argued that comprehensive child development programs “should be available as a matter of right to all children regardless of economic, social, and family background.”Footnote ³⁷ Supporters portrayed the bill as a desirable response to changes affecting growing numbers of disadvantaged and middle-income families. They also noted that enrollment would be voluntary in an effort to preempt charges that the bill proposed an excessive role for the national government. Opponents of the proposal argued that its provisions violated parental autonomy and compared the child development program to policies implemented in the Soviet Union and in China. Critics also argued that the child development program would be very costly and that the country could not afford it.Footnote ³⁸

Supporters added the child development program to a bill extending the life of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which was scheduled to expire on June 30, 1971. Opponents of the child development program, supported by the Nixon administration, unsuccessfully attempted to remove it from the bill and then introduced amendments that would have narrowed its scope. All of the amendments were defeated, and the bill passed the Senate on September 9. Three weeks later, the House passed an OEO bill that included similar child development provisions. The legislation proceeded to a conference committee, and the conference report received significant support in both houses of Congress. It passed the Senate by a 63–17 roll call vote on December 2 and earned a 211–187 majority in the House five days later. On December 9, however, President Nixon vetoed the bill, harshly criticizing the child development program. The tone of the veto surprised many preschool advocates. Nixon invoked issues of family autonomy, administrative control, and cost, using colorful language to warn against the dangers of “communal approaches to child rearing.”Footnote ³⁹ The conference report returned to the Senate, and thirteen senators who had previously voted for the bill changed their votes. As a result, the Senate fell seven votes shy of the two-thirds required for a veto override.

The near-passage of the Comprehensive Child Development Act is a critical juncture in the history of American preschool education. The tone of the president’s veto message indicated that a comprehensive national program would not be established in the near future, so preschool advocates engaged in venue shopping. They turned to the states, convincing state officials to adopt less expansive programs, and lobbied for the expansion of two less comprehensive programs at the national level. Their actions illustrate how the decentralization of political power in the American political system provides many points of access for those who want to change the existing policy repertoire.

AFTERMATH: CONGRESSIONAL STALEMATE AND STATE ACTIVITY

After the president’s veto, preschool supporters continued their congressional campaign to enact a national child development program, but they made little progress. These setbacks at the national level heightened the visibility of preschool education, however, and federalism enabled the reformers to continue their battle in statehouses across the country. According to Barbara Finberg, an associate of the Carnegie Foundation, the veto increased “some persons’ interest in child development” and illustrated “the need to work more at the local level to increase the citizens’ understanding of what was happening [and] what child development was about.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Preschool supporters turned to the states as they sought a more favorable venue for their cause, drawing the lesson that they needed “to pay a lot more attention to state governments than we have in the past.”Footnote ⁴¹ Working through such organizations as the early childhood task force of the Education Commission of the States, they successfully fomented state-level interest in preschool education.

During the twelve months after Nixon’s veto, nine states took major steps to improve the administration and coordination of programs for the very young. Between November 1971 and May 1973, a dozen states created offices of child development, the purpose of which was to plan and coordinate the delivery of services to young children and their families.Footnote ⁴² William Smith, a lawyer working with the Children’s Defense Fund, described this administrative reform as “one of the good things that’s come out of the veto.”Footnote ⁴³ It illustrates the venue shopping that occurred after Nixon’s veto.

In 1972, the Education Commission of the States, backed by a grant from the Children’s Bureau, launched its Early Childhood Project. One goal of this endeavor was to “provide assistance to selected target states in initiating or expanding their early childhood programs.” When the commission solicited proposals, twenty-nine states asked to be considered for selection as target states, an enthusiastic response that illustrated the state-level interest in preschool education.Footnote ⁴⁴ This interest bore substantial fruit during the 1974 legislative session. A survey of state education agencies, legislative service agencies, school board associations, and teacher organizations is illustrative. It listed state legislation, projects, and studies affecting the very young enacted in 1974. Seventeen states established preschool projects or began preschool activity in 1974. This count does not include bills that were vetoed, failed, carried over, or that fell into related categories (e.g., “early childhood”), so it provides a conservative estimate of state-level activity. Even such a conservative estimate, however, indicates the breadth of state action after Nixon’s veto.Footnote ⁴⁵

By 1974, eleven states provided public funding for prekindergarten programs. It was also common for states to provide services to young children who were too young to attend primary school. At least thirty-eight states offered “pre-first-graders” such state-supported services as medical and dental care, nutritional programs, and special programs for the handicapped.Footnote ⁴⁶ Providing medical, dental, and nutritional services resonated with the comprehensive approach of the proposal that Nixon had vetoed. In contrast to that bill, however, state programs typically provided services to young children with learning disabilities and young children living in rural areas with limited preschool services. The states generally shied away from making preschool services universally available.

Congress revisited the preschool education issue in 1975, when Senator Mondale and Representative Brademas introduced the Child and Family Services Act. This bill was nearly as ambitious as the one that Nixon vetoed, but it also attempted to respond to the objections voiced by the president and others. Supporters of the Child and Family Services Act characterized it as voluntary and parent-dominated in an effort to address concerns that it would encroach on parental autonomy.Footnote ⁴⁷ The bill called the family “the primary and the most fundamental influence on children,” and its main objective was to “build upon and strengthen the role of the family.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Supporters also emphasized that children would enroll in a federally supported program only with parental permission. For various reasons, however, Congress rejected the Child and Family Services Act.

Three important factors contributed to the bill’s defeat. First, the political and economic environment had changed dramatically between 1971 and 1975. The 1970s witnessed declining faith in government programs, and a struggling economy militated against the establishment of large and costly public programs.Footnote ⁴⁹ The economy deteriorated “to the point where all ambitious social policy ventures were doubtful undertakings.”Footnote ⁵⁰ President Gerald Ford pledged to hold the line on public spending, and preschool advocates recognized that the child development program they envisioned would be a prime candidate for his veto pen. Even so, they pressed ahead in the hope that their efforts would draw increased attention to the issue of preschool education.Footnote ⁵¹

A second important factor was an energetic opposition campaign. While preschool supporters had their share of critics in 1971, they faced a veritable onslaught four years later. A central weapon in the opposition campaign was an anonymous flyer that leveled a series of inaccurate charges, claiming that the bill would give children the right to sue their parents for asking them to take out the garbage and would prevent parents from giving their children a religious education. The charges sparked such an outcry that individuals on both sides of the debate urged lawmakers to set them aside and focus on the actual merit of the proposal.Footnote ⁵²

The debate over the Child and Family Services Act also sparked a fissure within the early childhood advocacy community. This third factor is important because it illustrates how the constituencies favored by an existing arrangement will fight to defend the status quo. Teachers unions had played a peripheral role during the debate over the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, but they were more active during the debates of the mid-1970s. In fact, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) proposed the creation of a national preschool system. One might have expected preschool advocates to welcome the support of the teachers union, but they did not.

The AFT proposal grew, in part, out of a concern that the number of teachers outnumbered the number of available teaching jobs. When the AFT argued that the public schools should serve as the prime sponsor of a national preschool system, many early childhood educators resisted the proposal because they viewed it as a power grab.Footnote ⁵³ Rather than bringing together a stronger coalition in support of public preschool provision, the AFT proposal heightened existing tensions among supporters and drew heated criticism.Footnote ⁵⁴ The proposal inflamed a long-standing controversy among educational practitioners over the appropriate role of educational, social, and emotional content in preschool programs.Footnote ⁵⁵ It therefore divided preschool supporters into competing camps and contributed to the demise of the Child and Family Services Act.

Although comprehensive preschool legislation made little headway in Congress during the 1970s, two smaller national programs were expanded with little fanfare. Their growth further fragmented the preschool advocacy community. Head Start, a national program that distributes federal monies to various types of local community organizations, is the first program. It is a targeted program that serves disadvantaged young children and their families, providing a variety of social services to the families while preparing the children for primary education. Established as part of the War on Poverty in 1965, Head Start maintained a tenuous existence during its early years but was placed on surer footing during the 1970s.Footnote ⁵⁶

The second program is the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. Its origins date to 1954, when the federal tax code was revised to allow a tax deduction for specific employment-related dependent-care expenses. Gainfully employed women, widowers, and legally separated or divorced men were eligible. The Revenue Act of 1971 made any individual maintaining a household eligible, raised the deduction limit, modified the legal definition of a dependent, and raised the income level at which the deduction began to be phased out in an attempt to provide tax relief to middle- and low-income taxpayers. In 1975 and 1976, additional legislation nearly doubled the income level at which the deduction began to be phased out and replaced the deduction with a nonrefundable tax credit. It was believed that changing the deduction to a tax credit would expand its reach to taxpayers who did not itemize deductions and provide a greater benefit to taxpayers in the lower brackets.Footnote ⁵⁷

By the end of the decade, the preschool coalition was “hopelessly divided.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The development of state-level programs, combined with the expansions of Head Start and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, led members of this coalition to be skeptical of subsequent congressional proposals. The fate of the Child Care Act, introduced in 1979 by Senator Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), is illustrative. The bill possessed limited scope compared to previous child development proposals. Even though it attempted to avoid both direct competition with programs like Head Start and massive government spending, Cranston’s modest proposal generated little enthusiasm among its potential supporters. It tried to foster a compromise among the various interest groups with a stake in child-care policy, but these groups feared that the Child Care Act would affect their existing prerogatives. In addition, the Carter administration expressed its unequivocal opposition at a February hearing. After receiving this tepid response from potential advocates, Cranston killed the bill by canceling further hearings.

In sum, the early to mid-1970s witnessed preschool-related activity in multiple institutional settings. Preschool advocates engaged in venue shopping after President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971. They shifted their attention to the state level, where officials enacted several projects that expanded the public role in preschool provision. At the national level, targeted programs such as Head Start and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit experienced incremental growth as comprehensive proposals languished. Thus the aftermath of Nixon’s veto witnessed activity in several institutional settings, and subsequent developments illustrate the long-term consequences of this venue shopping.

HERITAGE: CONTINUED FRAGMENTATION AND THE ASCENDANCE OF THE STATES

The heritage of a critical juncture refers to its long-term consequences and the extent to which it affects temporally distant developments.Footnote ⁵⁹ This section assesses how the developments of the early 1970s have influenced debates from the late 1980s through the present. It suggests that the long-term consequences of venue shopping affected the identities and positions of key actors, creating entrenched interests that opposed significant policy change. These constituencies generally supported the expansion of public preschool programs but were skeptical of proposals that they believed would affect their existing prerogatives.

Spurred by the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 and a general interest in education reform, early childhood education resurfaced as a political issue during the mid-1980s. Several states followed the precedent set in the early 1970s, when early pioneers had provided public funding for preschool. Their actions brought the total number of states in which such funds were available to “at least twenty-four,” and commissions were convened in “several other states” to study the issue.Footnote ⁶⁰

The education reform movement and developments at the state level rekindled congressional interest in preschool education. In 1987, members of Congress introduced numerous measures related to early childhood programs. The fate of one bill, introduced by Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) in 1988, is instructive. Entitled Smart Start: The Community Collaborative for Early Childhood Development Act of 1988, the measure sought to provide health, nutrition, social, and educational services to all four-year-olds. Its means of achieving universal preschool access illustrates the lasting effects of the venue shopping that occurred in the 1970s. Smart Start acknowledged the crucial role played by the states, as its main objective was “to provide financial assistance to states and localities for high quality early childhood development programs for prekindergarten children.”Footnote ⁶¹ In short, Smart Start envisioned a supporting role for the national government and stressed the continued preeminence of state and local programs.

The role of states and localities was a common theme during the three days of hearings on Smart Start. Several governors and former governors—James J. Blanchard (Michigan), Mario M. Cuomo (New York), Thomas H. Kean (New Jersey), Richard W. Riley (South Carolina), and Rudolph G. Perpich (Minnesota)—appeared before the committee, as did Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Murphy of Massachusetts. The officials described existing programs within their states and how they would leverage national funds to expand them. Governor Perpich, speaking on behalf of the National Governors’ Association, said, “I would like to comment on how your early childhood legislative proposal can best assist and encourage our efforts on the state level.”Footnote ⁶² His assessment of the national government’s role illustrates how state officials lobbied for continued policy autonomy for the states and sought to protect their prerogatives from congressional encroachment. State officials pressed for a better-funded version of the status quo as they sought to preserve their authority in preschool education.

Other witnesses also urged the committee to protect existing public preschool programs. The president of the National Head Start Association, Eugenia Boggus, lobbied for “full and expanded support” for Head Start and then expressed her fear that the creation of Smart Start would establish two funding streams and that Congress would face pressure to combine them. She stated that the “solution of taking money from Head Start and giving it to Smart Start is exactly what we fear.”Footnote ⁶³ Boggus strongly supported expanding public preschool programs but viewed Smart Start as a threat to existing programs. Like the state officials who testified before her, she defended her turf. Her testimony suggests that a strengthened Head Start program was actually an obstacle to the creation of a universal preschool program.

Smart Start never made it out of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Although it would be a mistake to attribute this outcome wholly to state officials and the National Head Start Association, the preceding testimony suggests that existing programs and the constituencies defending them made an important contribution. Thus the evolution of American preschool education suggests that venue shopping can have long-term consequences. The developments of the early 1970s resulted in a fragmented sector that included various state-level and targeted national preschool programs. Beneficiaries of the existing system viewed new congressional initiatives skeptically, worried that the proposals would reduce their authority.

Shortly after the hearings on Smart Start, the Education Commission of the States and the Institute for Educational Leadership sponsored a conference on the evolving federal-state partnership in education. The conference report noted that the national government administered nearly seventy distinct education programs, almost all of which were “protected by an active constituency.” It called on presidential leadership to “shake loose the intransigence of vested interests in education which often fracture and diffuse efforts and funding.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This assessment suggests that the debate over Smart Start was not unusual and that the political mobilization of program beneficiaries can represent a hurdle to policy change.

In September 1989, President George H. W. Bush held an education summit with the nation’s governors. In a memorandum issued just before the summit, the president of the Education Commission of the States listed preschool education as a candidate for additional federal spending. He alluded to programmatic fragmentation in that area and argued that the national government “must get its act together since multiple departments have differing approaches.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Summit attendees discussed preschool education as a way to ensure that disadvantaged young children were prepared when they entered primary school. The governors urged the national government to provide additional funds for existing prekindergarten programs like Head Start while preserving the flexibility of state governments and local school districts in administering them. Their request illustrated both an increased interest in preschool education and a desire to retain their existing prerogatives.

Several forces kept the education of young children on the political agenda during the early 1990s. Preschool advocates used recent findings in neuroscience research to argue that “what happens in a child’s first years makes all the difference in the world.”Footnote ⁶⁶ As legislation at the state and national levels emphasized the transition from welfare to work, child-care and preschool education became key components of the welfare reform debate. With welfare recipients poised to enter the labor market, the care and education of their children took on added importance. For these and other reasons, state officials continued to expand the availability of public preschool programs. By 1997, thirty-seven states funded prekindergarten programs or supplemented the national Head Start program. These initiatives are a legacy of the venue shopping that occurred during the 1970s. As in the earliest state programs, the beneficiaries of state preschool programs in the 1990s were children who were classified as “educationally disadvantaged,” “economically disadvantaged,” or “at-risk of failure.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Most programs attempted to reach children who were unlikely to enroll in prekindergarten, enabling them to enter primary school with an equal chance of success as their more advantaged counterparts.

Interest in preschool education remained high during the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century. In April 1997, the White House organized a conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning. “Thinking big was the order of the day” as advocates envisioned major expansions of Head Start, the adoption of nationwide quality standards, or even enacting a version of the comprehensive legislation proposed during the 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁸ They struggled to convert this enthusiasm into legislative accomplishments, however, in part because of the fragmentation of the existing system. One overview of preschool education explained, “While nearly every level of government and sector of society has a stake in improving early care and learning, the responsibilities are so fragmented that no single actor holds enough of the levers for change to get it done.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Advocates found it difficult to generate sustained attention and commitment to action because responsibility for existing programs was so decentralized.

Over the past decade, Congress has revisited the topic of preschool education but has taken limited action. Most congressional hearings have focused on such broad issues as school readiness, cognitive development, public-private partnerships, preschool access, and program quality and effectiveness. The hearings suggest a general interest in preschool education but evince little interest in an expanded national government role. Even the most ambitious national efforts, such as the Good Start, Grow Smart initiative that President George W. Bush announced in 2002, largely deferred to existing programs. Good Start, Grow Smart encouraged states to develop voluntary early learning guidelines on literacy, language, and prereading skills. The School Readiness Act of 2003, a reauthorization of the Head Start program, touched on similar themes.

Two congressional hearings specifically addressed programmatic fragmentation. In 1999, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs held hearings on “multiple program coordination in early childhood education.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Senators lamented the fact that existing federal programs were administered by eleven different agencies and twenty different offices. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) claimed that, in addition to causing duplication and inefficiency, this arrangement led the agencies and their staff to “despite their best intentions, get caught up in a mind set, a turf battle, [and] jurisdictional problems.”Footnote ⁷¹ Six years later, a different Senate subcommittee discussed similar issues at a hearing on the appropriate role of the national government in early education.Footnote ⁷²

While congressional discussions of preschool education did not produce any policy breakthroughs, state-level preschool programs continued to emerge and expand. Advocates experienced enough success at the state level during the late 1990s and early 2000s that multiple scholars identified the emergence of a preschool movement.Footnote ⁷³ Many states expanded access to and increased spending on the targeted programs that were established in the 1970s. Where such programs did not exist, state officials established prekindergarten programs serving mostly disadvantaged children. By March 2002, forty-four states funded their own preschool programs or supplemented Head Start.Footnote ⁷⁴ States have also spent rising sums on public preschool programs. During the 2005 legislative sessions, for example, twenty-six states boosted preschool funding by $600 million, and spending on preschool increased by at least 30 percent in several states.Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus the last fifteen years have been a period of widespread state-level activity in preschool education, with many state leaders building on the policy legacies of the 1970s.

The evolution of preschool education from the late 1980s to the present suggests the existence of a preempted policy space. State officials and other groups favored by existing policy arrangements have guarded their existing prerogatives, such as when they lobbied successfully against Smart Start in 1988. Over the past two decades, state preschool programs have grown, often dramatically. Meanwhile, most congressional initiatives view the national government in a supporting role and attempt to reduce the administrative fragmentation that currently characterizes this policy sector. Several observers have criticized the ongoing fragmentation of American preschool education, complaining about the intransigence of entrenched interests and the difficulty of producing major policy change.