In 1989, in response to public concern about child care, the French-American Foundation sent 14 prominent experts to study France’s widely admired early childhood programs. Nothing at its outset suggested that the Early Childhood Education Project could expect to have a major impact on thinking and practice in American child care. Yet, in retrospect, many of the factors accounting for its success are those that a small bi-cultural Foundation can bring to the large arena of public policy study and action.
      The Foundation’s Early Childhood Education Project was the first attempt to analyze in detail and disseminate the workings of another country’s health, education and day care programs for children under six years old and to use this information as a catalyst for change. To increase the potential for subsequent impact, we selected a panel of diverse leading experts representing a microcosm of American perspectives and professional disciplines and later published their findings in accessible, lay language in a report, “A Welcome for Every Child: How France Achieves Quality in Child Care - Practical Ideas for the United States,” distributed to 25,000 professionals and policy makers. Yet the real power of the project’s outreach has come from the panel members’ unusually extensive use of the report and the basic principles it sets forth, as evidenced in their own work, in the many articles they have published, in their public statements to more than 40 national organizations and through their participation in the six regional forums organized by the Foundation.
     The project has among other things helped panel members improve day care regulations in Wisconsin, link health care to child care in Pennsylvania, persuade a major national company to invest in child care quality, convince advocates to focus attention on the educational importance of day care, influence Texas leaders to improve early childhood education, and contributed to the codification of national health and safety standards for out-of-home care. The practical outcomes of the forums also include the initiation of monthly inter-agency education and health roundtables in Illinois, the launching of a plan to create a comprehensive blueprint for children’s services in Connecticut, and the launching of a public-private sector committee to advocate for the construction of a showplace children’s center in time for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. These examples of achievements, which have exceeded expectations, strongly suggest the relevance of the project and the French example for the United States and led to a project which became at once an educational program and an inspiration for change.

Choosing the Right Issue at the Right Time

      As a bridge between two cultures, the French-American Foundation introduces leaders in each country to the practices of the other to promote useful innovation in areas of central concern to both societies. The well-being of children and families is one such area, and it reveals striking contrasts.
     During the past century, France has built a comprehensive public system of universal child and family services that now includes preventive health care for mothers and infants, a variety of quality infant-toddler programs, and one of the world's best public preschool systems, attended by virtually every 3, 4 and 5 year old. During the same period, the United States has largely reserved the care of the nation's youngest children to the private realm of families and the competitive marketplace, breaking with this pattern in recent decades principally to address the needs of special populations through public programs having disparate origins and rationales, the best known of which is Head Start.
     Since the 1960s, the rapidly increasing numbers of working mothers with children under six has strained child care resources in both countries. Yet, whereas France's historical legacy of public investment in all children has proved a strong foundation for meeting current social needs, the United States was just beginning its first prolonged examination of young children's conditions including the shortage of affordable, quality child care, which affects all social and economic classes. In the years preceding the launch of this program, the Congress and state legislatures had to consider literally dozens of bills containing child care provisions.
      The Foundation devoted considerable time and resources in order to carry the project plan at a high professional level. The work also revealed the unsuspected potential of familiar project formulas especially the “study tour”, of which there are numerous varieties and examples - to be transformed into highly refined vehicles for inquiry, discovery, and social change.

Assembling a Microcosm of American Child Care Experts As a Delegation to France

      The Foundation's most demanding initial task was to develop a methodology for identifying those French ideas that would be of broadest practical value in the United States. As a first step, Dr. Dorothy Sparrow, a specialist in French social policies, was asked to prepare a detailed background paper on French infant-toddler and preschool programs. Her findings suggested that the features of France's child care programs likely to be of particular interest to Americans were the “health care foundation of infant care programs, the integration of preschool in the free public education system, and the national standards for licensing and supervising mothers' assistants (family day care providers).”
      Next, with the advice from experts at Yale University, the Conference Board, the Bank Street School, the Columbia University School of Social Work, the Child Care Action Campaign and the Children's Defense Fund, the Foundation developed a list of more than 100 leaders and professionals in child care and related fields whose achievements are considered outstanding by their colleagues. Dr. Sparrow's background paper and a project description were sent to all of them, and 70 responded that they were both interested in and able to devote the considerable time and work required by the project.
     Thirdly, the Foundation formed an advisory panel of seven nationally known experts as counselors on the selection of the final group of 14. Our strategy was to select a delegation of diverse individuals, each one opening a window on a different professional discipline and political constituency, so that together they constituted a virtual microcosm of the field of American child care. We favored activists over academics in the strong belief, which later proved well-founded, that people engaged in the day-to-day challenges of developing programs, policies, regulations and early childhood curricula would most quickly seize upon those elements of the French system that could be transferred or adapted to American settings. The study tour delegation included Hillary Rodham Clinton, then Chair of the Board of Directors of the Children’s Defense Fund, Evelyn K. Moore, Executive Director of the National Black Child Development Institute, and Barbara Reisman, then Executive Director of Child Care Action Campaign and currently executive director of the Schumann Fund for New Jersey.
 

A Commitment to Consensus: Study Tour and Report

      The study tour took place from March 3 to 17, 1989, and its itinerary included 70 meetings in or near Paris and Nantes involving from 1 to 14 people. Visits to preschools, infant-care programs, and preventive health clinics constituted nearly half the itinerary. The other half was divided among meetings at education, social service and family allowance agencies; large corporate headquarters; labor and family organizations; and a variety of institutes and research centers. Special arrangements were made to permit individuals to pursue their own lines of inquiry that opened up during the course of the tour.
     This intensive program was by far the most systematic exposure any panel member had experienced to the components of a fully integrated system of health, education, and day care programs for young children outside the U.S. The thoroughness of the itinerary was its most important feature and noticeably raised the level of discussion among the panelists from often controversial exchanges about particular features of French programs to a strong consensus that the U.S. must create a similarly comprehensive set of programs appropriate to its own cultural and social traditions.
      By the tour's end, the team had developed a set of preliminary findings that formed the basis for the final report, A Welcome for Every Child: How France Achieves Quality in Child Care: Practical Ideas for the United States. Rather than making recommendations, the report set forth some of the major principles underlying France’s achievements for children, including these three core axioms:

1. The primary mission of child care and education is to help meet children's needs - not those of parents or employers. All children benefit from quality care.
2. Universal preventive health care is an essential foundation of child development and all early childhood programs.
3. Well trained and decently paid professional staff are the key to achieving program quality in every type of early childhood program.

     To illustrate the practical implications of these principles, the report cited numerous specific uses of them in French programs that could be usefully imitated or adapted in the United States. These examples ranged from the targeting of incentives to encourage families to use existing health care and medical services to the systematic use of architecture and design in child care facilities to promote child development.

 

A Catalyst for Change

      The public reaction to the panelists’ report was enthusiastic, and media coverage was extensive. Within a year, prominent articles appeared in major press, including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and panelists and Foundation staff gave over 40 briefings and presentations to audiences of policymakers and professionals. By mid-1990, at the urging of state leaders, the Foundation began to organize a series of “Working Forums” to help senior decision makers and professionals implement French principles and practices in their own states.
      In 1991 the Foundation sponsored forums in Illinois, New York, and Georgia; and co-sponsored a forum in Connecticut. Each was planned over a period of several months to ensure the participation of 75 to 125 of top decision-makers in early childhood education, child advocacy, social services, philanthropy, public health, and corporate management. Using a slide show and the testimony of several panelists, each forum, in effect, recreated the trip to France and then challenged attendees to develop recommendations based on French ideas that are appropriate to their own states.

A Model for Future Policy Projects

      The Early Childhood Education Project received the recognition and support of many major foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation and the Fund for Child Development, and major corporations. It revealed the potential of exchange projects to introduce powerful and useful new perspectives on American issues by consulting systematically and with a keen interest in practicalities, the different traditions and policies in France.