THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160536
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 99 lines
Two early childhood organizations have lashed out at a report that accuses them of indoctrinating young children with radical ideas.
The report has so angered members of the organizations and other child-care professionals that the issue will be aired today in Richmond by a legislative panel chaired by Sen. Stanley Walker, D-Norfolk.
``We're concerned,'' said Walker, who heads the Commission on Early Childhood and Child Day Care Programs. ``The report waves a flag around that is not in the best interest of improving child care in Virginia. It puts the fear of God in people.''
The report, written at the request of a now-defunct Virginia council on child care, targeted the actions of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. It said the two groups:
Encourage an ``anti-bias'' curriculum in day-care centers that seeks to impose a particular ``ideological world view'' on children.
Promote a college curriculum that encourages graduates of early childhood-education programs to teach children ideas about diversity and tolerance that their parents might not support.
Set up standards that reduce the number of child-care providers, increase the cost to parents and discriminate against religious providers.
A specific complaint focuses on a book called the Anti-Bias Curriculum, which NAEYC publishes. A reading list in the book includes titles that encourage children to learn about different roles of women; a book about a child growing up in a family in which the father is in prison, books about children in single-parent households and a book about a girl who lives with three women instead of a traditional father-mother family.
Mark D. Kindt, the consultant who wrote the report, said many parents would find the Anti-Bias Curriculum ``an inappropriate intrusion upon their rights of family privacy; some will object to sex education for pre-school children, some will value the integrity of more traditional gender roles.''
But Carol Whitener, a Hampton Roads educator who is president of the Virginia chapter of NAEYC, strongly disputed that view. The book, one of 100 publications the organization puts out, is supposed to encourage diversity, Whitener said, and the NAEYC does not require day-care centers to use it. She said few centers in Virginia do.
Aside from that, though, she voiced concern about the attack on diversity teaching.
``When tolerance for other people is considered pernicious, we're in big trouble,'' said Whitener, who teaches child development at Tidewater Community College.
The report also says the NAEYC and the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies are guilty of setting up standards that increase the cost of day care and decrease availability and choice to parents.
The organizations, however, defend the standards as improving the quality of child care. Any attack on them would water down safety to the detriment of children, they say.
``Most of our members are appalled and wounded by these charges,'' Whitener said. ``The charges are so absurd and off-the-wall and outrageous, it's hard to know how to react. The reputations of a lot of people have been attacked, and they have no chance to speak back in their defense.''
The report grew out of allegations that the state Council on Child Day Care and Early Childhood Programs had mishandled federal grant money. Gov. George Allen removed the entire council last year after a public audit revealed errors in grant disbursement, and he appointed a new panel, which hired a consultant to look further into the matter. The consultant's report was one of the last acts of business for the council, which was killed by the General Assembly and ceased to exist in June.
Kindt, the consultant whom the new council hired, reported that $1.4 million of the funds had been improperly awarded by the previous council. Kindt found that recipients of three grants, one of which is The Planning Council in Norfolk, participated in a ``roundtable'' where contract specifications were drafted. Kindt said this could amount to illegal contract steering. The records and report have been turned over to the FBI.
But Kindt's report didn't stop there. He went on to accuse the previous council - and the day-care business in general - of being influenced by groups with a liberal agenda.
The council's last president, R. Jefferson Garnett, wrote a letter to the governor saying that the National Association for the Education of Young Children peddles an ideology that is ``contemptuous of and antagonistic to the traditional values of Virginians.''
Garnett's letter also said ``a pernicious ideology has been promoted nationally in child day care and has marched into Virginia unencumbered by the penetrating light of vigorous public debate.''
Garnett, a Louisa lawyer and self-described Republican conservative, said he welcomes the discussion the report has stirred.
``The folks who have had the prevailing philosophy have done so without public debate,'' Garnett said in an interview.
The report will jump-start that debate today before Walker's legislative panel. Whitener will testify, along with the executive director of The Planning Council and Walter Kacharski, the state's auditor of public accounts. MEMO: The Commission on Early Childhood and Child Day Care Programs
meets at 10 a.m. today in Senate Room B in the General Assembly Building
in Richmond. Copies of the report are available by calling (804)
692-0006. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
STEVE EARLEY/The Virginian-Pilot
Carole Whitener, state head of the National Association for the
Education of Young Children, says day-care book choices aren't
mandated. by CNB