The largest single-year jump in the US poverty rate on record occurred in 2022 after a series of government assistance programs aimed at reducing hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic expired. This broad set of social safety net programs—which included the expansion of child tax credits, rental assistance, nutrition and unemployment benefits, and direct stimulus payments—essentially provided a guaranteed income for families with children and contributed to historic declines in poverty (US Census Bureau, 2023). What this historic shift in the poverty rate affecting millions of American children demonstrates is that poverty in the world's wealthiest nation is largely a policy choice.
One of the dominant arms of US antipoverty policy is access to early childhood education for low-income families—the federal Head Start program. The Head Start program aims to “support children's growth from birth to age 5 through services centered around early learning and development, health, and family well-being” (Office of Head Start, 2023). Research on child development coupled with “culture of poverty” discourse about the perceived cultural depravity and deficits of poor families contributed to the expansion of antipoverty programs like Head Start to intervene on behalf of poor children (Kuntz, 1998; Washington & Bailey, 1995). While the benefits of preschool for children's development, preparation for kindergarten, and later academic success are widely established, a consideration of how the segregated nature of these programs shapes early learning experiences has remained largely absent.
In her groundbreaking book False Starts: The Segregated Lives of Preschoolers, Casey Stockstill fills this gap, taking a family- and group-centered approach to understanding the ways socioeconomically and racially segregated preschool experiences serve to reproduce social inequalities. Through an examination of two preschools in Madison, Wisconsin—Sunshine Head Start (pseudonym), predominantly serving poor children of color, and Great Beginnings (pseudonym), serving mostly white middle-class children—she describes how segregated preschool spaces work to concentrate the effects of poverty and structural racism: “So long as poverty in the United States remains punishing, stressful, and interlaced with unpredictable access to housing, food, and social support, preschool segregation may undermine efforts to support poor children and their teachers” (155).
Stockstill outlines four useful discourses for discussing preschools through the lens of segregation: teachers as key educators, preschool as compensatory, preschool as supplemental, and preschools as sites of broad socialization (26). The first discourse, teachers as key educators, emphasizes the outsize role early childhood educators play in affecting children's development, from the instruction, feedback, and structures and routines they create to the core interactions they provide to facilitate learning. The next two discourses are concerned with the nature of the family-school connection, but they differ based on assumptions about class. The preschool as compensatory discourse emphasizes a conception of preschool as making up for the harsh conditions families experience navigating poverty and structural racism. In this vein, preschool is seen as an important lever for delivering resources and a positive social environment to children of poor families. The preschool as supplemental discourse, however, presupposes a positive and healthy home environment on top of which preschool serves as a supplemental, enriching experience. In contrast to poor families of color, “white, affluent parents who send their children to preschool have the luxury of their parenting being presumed to be adequate; preschool then supplements supposedly great parenting at home” (26). Stockstill offers a final sociological discourse, preschools as sites of broad socialization, to make sense of preschools as spaces where children learn about broader societal structures of race, gender, and social class in segregated spaces. By engaging in these four discourses through a group-centered approach that focuses on segregation between the two preschools, Stockstill generates valuable insights into the ways in which preschools can serve as sites of social reproduction.
Her findings demonstrate significant differences in children's daily routines, patterns of pretend play, access to personal property, family-school engagement, and the experiences of teachers and their relationships with children. In terms of children's daily routines, Stockstill demonstrates the reciprocal nature of segregation: “Inequalities in race and class meant that in segregated classrooms, routine disruptions were common for poor children of color, and stability was common for white, middle-class children” (59). For example, the unpredictable nature of enrollment and attendance coupled with teachers’ demanding paperwork and tracking requirements at Sunshine Head Start meant that an average of five minutes per day was spent on reading. Meanwhile, at Great Beginnings across town, they read for an average of thirty minutes each day.
When it came to children's pretend play, Stockstill's analysis shows that poor children of color exercised greater autonomy over their play, often demonstrating complex interactional skills when entering in-progress play with peers, which also meant greater distance between them and their teachers and increased opportunities for peer conflicts. The benefits of Stockstill's group-centered approach examining play through the lens of segregation are noteworthy. At first, when observing the autonomy and interactional skills demonstrated by the children at Sunshine Head Start to self-manage their play, she did not find issues with the phenomenon. But after observing teachers’ tighter management of children's play at Great Beginnings, where they organized small groups to rotate through various play stations, she found that peer conflicts were rare and teachers’ time and attention were plentiful. Such contrasting patterns of play—what Stockstill describes as “the paradox of autonomy”—serve to reinforce different expectations of adult attention and interest in kids’ activities. They may also inadvertently cause poor children of color to learn practiced behaviors that are devalued in classroom spaces. Without the lens of segregation, such insights about autonomy and play may not have been possible.
In terms of access to personal property, Stockstill found that children at Sunshine Head Start were not allowed to bring their own toys, books, and other nonessential personal belongings to school. The reason for this was an underlying assumption about scarcity of material resources at home and wanting to avoid any potential conflicts or jealousy over personal belongings. In contrast, the children at Great Beginnings were invited to bring personal items to school, whether to showcase a plush toy at show-and-tell or snuggle with a beloved stuffed animal during naptime. Children at Great Beginnings experienced ample opportunities for their schooling to be personalized and their identities affirmed, whereas the children at Sunshine Head Start had a more uniform experience and sometimes resorted to sneaking things into the classroom space—a practice that created unnecessary deception and conflict. Stockstill notes that such “quests to enjoy personal property became a source of racialized, gendered discipline that disadvantaged boys of color” (88). These experiences taught children about what it means to belong in educational institutions. Again, Stockstill's group-centered examination of students’ race- and class-segregated experiences reveals the unintended consequences of unequal schooling related to the management of children's personal property. The property regimes at both preschools worked to simultaneously reflect and reinforce race and class inequalities.
When it comes to family engagement, preschools and families are presumed to be “a village” working in partnership to support a child's development. “In a real village, communities talk about disruptions to the ordinary routine, celebrate together, and come together to share space” (112). Stockstill found that at Sunshine Head Start, in contrast to the culture of openness and collaboration at Great Beginnings, there was much distance between the families and school, reflecting broader policies of scrutiny toward poor families of color. For example, she describes an incident at Sunshine Head Start when a student, Isaac, arrived late one morning crying. His mother shared that he slept poorly and would be staying with his grandmother that day. Isaac's teachers did not speak directly with Isaac or his mother but instead gossiped with one another and demonstrated subtle suspicion about what may have occurred. This incident reflects the scrutiny directed at families, as Head Start program policy tracks student attendance and requires absences to be explained. Stockstill's insightful analysis demonstrates the respective distance and proximity between schools and families at race- and class-segregated preschools and their implications for inequality.
In the final chapter of findings, the lens of segregation facilitates an examination of how race and class inequalities shaped the experiences of teachers. Again, Stockstill's strategic comparative approach demonstrates the ways segregation “clusters poverty-related trauma in one classroom, and affluence- related expectations for amenities in another” (137), leading to stress, burnout, biases and negative views of children, and teacher turnover at Sunshine Head Start, while at Great Beginnings there were low levels of stress, overwhelmingly positive views of students, and staffing stability. Stockstill shows that such contrasting conditions reflect inequalities in society but also reinforce them, with implications for children's development in race- and class- segregated spaces of early learning.
As the key findings concerning children's daily routines, patterns of pretend play, access to personal property, family-school engagement, and teacher experiences show, False Starts covers remarkable breadth and depth. Spending two years engaging in intensive observation at both school sites, Stockstill adopted the “least adult approach,” which helped downplay her position of authority as an adult during observation, allowing her to immerse herself in children's play and generate a rich and detailed dataset. She deftly stitches together the interrelatedness between broader social structures and policies with the finer-grain, intimate phenomena of the classroom, down to the hidden action figures in children's pockets. In this way, she illustrates how micro and macro forces work to reproduce inequality in preschool.
If one could find any area potentially overlooked in this book, it might be a longitudinal examination of the themes and how they might emerge throughout a child's socialization in school after preschool. For example, how might a child's lack of a customized preschool experience emerge in kindergarten? Stockstill does connect her findings to related research showing white, affluent children's sense of entitlement to teachers’ time in elementary school and, conversely, the tendency of poor children of color to not ask their teacher for help. In this way, she situates her findings in the trajectories of students’ raced and classed education experiences. While a longitudinal analysis was beyond the scope of this project, Stockstill's work invites further research into the ways racial and socioeconomic segregation in preschool shape children's socialization and learning over time.
In the end, Stockstill argues that “a truly family-centered approach to enriching children would focus on ameliorating poverty, so that families have the financial resources and emotional bandwidth to meet their child's needs at home” (163-164). She takes issue with the fact that—particularly for poor children of color—preschools are tasked with the gargantuan responsibility of being provisioners of social services to compensate for the racialized lack of access to capital and largely antifamily policy landscape in the US. Rather than focusing on the primary and joyful job of providing early learning experiences to enrich the lives of children, Stockstill argues that discourses of preschools as compensatory for poor families’ perceived shortcomings work to perpetuate, rather than fully disrupt, social inequalities at this stage of early childhood. What would it look like for federal programs to address poverty more directly? It might start with an asset-based view of poor families as capable and wanting the best for their children, too.