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This is a case study of political struggles over early care and education in the USA using a combination of archival, interview, and observational data from a study conducted in the US state of Arizona. This case analysis illustrates how a combination of the episodic nature of public attention paid to early care and education in the USA, internal tensions within US early care and education between its educational and caring purposes, and competition over scarce resources has worked to undermine the development of universal early care and education in the USA. The study is framed by Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave’s ideas of enduring struggles and locally contested practice, and uses an analytic strategy informed by Bakhtinian theory to illustrate how understanding the cultural logics involved in locally contested practice can be of use to the practice of policy advocacy, specifically engaging adversaries with what Bakhtin called an “excess of seeing” - understanding beneath the surface. While focused on one state in one national context, this analysis may have transnational relevance by raising comparative questions about early care and education policies and policy practice in other localities.

Social and emotional learning is a young field, but a very old concept. The idea that children require explicit instruction in social-emotional capacities is present in the writings of philosophers as far back as Plato, and partly constitutes the roots of the “whole-child development” and “developmentally appropriate practice” frameworks in early childhood education today. Nevertheless, early childhood education has recently been embracing and embraced by the modern global social and emotional learning movement in compulsory school education. Why would early childhood education do this, given its long tradition of prioritizing social-emotional pursuits and, in fact, serving as a model for the rest of the education continuum? Using Minow’s “dilemma of difference” framework, this article critically examines the question of which set of consequences the early childhood education field should choose in the current era—those of potentially superficially modularizing social-emotional concerns and comingling them with undesirable compulsory school education accountability structures, or those of continuing an embedded approach within a potentially generic whole-child philosophy that is difficult to implement in the real world. After considering early childhood education’s challenges with living by its own philosophy, the authors recommend a cautious but proactive acceptance of new social and emotional learning models within early childhood education because this allows a public interrogation of whichever values and methods for imparting them are chosen. The authors argue that an active alignment around social and emotional learning may buffer the early childhood education principles of democracy and child agency against the marginalization from political cross-currents they have historically experienced.