An Exploration On Development Of Early Childhood Education Quality Accreditation In The United States (1982-2010)

Pursuing high-quality early childhood education is not only the realistic demand of the 21 st century—“era of quality”,but also the inevitable trend of development of early childhood education around the world in the days to come.High-quality early childhood education is conducive to realize its own “public welfare” and “inclusiveness”,which is of significantly practical meanings to stimulate children's potentials and promote lifelong sustainable development;to improve functions of children's families and community so as to maintain social stability and harmony in the future;to give impetus to equity of early childhood education and eventually advance the realization of social justice.Currently,high-quality and equity are fundamental value pursuit and goal orientation of our country's early childhood education development.At the same time,they are also the requirements of the day to propel the deepening reform and development of early childhood education.As creating and improving early childhood education quality assessment system as well as strengthening evaluation and supervision towards early childhood education is the commonest way employed by other countries in the world to promote early childhood education quality,it also can be used as the necessary and important measures to solve existing problems we meet now and enhance the quality of early childhood education greatly.As we all know,the high-quality early childhood education in the United States mainly benefits from advanced and perfect quality accreditation which has been recognized by numerable countries around the world.Besides,the good momentum of it's rapid development has already lead the development of early childhood education globally.Accordingly,this study employs scientific methodology covering literature analysis,historical research and comparative analysis to explore the development process of early childhood education quality accreditation established by National Association for the Education of Young Children(NAEYC).Specifically,three aspects of such accreditation containing programs,curriculum and professionals are chosen as the pointcuts to sort out and clarify evolution process of early childhood education quality accreditation's establishment and development.Then author profoundly analyzes specific contents of this accreditation and factors that influence them.Lastly,this study tries to summarize certain characteristics and experience of this accreditation's development process so as to provide a beneficial reference to improve our country's early childhood education quality.From the historical point of view,this study centers around development and changes of NAEYC early childhood education quality accreditation and pinpoints them from vertical and horizontal dimensions.The vertical dimension shows the developmental history of certain accreditation that mainly experienced three stages: initial period from 1982 to 1994;developmental period from 1995 to 2004;and advanced period from 2005 to 2010.At the same time,the horizontal dimension presents the changes of its three subsystems including standards of programs,curriculum and professionals: for program,its quality accreditation went through the evolution process from standardization to lean requirement;for curriculum,it changed from general presupposition to meaning generation with an emphasize transferred from age and individual appropriateness to social and cultural appropriateness to objective and experimental appropriateness;for professionals,it underwent the philosophy changed from knowledge-oriented to skill-oriented to reflection-oriented.After making a comprehensive exploration on development of early childhood education quality accreditation in the United States,author finds that this accreditation is driven by national policies,influenced by multicultural society,and supported by theoretical research,which shows the following unique characteristics such as stressing on children-centered development always;paying attention to process quality as well as result quality;inviting unique inclusiveness and openness;taking individual differences into account and emphasizing education equity,and so forth.Based on these characteristics and experiences mentioned above,this study presents some suggestions according to problems existing in our country's early childhood education now.That is,strengthen government duties to enhance quality development of early childhood education entirely;create nationally developmental quality evaluation system;emphasize process quality-oriented assessment;and advocate introducing the third party agencies to assess the quality of early childhood education.