Globalizing Institutions: Case Studies in Regulation and Innovation by Jane Jenson & Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Author:Jane Jenson & Boaventura de Sousa Santos [Jenson, Jane & Santos, Boaventura de Sousa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351762564
Google: zvhKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38506464
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Going North

N. M. and I had finally found a quiet place for our first real conversation, in the space under the stairs that led up to the play-yard from the church’s basement. Outside, the sun was blazing, which was rare in this part of Los Angeles except in the dead of winter. It hardly mattered to us, though, because the sun hadn’t reached into the basement from the wide-open play-yard door. The children, including Ms. M.’s four year old daughter, Daniela, were out on the play-yard while the teachers and parent volunteers prepared the tables for lunch. Every morning, two men in their twenties, well aware of how lucky they were to be employed, would deliver two big metal trays of food – fried chicken and tacos and corn on the cob – to the Church of God, as well as the Education and Training Institute (ETI)’s4 ten other sites, from the programme’s central kitchen in Watts.

N. M. had come North to find work and safety. Eventually, she had found her way to a temporary resting place in Project Head Start. All of the other women in the Head Start programme that N.M.’s daughter attends, like N. herself, could trace their families’ origins to places that lay South of this city, Chiapas, or Honduras, or the Ivory Coast of Africa, by way of Alabama and then Saint Louis, or Chicago, or Detroit. Most of these women have not been as lucky as N. M. Their lives remain in transit. They move back and forth, South to North, in pick-ups, or second-hand cars, or Greyhound buses, or Amtrak trains, seeking work and safety, making home. For three decades, Head Start has been a place in common on these journeys, a place to find bearings, to raise voices, to wash dishes, to share a meal.

Head Start is the popular, federally-funded pre-school programme for low income children that was launched by United States President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Since then, the programme has been marked by wide bipartisan support. By 1992, when I met with N. M., it was one of Lyndon Johnson’s few social welfare innovations that was not at risk of extinction in an era marked by lots of talk about “new global pressures,” steadily increasing wealth inequality, and social welfare retrenchment. The Head Start programme was left largely unaffected by these trends, perhaps because it is a small programme, which is more focused on making new public spaces for low income women to come together than on shifting cash in their direction.

The Head Start law and regulations funnel federal dollars to local non-profits and government entities to run pre-school and family support programmes that comply with strict regulatory requirements. These requirements include such unlikely features for a United States social welfare programme as open-door access for parents to their children’s classrooms, a voice for parents in the local programme’s basic management decisions, parent-directed educational activities, and a priority for parents to be hired as programme staff.

I was first drawn to

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