Scarcity and surveillance in early childhood education

At a time when national discourse in the USA centers the need for professionalization, regulation, and surveillance, this article emphasizes the ways in which neoliberal logics harm those working in early childhood education in the USA. While stakeholders at every level debate proposed solutions to the early childhood education crisis, largely related to furthering regulation, this article brings forward the voices of those doing the work and rejects the idea that neoliberal logics will lead us collectively away from a situation that they created. Guided by the tenets of critical qualitative inquiry, I use narrative inquiry to explore the stories of early childhood educators working in an underfunded, undervalued field. In this article, I highlight two resonant themes that spanned the participants’ narratives, which are related to the impacts of scarcity and surveillance in early childhood education spaces. Based on my findings, I make the claim that early childhood education professionals are strained by increased regulation and surveillance amidst an already toxic prevalence of scarcity of various forms, and that shifts to further regulate the field should consider the voices of the people working in these spaces.