In this important book, William T. Gormley, Jr., argues that child care is a social problem of critical importance and that there are compelling reasons for government intervention. Because child care quality affects how children grow up - for better or for worse - the government has a responsibility to improve and reshape the child care system. Gormley offers a balanced, comprehensive analysis of market, government, and societal failures to ensure quality child care in the United States. He finds that unreliable child care contributes to family stress and undermines efforts to achieve educational readiness, welfare reform, and gender equity; that regulators and family support agencies do not distinguish sharply enough between good and bad child care facilities; and that government and businesses provide inadequate financial and logistical support. As a result, children suffer, as does society as a whole. Everybody's Children presents evidence on how different states and communities have responded to child care challenges. Gormley prescribes the roles to be played by federal, state, and local governments, for-profit and nonprofit child care providers, churches, schools, and family support agencies. He offers a number of reform strategies and argues that different levels of government and societal institutions must work together to achieve the goals of efficiency, justice, choice, discretion, coordination, and responsiveness - and, ultimately, to create the best system possible for our children.
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From Publishers Weekly
Gormley, winner of the Louis Brownlow Book Award for his 1989 Taming The Bureaucracy: Muscles, Prayers, and Other Strategies, offers a comprehensive but exceedingly dry view of contemporary American child care. His observations range from the obvious-``Demand for child care has grown dramatically in recent years.... As of 1990, only 46.3% of all children under the age of five were primarily cared for by a parent at home''-to a more helpful cost analysis of for-profit and nonprofit child-care options. His research is detailed and exhaustively documented; anecdotes are conspicuously absent. After several chapters establishing that a problem exists, Gormley suggests several reform options, noting that they are not mutually exclusive. First, he says, a ``mediating structures model'' relies on ``a caring community in which one person's problem is everyone's problem.'' Secondly, ``an informed consumer model supplies parents with enough good information.'' Then there's a ``safety net model seeks to protect children... through national government action.'' Any or all of these, Gormley claims, will govern child care in the 21st century. He may well be right, but his formal and arid approach to the topic is going to have the very people who need to read the book-the parents-forgetting where they put it the second they lay it down to tend to their children.
Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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