View Point
 
It is my view, with ought reserve, that the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance (NAREA) serves as an extraordinary conduit to contemporary early childhood thought. NAREA is a source of a high-caliber cadre of early childhood educators offering resources in human development and cutting-edge publications.  Anyone who is interested in the present and future direction of the early childhood education profession would find the organization's quarterly journal, Innovations, to be indispensable. NAREA colleagues, Innovations, Reggio Children and Tucson Children's Project have served as a present-day counterweight by embracing the necessary and important integration of the skill-driven school reform movement with the educational stance that sees the multifaceted competence and the complexity of thinking of children, parents and educators.
 
It seems as if national education reform has taken a myopic view of accountability with its insistence on multiple points of measuring school readiness of children in Head Start early childhood programs.  As a result, the specialization of technology has facilitated the ease in which "data-izing" can quantify what children bring from their home and individual culture experiences into their initial school experience. The results are an undervaluing of a child's current knowledge and future academic potential.
 
At Head Start Child-Parent-Centers, the grantee for Southeastern Arizona, where I serve as Director of the Children's Services Department, the Curriculum Specialists who have embraced this complex and often seemingly contradictory integration charge, and the heroic educators who experience the daily joys and taxing challenges of practicing both value sets all remain focused on broadening the view of human potential and competency, and are grateful to many colleagues in this organization for their "reflective holding" that moves us through this process.