A Moment with Dr. Moore

Dolls and Data: Black Scholars in the Early Learning Field

“The education of any people begins with the people themselves,” declared Carter G. Woodson, the Harvard alum and Howard University professor who launched Black History Month in 1926. Woodson was committed to educating and preparing the next generation of Black youth. So are the Black researchers who’ve embraced Woodson’s mission by exploring the experiences and development of young Black learners. Researchers who come from the same community as the children they observe can bring an equity lens to the search for ways to help all young Black children reach their promise, also one of the Council’s goals. And we have ties to some of the most renowned Black scholars of the early learning field.

Our hallmark credential, The CDA®, first emerged out of the need for competent teachers to staff Head Start, and that links us to psychologist Edmund Gordon, co-founder of the Head Start program. Gordon became involved in Head Start as President Lyndon Baines Johnson looked to wage war on poverty. “I was invited to provide advice,” Gordon once recalled, “because much of the work I had done on my doctoral dissertation had to do with the holistic development of children. I think that Johnson also understood that the research effort would succeed better in some of the targeted communities for Head Start if they had a person of color to lead it.”

Head Start also required a way to build a diverse early childhood workforce, a complex task that fell to Evangeline Ward. She was a Temple University professor of early childhood education and executive director of the CDA Consortium, which designed a performance-based system for the credential. Ward was also the author of several books that focused on the importance of treating children as individuals and stressed the educator’s role as a partner with families. In addition, she outlined a code of professional ethics for the early childhood profession and urged educators to continue learning, goals that the Council pursues to this day.

We draw inspiration for our work from educators like Dr. Evelyn Moore, the former director of the National Black Child Development Institute (NBCDI). She was also one of the original teachers of the Perry Preschool Project, which provided high-quality early learning to young Black children with low test scores in Ypsilanti, MI. “We need to give kids a chance to develop before we decide what their limitations are,” Moore explained when we interviewed her for our CounciLINK newsletter a few years ago. “When I came along as a teacher in the sixties, there were so many Black kids in special ed classes, and I thought that this doesn’t make sense,’” she told us. And she was right. Over time, the Perry preschoolers did better in terms of high school graduation rates, job retention, ability to form stable households and physical health than peers who weren’t part of the program. And to this day, Perry has stood as a milestone in early anti-bias learning.

Understanding how children develop and learn is an important part of being in the classroom, as Moore pointed out in the early 1970s when the Child Development Associate® (CDA) Credential™ was in its initial stages. “I was involved with it from the beginning,” Moore pointed out, “and I was part of the discussion that led it to include academic coursework and allowed CDA students to earn college credits. My fight was as much for the educators as for the children because you have more portability and opportunity if you’re a credentialed teacher.”

So, the Council has worked hard to expand the pool of CDAs under my predecessors as CEO, Dr. Carol Brunson Day, another former director of NBCDI, and Dr. Valora Washington, once a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC. Howard has long been a center for social science research that takes a strength-based approach to the study of the best ways to help young Black learners develop. Howard’s faculty have brought their personal knowledge of Black values, social patterns and community institutions to their research and used their findings to advocate on behalf of Black children.

This goal inspired Howard alumni Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Bancroft Clark to conduct their famous “Doll Test” in the 1940s. “The doll test,” as Kenneth Clark explained in an interview with PBS, “was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self-esteem in children. We worked with Black children to see the extent to which color, sense of their own race and status influenced their judgement about themselves,” Clark said. And they did it by giving young Black children a choice of whether to play with Black or white dolls.

The Clarks found that most Black children from segregated schools preferred to play with the white dolls and ascribed negative traits to the Black dolls. Then when asked to describe the doll that looked most like them, some of the children became “emotionally upset at having to identify with the doll they had rejected,” as Clark recalled. Some even stormed out of the room, behavior that led the Clarks to conclude that “color in a racist society was a very disturbing and traumatic component of an individual’s sense of his own self-esteem.” And their findings had a dramatic impact nationwide. In 1954, lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People used the Clarks’ research to overturn public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Brown decision showed the potential of social science research to advance the well-being of Black children. But the task is not complete. Today, many U.S. public schools remain segregated by race, and Black families still strive to provide their children with equity in early learning. In the years since Brown, several researchers have conducted variations on the doll test and come to similar findings as the Clarks. At the same time, today’s researchers have called for a more nuanced study of how institutional racism affects young children’s preferences and beliefs.

“We need to be responsive to Black children and families’ diverse assets and needs,” according to Crishana M. Lloyd, a research scholar at Child Trends and a speaker at the Council’s Early Educators Leadership Conference last year. In a recent paper, she called for an applied research agenda that captures the growing diversity of Black children and families in the United States. “Black people in the U.S. are geographically, culturally, religiously, economically and educationally diverse,” as Lloyd pointed out, so we need culturally responsive research to guide positive change for young Black learners.

Culturally responsive research, as Lloyd went on to explain, requires research questions that challenge stereotypes and simplifications, as well as measures and instruments that are examined for bias, and data analysis that is in-depth and open to examination. In addition, culturally responsive research requires opportunities for participant engagement in the research process and diverse teams that include members who come from the population they study. If we want to bring a sharper equity lens to the early learning field, Lloyd pointed out, it’s not enough to think about how and why we’re conducting the research. “We must think about who is doing the research.”

Still, why does this matter when we’re talking about evidence-based, data-driven studies? Because we too often take at face value that ideas grounded in research lead to fair, equitable outcomes. Yet data is subject to analysis and interpretation by human beings who, despite their best efforts, are seldom completely objective. People even decide what data to collect—a choice that can reveal its own kind of bias. So, we must ensure that researchers reflect the children they seek to understand, and we should take note of how Black researchers can make a unique contribution to the early learning field. They bring a first-hand perspective and a focus on equity as they lay down the groundwork for change.