Mississippi CDGM: Head Start and Civil Rights, 1965–67

About the Author

Polly Greenberg’s special interest has long been the art, detailed mechanics, and interdisciplinary science of achieving—through parenting, the care and education of zero-twelve-year-olds, and related public policy—social change toward a truer democracy—one in which more people might experience fairly comfortable and somewhat fulfilling lives.

The wide variety of jobs Polly has had the good fortune to have had over a fifty-year period (including summer, after-school, and part-time jobs during college and the early years of single mothering five daughters before she became— almost fifty years ago—a full-time professional) has offered her many a challenging opportunity to expand her understandings and enrich her convictions in this many-dimensioned area of expertise.

Greenberg has been a K-6 teacher in NY, MD, DC and PA, and has taught all grades, some of them only as a long-term sub or student teacher. Her favorites are preschool and primary; birth through eight years is the age span she knows most about. Polly was a co-op nursery school parent, admissions person, and the substitute teacher (for seven years in the late1950s and early 1960s), a founding corporate day care center director for General Electric/Time-Life (1970), parent educator several evenings a week (1970s-1980s), teacher of evening child and family courses at the University of Maryland (for eighteen years), on-site staff development specialist consultant in D.C.–area school systems, one of a trio of founders and the education director of a state-wide Head Start in Mississippi (where she and her young children lived for two years) run by extremely low income African American parents and civil rights workers (June, 1965 to June, 1967), the early childhood specialist for two national learning corporations (General Learning Corporation owned by Time/Life & General Electric (1968-1974), and Human Services Group (1974-1976).

Polly has been a staff member at three Federal agencies in Washington, D.C., where she has lived since 1956 (with two years out while living in Mississippi), but only half of each week since 1980 when she moved to her home in Bedford County, PA. The agencies at which she worked were the Department of Education (then called the U.S. Office of Education) during the Kennedy Administration; the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during the Johnson Administration; and the Department of Health and Human Services (then called Health, Education, and Welfare) during the Carter Administration.

As a War on Poverty staff member in the Washington, D. C. headquarters (1963, 1964, early 1965), Polly worked on creating the national Head Start program, and was then the Senior Program Analyst for the seven Southeastern states, responsible for launching Head Start in all of the counties within these states.

Writing has usually been included in a major way in Polly Greenberg’s jobs—reports, proposals, speeches, dissemination materials, etc.). She enjoys writing (for parents, for teachers, for children; and for the interested public about social issues relating to families), therefore, on her own time, has written many, many published articles, several chapters in public policy books, and a number of books, including

For 15 years (1986-2001) Polly was the editor of Young Children, the professional journal (a magazine for teachers and teacher educators) of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. During her first seven years at NAEYC, she was also the acquisitions and content editor of 37 books for teacher educators and teachers. (The publications program grew, and in 1993 the job was divided into two jobs.) Throughout the fifteen years, she was the children’s book reviewer. She worked at home in PA three or four days a week during this period.

Since their establishment in the late 1980s, Greenberg has had regular columns in two Scholastic magazines: Parent and Child (for parents) and Early Childhood Today (for teachers). She has done other projects for Scholastic also, such as serving as editor of The Child Development Handbook (1995), and answering early childhood teachers’ questions on a Polly Greenberg website. (Scholastic has been her Saturday job for almost two decades.)

Greenberg says she has learned everything she knows work-wise from her mother, Margaret Pollitzer, a child development specialist and New York City progressive educator in the 1920’s, and civil rights activist (she worked for child labor laws, women’s right to vote, etc.); from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was allowed to study in-depth the limited number of things she was deeply interested in; through the example of her father’s integrity and courage to write and publish what he believed as Editor-in-Chief of a major Midwest newspaper in McCarthy’s home state during “the McCarthy era”; and through her jobs, continuous professional reading, and raising five children on her own. She claims to have learned to write by life-long reading of The New Yorker and good books, and by the goading of her first editor, McMillan’s Alan Rinzler.

Polly is the enthusiastically, regularly, and gratefully involved grandmother of eighteen. She and her five daughters and five sons-in-law spend lots of time together. Polly left NAEYC January 1, 2001, to write full-time about education, childrearing, and some of the insanities of our current American culture, and to have time for each of the grandchildren, which is what she has been very happily doing ever since. Two books about K-2 in public schools are currently nearly finished, and several other books are well under way.

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