This article is a commentary developed by three early childhood teacher educators who are concerned about the negative consequences of contemporary policy trends in the United States. The commentary critically examines the influence of quality improvement in early childhood as it relates to environmental rating systems and the use of teacher performance assessments, more specifically, the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale and the Teacher Performance Assessment. The article concludes with a potential vision for early childhood scholars and practitioners—building solidarity to function as an emerging, powerful, ethical community of early childhood curriculum workers that thrives without consensus.

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The heightened level of attention being afforded to "teacher leadership" is palpable in the United States. At a national level, proprietary organizations are receiving funds from large philanthropic organizations (e.g., the Gates and the Wallace Foundations) to promote the development of teacher leaders. State departments of education are accommodating the federal push finding various ways to incentivize the efforts of teachers to lead from the classroom. Our institutions of higher education are also adjusting and accommodating by taking up the charge of preparing teacher leaders, theorizing, and researching the potential of teacher leadership through academic study. As professors of education in the United States, we are mindful of the contextualizing neoliberalism infused throughout our policy environment and are deeply concerned about the habits of competition, rigidness, bureaucratization, and overspecialization. Not surprisingly, such ways of thinking, acting, and being infiltrate our educational institutions and can have a dehumanizing effect on local teachers, their pedagogies, and their students (Noddings 2007; Nussbaum 2010). Such habits of mind and body can additionally reinforce a sense of isolation between teachers and their profession (Eisner 2001), perhaps even a loss of vocational calling (Hansen 1995;Palmer 2007). Along with this can come a sense of alienation from colleagues and administrators (Macdonald and Shirley 2009) as well as a loss of individual and collective voice and autonomy (Apple 2006;Ayers 2010;Miller 1990). This chapter reports on an action research project designed focused on teacher leadership and reconceptualist curriculum theorizing as an alternative to the Tyler Rationale.

In this article, the authors consider the shift from neoliberalism to authoritarian practice and its chilling effect on early childhood education policy, practice, and advocacy work. Firstly, they consider the history of resistance found within the field of early childhood education, recognizing the success of the reconceptualization movement. Secondly, they present the case of the 2021–2022 US legislative session in the state of Florida as evidence of the emergence of authoritarian practices. The authors conclude with proposals for partial, provisional, and practical ways of responding to the increasingly authoritarian conditions governing the education of young children.

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