PERSISTENCE AND STRONG ALLIES

That this innovative program came to be adopted in the "Show Me" state is a monument to Winter's persistence, to the support of powerful citizen groups, and to a governor's appreciation of how much guidance a first-time parent needs.

In 1972 when Arthur Mallory was Missouri's Education Commissioner he established a state office on early childhood education and named Mildred Winter to head it. At the time, she was director of a program in the suburban Ferguson-Florissant school district of St. Louis County that involved parents in the education of their young children. Since 1970 this district had offered parents of children under age five a range of programs, including home visits, tests of learning ability, and group meetings with other parents of preschool children. These activities provided some of the building blocks for the program Winter was later to inaugurate statewide.

When Winter accepted the new position in Jefferson City, Missouri's capital, she took a cut in income and agreed to work an administrator's 12-month year. She also worked what Mallory remembers as 75-hour weeks. Winter learned quickly that selling the basic design of the Ferguson-Florissant program to legislators and decision makers in other parts of the state was an enormous undertaking.

To assist these decision makers in constructing a model of parent education grounded in sound, pedagogic research, Winter and Mallory retained as a consultant Burton White, director of a 13-year study of early development by the Harvard Preschool Project. To underscore the appalling lack of guidance available to parents of young children, White once quipped: "You get more information with your new car than you do with your new baby." With no "owner's manual" for their offspring, too many parents learn childrearing by trial and error. Deprived of the right kind of education in their first years, many children later fail or underachieve in the classroom.

BUILDING A COALITION

The education of parents of very young children was not a burning issue among Missouri legislators in the 1970s. Nor did it seem to be high on the agenda of people outside Ferguson-Florissant. Headstart, virtually the only program to survive the dismantling of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the mid-1970s, was universally admired. But it was geared mainly to providing educationally and culturally deprived children with advantages their homes presumably failed to provide. Only peripherally did it bring parents into the process of helping their young children develop.