Jerlean Daniel

Jerlean Daniel, a Pitt alumna and former associate professor of education here, traveled a long way to become executive deputy director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) in Washington, D.C., a job she began last month.

Her journey started when, at age 17, she left her hometown of Sacramento, Calif., to attend Pitt.

When Daniel was a girl, her parents attended NAACP board meetings around the country; from Pittsburgh, they brought back to Sacramento pictures of the Cathedral of Learning and its Nationality Rooms—but Jerlean Daniel says today that those images did not influence her decision to enroll here. Rather, the attraction was Pitt’s trimester academic schedule, which encouraged undergraduates to earn their degrees in less than four years’ time. Jerlean liked the idea of graduating quickly, and also of going to college away from home.

Ultimately, Daniel would earn three Pitt degrees—a B.A. in political science in 1964; an M.S. in child development in 1972, and a Ph.D. in higher education in 1975.

While she’s spent most of her career in child care, Daniel initially wanted to be a lawyer, like her father. She changed her mind as a freshman, though, because she disliked the thought of arguing with people all of the time.

Daniel says her Pitt undergraduate education in political science has served her well throughout her career. “I consider myself first and foremost to be an advocate for children and families,” she says. “And I use that [political science training] to this day in working with public policy issues. I don’t know what part of life isn’t political.”

Unsure of what she wanted to do professionally upon finishing her undergraduate degree, Daniel became a caseworker for the Allegheny County Department of Public Assistance. She disliked the job, she recalls, largely because her supervisors “had an attitude that everyone who sought their help was trying to cheat the public.” Daniel remembers being assigned to search the residence of one of her clients, a mother with five children, because Daniel’s boss did not believe the woman could be living without a man in the house.

“That was the icing on the cake for me,” Daniel says, “and I decided there had to be a better way to be a helper in this society.”

A fellow caseworker noticed a newspaper ad by the Pittsburgh Public School Board seeking preschool teachers with degrees in fields other than education. Daniel and two other caseworkers applied and were hired.

“It was a different era, and they had money to give us training while we were on the job,” says Daniel. “The next thing I knew, I was teaching preschool, and I really enjoyed it. But there came a time, as I was doing this work, that I thought, ‘This is more complicated than meets the eye. There’s really more to this. I need to go back to school.’”

From the wife of a colleague of her husband, Jack L. Daniel (now Pitt’s vice provost for undergraduate studies and dean of students), Jerlean learned of a small but high-quality graduate program at Pitt in child development and child care. She enrolled and felt that she had at last found her proper place.

After Daniel earned her master’s degree, she moved with her husband to Michigan for a year, returned to Pittsburgh to begin doctoral studies in Pitt’s education school—and had two children.

“Toward the end of my doctoral study, I got a job as a child care center director at the Sewickley Care and Development Center, a center funded in part by the Department of Public Welfare,” Daniel says. “That job helped to focus my advocacy on behalf of children and families and the people who work with young children, who are so grossly underpaid.”

After working for eight years at the Sewickley center, Daniel spent two years at Carlow College’s Child Development Center and was the latter center’s director when it moved to Pitt in 1984. After eight years at that job, Daniel became a faculty member in Pitt’s Program in Child Development and Child Care, initially housed in Pitt’s School of Social Work but later moved to the School of Education and renamed the Applied Developmental Psychology Program.

Looking back on her faculty career, Daniel says: “I wanted to be sure that the kinds of learning opportunities that I shared with my students were real-world like, that the students had a way of thinking about complex issues, a way of projecting themselves out of their immediate experience to consider other people’s points of view. I also thought it was important to help people to be excited about the work they were doing, to find both depth and joy in it.”

By the time Daniel left Pitt for Washington, D.C., to become executive deputy director of NAEYC, she had earned tenure here and been promoted to chair the education school’s Department of Psychology in Education.

NAEYC is the largest early childhood education organization in the world, with about 100,000 members and a mission of enhancing early childhood programming and supporting professionals who work in early childhood programs.

When Daniel was offered the NAEYC job, she didn’t have to think hard before accepting. During her 18 years directing child care centers, she had served on NAEYC’s board and as president and secretary of a NAEYC-affiliated organization in Pittsburgh. “People talk about being made an offer they can’t refuse,” Daniel says, “and this was an opportunity to take my very intense volunteer life and make it my job, to really take it to another level.”

Her husband of 41 years remains at Pitt. Jerlean Daniel says: “We are both at a point in our careers that we are really supportive of each other in terms of being able to do work that is really satisfying, that allows us to make a difference in our various fields. We are very particular about our weekends and spending them together, and we talk all the time.

“I’ve had a fabulous professional life, because this field is one that offers all kinds of opportunities to work across disciplines and to work with a variety of people, all to make things work for children and families.”