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The primary goal of the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct is to provide a moral compass for early childhood educators. Based on the core values of the early care and education field, it spells out some important ethical responsibilities and provides guidance for practitioners who face difficult ethical dilemmas by helping them to reflect on the question "What would a good early childhood educator do?" It was designed to be a living document that would always reflect the field's current understanding of how early childhood educators can best serve young children and their families. This article examines the Code's history and recent developments that reflect efforts to keep it current, and it considers where future initiatives related to ethics might take us.
Origins and development of NAEYC's Code of Ethical Conduct
NAEYC began exploring the issue of professional ethics in 1976. For two years ethics was a topic of discussion at the Association's Governing Board meetings, but at that time consensus could not be reached on how to proceed. Lilian Katz and Evangeline Ward's influential 1978 book Ethical Behavior in Early Childhood Education rekindled NAEYC's interest in ethics.
In 1984 new efforts were initiated-an ethics survey was published in Young Children (Feeney & Kipnis 1985) and an Ethics Commission was formed. Soon thereafter NAEYC began its concerted efforts to create a code of ethics. Young Children published selected dilemmas received in response to the survey, and some of these scenarios were explored in more depth in subsequent issues of the journal and in ethics workshops conducted throughout the country. Those efforts led to greater understanding of the ethical dimensions of the early childhood educator's work and resulted in a draft of the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct that, after revision, the Governing Board adopted as an NAEYC position statement in 1989. This collaborative process ensured that the development of the Code would be a grassroots effort, one that would come from the members and incorporate their views (Feeney & Freeman 1999). The process reflected the consensus-building that NAEYC believes is essential to all of its position statements and that comes from extensive field input.
When NAEYC created the Ethics Commission (later to become the Ethics Panel) more than 20 years ago, its charge was to...