Josué Cruz, Jr., PhD: Making a Solid Place for the CDA

Dr. Cruz has been involved with the Child Development Associate (CDA)® Credential™ since its beginning. He was earning his PhD in early education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and interning at a Head Start center in San Antonio when he met C. Ray Williams, who taught at the University of Texas, Austin, and was conducting research at the center. In 1972, Williams became the first executive director of the CDA Consortium, the group tasked to develop the new credential, and he invited Cruz to join his staff in Washington, DC. Cruz spent two years working at the Consortium, went on to serve on the board at the Council for Professional Recognition and later became the Council’s CEO from 2007 to 2010.

So, he’s seen how far the CDA® has come from those early days when he and the first staff members of the Consortium began to explore models for the credential. “The Consortium brought together leaders in the early childhood field to lend their perspective, sense of vision and political muscle to give credibility to the CDA,” Cruz recalls. “There was a lot of productive dialogue and discussion as we wondered how we could make this experiment more than an idea and give it a solid place in the lives of children and families.”

From the beginning, the CDA had a strong connection with Head Start, the federal program that Yale psychologist Edward Zigler founded on the model of the settlement house where he had spent many hours in his youth. A settlement house, as Cruz explains, is an old term for a community center that provides low-income families with education, health care, child care and other social services to improve their living conditions. A settlement house in Kansas City, MO, had given Zigler’s family the support they needed to thrive after coming here from Eastern Europe. And Cruz has firsthand knowledge of the impact that settlement houses made on the families and children they served.

“When I was in college,” he recalls, “I worked with four- and five-year-olds at a settlement house that served people from public housing in San Antonio. I was involved in a family connection program, and I would read books, play games, do crafts and engage in games with the children when they came by in the afternoon. This was also a chance to get to know the children’s families because people who lived in the community were very concerned about their children. Grandparents and older siblings would volunteer to come and help us out several times a week,” he recalls. And seeing their sense of engagement sparked his own commitment to the early childhood education field.

Cruz would bring his passion for ECE to the world of higher education after completing his time with the Consortium in 1974. His academic career included administrative and tenured faculty positions at the University of Virginia, University of South Florida, The Ohio State University, and Bowling Green State University in Ohio where he served as dean of Bowling Green’s College of Education and Human Development. In the interim, Cruz continued his professional involvement, serving in numerous professional roles and as president of the NAEYC governing board. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and a Ford Foundation Urban Education Fellowship recipient, recognition of his work to improve outcomes for marginalized students.

“I began at The Ohio State University (OSU) in 1983 as an assistant vice provost for the Office of Minority Affairs,” Cruz recalls. “When I arrived, there were only 126 Latino students at the university, which had an enrollment of nearly 50,000 students, and I knew something had to be done. So, I began pushing for programs and funding that would open the doors of opportunity to Latino students,” as Cruz explains. During the 1990s, he worked with OSU’s Office of Affirmative Action to extend a new spirit of welcome to the many previously underserved Latino students.

And Cruz proved to be adept at getting the resources he needed to give his vision for Latino students a firm place at Bowling Green. “I obtained internal funding,” he says, “and in 1984, we brought in about 30 stellar Latino students. I also developed the first migrant student scholarship program, with funding from the Campbell Soup Company. It was strictly for students who had been working in the tomato fields and whose academic potential had been overlooked,” Cruz adds.

He also opened the door for Latino college students nationwide to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees at OSU. “My colleagues in the Office of Affirmative Action and I were able to obtain fully funded graduate fellowships for Latino students with bachelor’s degrees from some of the best universities around. They were stellar students and they, too, had been overlooked, like many students of color at that time. So, I developed a feeder system to bring them to OSU, along with an aggressive high school recruitment program for Latino high school students who lived in rural parts of Ohio and might otherwise have wound up working in factories or the fields.”

There was untapped promise among Latino students, Cruz was convinced, and he strived to bring it out by giving them a wide range of role models from diverse academic fields “I started a visiting professor program, and I was able to get funding to bring in professors of color who had a good record of helping students succeed. They would spend two weeks in their area of expertise at Bowling Green and give lectures in fields that included history, economics, chemistry, medicine, mathematics and more. These were people of color who had succeeded in higher ed and could inspire the Latino students to rise to new heights.”

Cruz also strived to recruit a more diverse permanent faculty to Bowling Green State University after becoming dean of the College of Education and Human Development in 2002. “I was successful because I had been tenured at several universities and knew how to get my thoughts across to faculty members,” he says. “So, I felt I had the right background as I sought to broaden the base of recruitment at Bowling Green.”

Cruz’s strong sense of vision drove him as he continued to open doors for underserved people, and he brought this sense of vision to the Council when he assumed the position of CEO in 2007. His experience in higher education came in handy as he worked to move the CDA credential ahead. “One of the things we did was to work with community colleges, especially those in North Carolina, where CDA courses became part of the curriculum and gained acceptance for college credits,” Cruz says. And this was another step in his quest to give early learning a solid place in the lives of children and families. “I’ve always thought the primary value of the Council and the CDA,” he explains, “is to legitimize and extend early education to all young learners.”

This was also a challenge in Cuba, Central and South America, an issue Cruz wanted to address after arriving at the Council. So, he brought together a group of staff members and U.S. early childhood leaders, organized visits to Cuba and formed professional links with other international groups. “We held two conferences in Cuba,” he recalls, “the second of which included people from other countries, especially those in Central and South America. The attendees were all eager to learn about the CDA and find out what the Council was doing to expand the reach of quality early learning and care for all young children.”

Cruz, too, continued to expand his global reach when he retired from the Council in 2010. “After that, I did some institutional accreditation work in the Middle East for about four years,” he recalls, “and it wasn’t always about early childhood education. I also worked with universities that wanted to reach the quality level of American higher education in fields that included mathematics, science, social studies, and special education. These trips gave me the opportunity to build bonds with people from different cultures, and they were among the most rewarding experiences of my life.”

Yet, as Cruz looks back on his long career, his efforts to enhance the well-being of young children remain foremost on his mind. He’s now doing research on a project he calls Children on the Threshold. It explores the roadblocks children face, whether abroad or in the U.S., where he’s glad to see that the CDA has made a broad impact for the better of us all. “The work the Council is doing to spread the reach of the CDA has an impact on the progress of society, the strength of the economy, the well-being of families and the quality of life for children,” he says.

So, Cruz is proud of the contributions he made to advance the CDA through technology and accreditation, but he knows he couldn’t have done it alone. “I had wonderful, talented people to work with at the Council. And as I collaborated with them, I saw that Council staff shared my vision for the CDA,” Cruz says. With their support, he helped make the CDA stronger and give it an even more solid place in the lives of children and families.