Jacobs, Francine

Francine Jacobs is an associate professor at Tufts University, with a joint appointment in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP), of which she is currently the chairperson. She is also the coprincipal investigator of the Massachusetts Healthy Families Evaluation, a multi-year study of the implementation and effects of Healthy Families Massachusetts, a statewide home-visiting program for young families. Her teaching focuses on child and family policy, program evaluation, and policy analysis.

In 1971, fresh out of Brandeis University, Jacobs took a job as an aide at a local child care center. Within 6 weeks, the director had resigned. Fran was the only staff person with a college degree, which is likely why, she believes, she was appointed the new director. As only inexperienced idealists can, she expanded services, recruited all kinds of families and children, and used the center as a political base from which to advocate for better child care arrangements for poor and working families. Among her proudest achievements was the center's integration of children with significant special needs. This appears to have been undertaken not for clear pedagogical reasons nor because of a legislative mandate (since there weren't any at the time), but rather out of a sense of moral necessity and a youthful belief that however difficult, it could be done. Under her passionate leadership, the center eventually accommodated itself to the physical and service needs of these children—this, at a time when few, if any, other child care centers had done so.

It was during this same period that Jacobs read the Westinghouse Learning Corporation's (1969) evaluation of Head Start. She was surprised at results describing Head Start's ineffectiveness; the findings ran counter to her own, hands-on experience in the field and to her own beliefs about the promise of early childhood interventions. About that time, she writes,

Here, then, during the first years of Jacobs's career, were many of the seeds of her later concerns and work: a passion to advance the cause of children, to promote their healthy development, and to protect them from harm; an insistence that scholarship serve the practical and immediate needs of children, families, and the workers “in the trenches”; a belief that wisdom derived from practice should undergird the development of theory and research; an inclination toward innovation, not for its own sake, but to serve ethical and professional demands; the willingness and audacity to lead, even when every day required calls to friends and experts to support, refine, and revise [Page 616]instincts that often proved to be right; and the insistence that the strengths, weaknesses, and capacities of individual programs be understood within their larger political, social, and ethical contexts.

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