Barbara T. Bowman, an educator who trained generations of teachers in helping underprivileged children in their preschool years begin to fulfill their potential, died on Nov. 4 in Chicago. She was 96.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure, said her daughter, Valerie B. Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and now the chief executive of the Obama Foundation in Chicago.
A scion of a trailblazing Black family, Mrs. Bowman was a founder of the Chicago School for Early Childhood Education, now known as the Erikson Institute. The organization has had a profound influence on education policy in Chicago, across Illinois and in the federal government, particularly under the Obama administration, with its focus on early education.
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, who described Mrs. Bowman as a personal hero, recently created a state department of early childhood education.
The Chicago School was created in 1966 at a time when early childhood eduction programs, like Head Start, for low-income families, were on the rise — all part of a national effort to address the needs of disadvantaged children, who often arrive at elementary school without the social and academic skills that are necessary to succeed. Mrs. Bowman’s school sought to fill the gap between the growth of those programs and the number of teachers trained to teach in them.
“At this point, young Black children are not getting a chance,” she said in an interview with The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in 2002. “They’re being cut off at the knees before they get to first grade.”
The school’s goal was to train teachers to give disadvantaged preschoolers the same opportunities for academic success that more privileged children get.
“It’s an ideal time to both provide the children with the education the parent can’t give them, and provide the parent with the kind of information they need to be supportive of their children’s education,” Mrs. Bowman said.
Her sense of mission stemmed from personal experience. “She grew up in the Depression and the Jim Crow era not expecting life would be fair,” Ms. Jarrett said, “but believing that through grit and determination anything would be possible” and “that anybody who was given the opportunity could succeed.”
She added, “My mother taught me, it’s not what happens to you in life, but what you do about it.”
Mrs. Bowman was the chief officer for early childhood education for the Chicago public school system and, in her 80s, a consultant to Education Secretary Arne Duncan during the Obama administration.
“We now know that quality early childhood care and education are the bedrock for future success in school and in life,” she wrote in The Chicago Tribune in 1996. “While everyone agrees with the goal of breaking the cycle of welfare dependency, the trick is doing it without harming our children and creating bigger, more costly long-term problems in the process.”
Mariana Souto-Manning, the president of the Erikson Institute, hailed Mrs. Bowman as having transformed “the entire early-childhood education landscape.”
Barbara Francis Taylor was born on Oct. 30, 1928, on Chicago’s segregated South Side. Her father, Robert Rochon Taylor, was a banker and the first Black chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. Her mother, Laura Dorothy (Jennings) Taylor, was a teacher.
Her maternal grandfather, Robert Robinson Taylor, was the first Black graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1892, and the first accredited African American architect, according to M.I.T.
Barbara attended Parker High School in Chicago before transferring to and graduating from Northfield School for Girls (now Northfield Mount Hermon) in Massachusetts. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and from the University of Chicago in 1952 with a master’s, both in education. While earning her master’s she taught at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools’ nursery school and later in elementary school.
“She chose her profession because she was fascinated by how very young children learn and develop,” Ms. Jarrett said. “She wanted to professionalize the field of early childhood education.”
She married Dr. James E. Bowman, a physician, in 1950. The couple first moved to Denver and then, in 1955, to Iran after Dr. Bowman had rejected job offers in the United States in which he would have been paid less than his white counterparts. He helped start a hospital in Shiraz, in southwest Iran, where Ms. Jarrett was born, before the family moved to London. They returned to Chicago in 1962.
There, Dr. Bowman became the first tenured Black professor of medicine at the University of Chicago medical school an internationally recognized expert on pathology and genetics. He died in 2011 at 88.
In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Bowman is survived by a granddaughter, Laura Jarrett, who is chief legal correspondent and co-anchor of NBC’s “Saturday Today” program; and two great-grandchildren.
Mrs. Bowman helped establish the Chicago School for Early Childhood Education in 1966, teaming up with Maria Piers, a child psychologist; Lorraine Wallach, a social worker; and Irving B. Harris, a businessman and philanthropist.
She served as the institute’s president from 1994 to 2001 and held the Irving B. Harris professorship of child development there. She was president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children from 1980 to 1982 and consulted with universities in China and Iran. She also directed training programs for teachers in inner-city schools and in Head Start programs; for caregivers of at-risk infants; and for a child development program serving Native American reservations.
Mrs. Bowman retired from the Erikson Institute a week before her death, though not without some reluctance. “She said to me, ‘I still have so much more left to do,’” Ms. Jarrett said.
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