Edward F. Zigler (Photo credit: Michael Marsland. Yale University)

We join our friends and colleagues in remembering Ed Zigler and his incredible leadership and commitment to young children and families.

Zigler was “a psychologist and children’s advocate who was a principal architect of the Head Start program in the 1960s,” the Washington Post reports. Zigler “called for schools to be neighborhood social service centers, and advised every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama…”

“An eminent and rigorous scholar, Zigler was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University,” a Yale news release says. “He was passionate that science should be in the service of the public interest…”

The Post adds this Zigler quote:

“I remember when I was in Washington they kept trying to get me to say whether I was a Republican or a Democrat,” [Zigler] told the Progressive magazine in 2002. “I just said, my politics are children. That’s all I know anything about.”