The Children's Equity Project
Closing opportunity gaps and advancing equity in all of the systems that impact the lives of children and families.
About the Children's Equity Project
The Children’s Equity Project is led in partnership with researchers and advocates at several universities and organizations across the United States. Our work focuses on closing opportunity gaps and advancing equity in all of the systems that impact the lives of children and families so that all children, particularly those from historically and contemporary marginalized communities, can thrive.
The CEP works at the intersection of research, practice, and policy. We engage in rigorous original research, partner with policy makers at every level of government to support data and research informed policy changes that will advance opportunity for children from historically marginalized communities; and engage with communities to deliver training, technical assistance, and professional development. We are informed by families' voices through our family advisory committee, lived experiences, data, and research, and have deep expertise in child development, policy, and systems.
Read more about our team and our work below.
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Research and Translation
Highly trained faculty from ASU and at partner institutions across the country conduct original, actionable research on a range of equity issues. We lead a national network of equity scholars and work through a "hub" model to aggregate, translate and disseminate equity research to policy and practice.
Check out our resources page to learn how we are applying our research to create more equitable learning environments.
Policy
We work with states and communities on policy change across a range of equity issues along with our partners at the federal level to ensure that equity issues are understood and considered in the federal policy-making process.
Read our resources providing policy recommendations on how we can improve policy in the U.S. to better serve our youngest learners.
Practice
The CEP uses a data and research-informed, policy and practice-focused lens that frames our training and technical assistance (TTA) approach. We work with federal, state, and local child and family-serving system leaders to surface and dismantle inequitable policies and practices by critically examining systemic factors that perpetuate and sustain inequities. We work across an array of systems including early care and education (child care, Head Start, pre-K systems), early intervention and preschool special education, K-12 education, child welfare, mental health and health, and more. We also provide training and professional development opportunities for practitioners across a variety of roles in each of these systems.
The Center for Early School Success
We are thrilled to announce that a collaborative led by the CEP in partnership with the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska, the Math Project at UCLA, the University of Oregon, New America, and the California Literature and Literacy Project, was selected to establish the first Center for Early School Success, funded by the US Department of Education.
Reimagining State Child Care Licensing
This report from the Children’s Equity Project provides states with recommendations to enhance their child care licensing systems, aligning them with recent research and effective practice, across 1) licensing content, 2) licensing process, and 3) governance and coordination in state early childhood systems.
Learning, Joy, and Equity: A New Framework for Elementary Education
This report proposes a new framework for elementary education that builds on, and is informed by, previous foundational efforts, centered on children and the ways we know children learn, and disrupting well-documented, historically rooted, and contemporarily entrenched biases in learning systems.
The Children's Equity Project has grown to a team of fifteen Arizona State University staff and faculty and manages a network of over two dozen scholars from twelve universities and institutes across the United States. Learn more about our team below!
The Children's Equity Project does a plethora of amazing work across research, policy, and practice across the early education space and has been featured in many news outlets highlighting our work. Check them out below!
With funding from the Heising Simons Foundation, the CEP is proud to offer the Start with Equity Fellowship, a 1-year fellowship program to prepare the next generation of changemakers in early childhood policy and research.