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Learning, Joy, and Equity: A New Framework for Elementary Education
Just over four years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to shut down and left a wake of destruction, with millions dead and millions mourning their dead — deeply impacting everyone, including our youngest children. There has been nonstop public discourse in education systems about attendance and learning loss/recovery, but most proposed responses have been repurposed, rather than transformative. The time to reflect and truly rebuild an education system for all children, including and especially those who education systems have historically and contemporarily marginalized, is now.
Many recent efforts, policies, research studies, and programs have moved the education field forward in understanding learning, development, and academic growth in U.S. schools. For example, researchers have done deep work on child-centered pedagogies, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and inclusive education that applies a universal design for learning (UDL). Other researchers have completed extensive work on preschool to third grade systems building. Curriculum and assessment are robust fields of their own. Contemporary work on assessment is moving the field forward in holistic, dynamic, bias-conscious assessment. This includes efforts by the U.S. Department of Education to encourage states to develop high-quality, low-stakes assessments that can help guide instruction and meet student needs.
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. While there is no single ideal elementary school experience, there are core ingredients to which every child needs and deserves access. Guided by research, data, learnings from schools across the United States, parent and family voice, and a desire to design child-centered, joyful, and effective spaces for learning, we provide a framework that consists of 14 core ingredients.
The Framework is guided by research, data, learnings from schools across the United States, and parent and family voice. In the coming months, the CEP and New America will launch a series that will take a deep dive on each of the 14 core ingredients. Stay tuned!
Suggested citation:
Powell, T., Meek, S., Bornfreund, L., Soto-Boykin, X., Allen, R., Iruka, I.U., Bucher, E.Z., Ameley-Quaye, A., Alexander, B.L., Cardona, M., Aponte, G.Y., Gordon, L., Blevins, D., & Loewenberg, A. (2024). Learning, Joy, and Equity: A New Framework for Elementary Education. The Children’s Equity Project. https://cep.asu.edu/resources/New-Elementary-Education-Framework.