Celebrating and Honoring Ruby Takanishi, 1946-2020

Last month, we lost a thoughtful and forceful leader in early education, an intellectual giant in research and policy, and a fierce champion of children’s rights and equitable learning opportunities through their first decade of life.

New America was privileged and honored to have Ruby Takanishi as a senior research fellow in our Education Policy Program over the last six years. With every phone call and visit to our office here in Washington, D.C., with every detailed and passionate exchange of comments on our reports and policy papers, Ruby helped to guide our work. Ruby could always be counted on to ask the provocative and critical questions that helped us hone our messages and become even more pointed in our writing about children and families who have the least, who are too often overlooked, and whose potential is at risk of being squandered and neglected without shifts in policy, investment, and attention.

Our conversations with Ruby were beautifully laced with her weighty yet humble turns of phrase. We will miss hearing Ruby’s words, “What shall I say…?”, before leaning into a full discussion of profound and troubling issues that need to be tackled across our country. Her words and fervency will guide us always.

Among the many areas of education that Ruby identified for needing revision, the early years of children’s educational experiences were at the center. Not only was Ruby an advocate for quality pre-kindergarten and more support for parents and families raising young children, she also recognized that it would be futile to stop that work at age 5 and simply have children enter a wholly different system that did not align to the research on how children learn best. She wanted to ensure that all kids, but especially those in families without resources, had rich continuous learning experiences in all their years of early schooling, setting them up for success throughout life.

These are causes that Ruby championed her entire life, in academic articles and policy papers dating back to the early 1970s, when she wrote about parents and communities being involved in child care centers and the significance of “developmental continuity,” which is now embraced as part of movements under monikers of PreK-3rd, P-3 and First 10. As president of the Foundation for Child Development from 1996 to 2012, Ruby established programs and awarded grants to advance those visions, and we here at New America (starting with what then called the Early Education Initiative) were grateful to be recipients of several FCD grants toward that end. The publication of First Things First! Creating the New American Primary School (Teachers College Press, 2016) laid out an even fuller case, elevating these issues for a broad audience of educators, researchers, education professionals, and policymakers. Her 2016 article for the New America Weekly magazine, summarizes the key points from her book, calling on decision makers to “redesign learning in Pre-K-5 classrooms to provide vibrant challenging experiences for all children.”

Ruby did not countenance the idea that education leaders and policymakers have no choice but to accept the status quo and tweak around the edges. She believed, as do so many of us here in New America’s Education Policy Program, that equitable education will only come with full-scale rethinking and rebuilding. As she stated in a presentation for the National Association of Elementary School Principals in 2016: “We created the current structure and organization of American education; we must and can change it.”

Ruby also worked to amplify and illuminate the needs of dual language learners (DLLs) and their families. She advocated for practices that leveraged DLLs’ considerable assets, particularly the use and continued development of their home languages. And she championed the need for policies that integrated DLLs as a core consideration rather than an afterthought. As chair of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Math consensus study, Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures, Ruby helped bring to bear decades of research on DLLs to elevate essential policies and practices to improve their educational experiences. The study has become an essential tool for understanding the strengths of DLLs and dispelling the myths that have been used to create harmful English-only policies and practices.

Ruby pushed to ensure continuity of quality instruction and family engagement up through the ages and grade levels, something that is very hard to do when our systems of education are walled off from one another. As Ruby once told me (Lisa), “the silos between early childhood education, typically considered the ages of 0-5, and elementary school (K-5) are water tight.” If she had not been the chairperson of the National Academies’ study on English Learners, it is likely that the researchers and educators in the worlds of ECE and elementary school would not have been connected in any way and few references to the importance of that connection would have made it into the report.

In a phone conversation several months ago, Ruby talked about the changes she had witnessed and been a part of over many decades, such as the linkage between policy and the scientific study of young children and how they learn, a connection that was barely understood and rarely pursued when she first started her career. “You now have a cadre of individuals who are looking at research and policy connections,” she said. “This is now normal work.” Throughout her life, Ruby mined that intersection of research and policy, able to see the big picture and offer a vision of a more equitable education system while also not shying from the details of science and implementation. Here at New America we are profoundly grateful for her mentorship and leadership, and we commit to continuing her legacy.

For more about Ruby’s many contributions, see memorials of remembrance, gratitude, and celebration published by the Society for Research in Child Development, the Foundation for Child Development, the Children’s Institute in Portland, Oregon, and this site for tributes from colleagues and friends. In the months before her death, Ruby also conducted a series of interviews for SRCD’s Oral History Project. The oral history of Ruby Takanishi starts with memories of her earliest years growing up on the island of Kaua’i and explains how they shaped her thinking throughout her decades of work in education research and policy.