[Event Recap] Child-Centered, Joyful Learning in the Early Elementary Grades

In July, New America and the Children’s Equity Project published a framework designed to improve elementary education. The framework builds on the recent Closing the Opportunity Gap for Young Children report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine about the causes, costs, and effects of the opportunity gap on young children. It highlights 14 core ingredients guided by research and data to describe an ideal elementary school that is child-centered, encourages joyful learning, places equity at the foundation, and is flexible to community context and priorities.

On Tuesday, both organizations hosted an event to introduce the new framework for elementary education. The event began with a welcome from Cara Sklar, director of New America’s Early & Elementary Education Policy program. Sklar began with a quote from the late Ruby Takanishi, former senior research fellow at New America, about the need to rethink education and design a new system to help all young learners realize their true potential.

Up next was Swati Adarkar, deputy assistant secretary for early childhood education in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education. Adarkar noted the Biden administration’s efforts to improve the elementary school experience through the establishment of the Kindergarten Sturdy Bridge Learning Community, as well as the recently announced Center for Early School Success. The Center, which will be supported by New America, the Children’s Equity Project, and others, will support efforts to improve the transition to kindergarten and the alignment of pre-K through third grade early learning systems. Adarkar concluded her remarks by recognizing the work of Barbara Bowman, a pioneer in the field of early childhood.

To provide more details on the framework, Dr. Shantel Meek and Dr. Tunette Powell then provided an overview of each of the 14 ingredients. Dr. Meek thanked the Biden administration for working to “put the early grades on the map in a real way.” Dr. Meek also noted the historical and contemporary challenges that act as barriers to achieving this ideal, such as funding issues, racial segregation, exclusionary discipline practices, and lack of teacher and leader diversity. Dr. Powell gave a bit of background about each of the 14 ingredients, focusing on the first two ingredients as being of heightened importance: transformative leadership and a child-centered vision and philosophy.

The panel discussion that followed offered concrete examples of the ingredients in action in schools across the country. Laura Bornfreund, senior fellow at New America, served as moderator of a panel that included Dr. Michael Robert, Superintendent of Osborn School District in Phoenix; Dr. Letitia Johnson-Davis, former principal of Baldwin Hills Elementary School in Los Angeles; Keri Rodrigues, the founding president of the National Parents Union; and two current District of Columbia Public Schools teachers, Ambar Martinez and Patricia Donati.

Bornfreund began by asking each panelist what resonated most out of the 14 ingredients in the framework. Dr. Robert spoke of the importance of promoting student health through the addition of bike lanes throughout the city for children commuting to school, as well as a partnership to eliminate unhealthy foods from school lunches (ingredient #12). Dr. Johnson-Davis emphasized the importance of transformative leadership (ingredient #1), saying that “the school leader holds the school community in their hands” and calling the job “a sacred responsibility.” For her part, Keri Rodrigues pointed to the importance of authentic family engagement (ingredient #10) that moves “from transactional to transformational” and treats parents with dignity and respect.

The discussion also featured important perspectives from the two current teachers on the panel. Patricia Donati emphasized the importance of blended pedagogies (ingredient #5) in her classroom and shared an example of what inquiry-based learning looked like in her classroom during a recent lesson around students’ favorite animals that led to research about preventing climate change. Ambar Martinez emphasized the importance of taking an asset-based approach to teaching (ingredient #11), noting that, “Kids don’t come to us broken.”

Bornfreund concluded the discussion by asking the panelists to share what gives them hope that conditions can improve in elementary schools. All panelists expressed optimism about the future of elementary school education across the country, with Dr. Robert noting that the vast majority of parents trust the public school system to educate their children, despite heightened attacks on public education in recent years.

While Tuesday’s event marked the official launch of the framework, in many ways this just marks the start of the work related to it. Stay tuned into 2025 when we’ll take an in-depth look at the ingredients in action and highlight local communities that are leading the way towards a better elementary school experience.

The event video can be watched in its entirety here.