Photo: Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children

Early educators can be on the front lines of promoting social equity.

To show how, the Foundation for Child Development has gathered resources on equity and justice from a number of national organizations.

“Creating a coherent and equitable system that works for young children, their families, and the educators who serve them requires the ECE field to be explicit about the realities of poverty, racism, discrimination, and prejudice,” the foundation says.

The foundation hopes to “foster a shared understanding” of how to move forward.

Among the resources is a report from Arizona State University’s Center for Child and Family Success, which notes:

“The United States is at a crossroads. We can spend the next several years trying to get back to the broken, ineffective status quo in our learning systems, where children were falling—or being pushed—through the cracks at astonishing rates. Or, we can choose to address the core, structural inequities that have held generations of children, especially Black, Latinx, and Native American children, back. For the sake of our country, we hope policymakers respond to the multiple crises facing our nation, with the latter. The policy agenda presented here can help us get there.”

The National League of Cities has a Race, Equity, And Leadership (REAL) initiative that “serves to strengthen local leaders’ knowledge and capacity to eliminate racial disparities, heal racial divisions, and build more equitable communities.”

Child Trends explores how research can be more equitable, explaining:

“Research has power. It influences policies and programs, factors into how communities receive funding, and provides policymakers and decision makers with information that helps them understand the underlying structural factors that perpetuate inequities. Because of this power, researchers have a responsibility to embed a racial and ethnic equity perspective within their work. A racial and ethnic equity perspective considers historical and current contexts, as well as the unequal power differentials and access to resources and opportunities in certain communities. Conducting research with a racial and ethnic equity perspective produces findings that reflect the life experiences of children, youth, and families of color.”

And this summer, the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families released its Statement on Structural Racism, which says in part:

“Combating racism requires that all of us acknowledge how we have been complicit in a system that denies access to opportunity, resources, and dignity to so many people in our Black, American Indian, Latinx, and Asian communities. We must also demand systemic change in our institutions that all too often create and maintain inequalities.

“In the words of Dolores Huerta, ‘every person [is] a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.’ ”

To learn more, check out these and other resources on the Foundation for Child Development’s webpage.