The Center for Educational Equity needs your help to make 2018 as productive as this past year! Thanks to supporters like you, here is just some of what we accomplished in 2017:

To strengthen students’ educational rights and opportunities, we turned our rights-based lens on underexplored areas of educational policy: pre-K, career and technical education, and preparation for civic participation. Our research and legal analysis in these areas resulted in several trailblazing publications:

• Establishing the Right to Universal Pre-K, researched and written in partnership with the Center for Children’s Initiatives
• Ensuring Students’ Right to Preparation for Competitive Employment
• CEE executive director Michael Rebell’s new book, Flunking Democracy, Schools, Courts, and Civic Participation (U. Chicago Press, 2018)

CEE officially launched a new initiative, “Securing the Future of Our Democracy: Students’ Right to Preparation for Civic Participation.” Our work to date includes

• A pilot study of assessing the availability of resources for civic preparation in public high schools in the New York metropolitan area.
• A policy primer on preparing students for civic preparation that will be distributed by the Learning Policy Institute to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
• Convening New York State leaders in civic education, civic engagement, and educational equity to begin planning a collective effort to align policy with the state constitutional requirement to prepare all students for civic participation.

We extended our efforts to equip and empower students and parents with useable knowledge about children’s education rights.

• In partnership with young people and adults at THE POINT and Knowledge House, we began work on an innovative Know Your Educational Rights mobile app that will give students and parents the information and tools they need to make sure elected officials and education officials equip their schools with required resources.
• In partnership the Adelaide Stanford Institute, we facilitated parents becoming educational-rights “ambassadors” who shared knowledge with other parents and advocated for school officials to inform families of their educational rights under state law.
• We produced an updated, second-edition Essential Resources, the first compendium of school-level resource requirements under state law.

With a grant from the Wallace Foundation, and in partnership with stellar TC professors Jeffrey Henig and Carolyn Riehl, we led Teachers College teams to eight small American cities in field research to study collaborative efforts to improve education. The third report from this research project will appear in 2018.

We need your generous support to continue this important work. Please give what you can!