The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded CLI a grant to develop and refine a culturally responsive pre-kindergarten curriculum audit tool in partnership with the Center on the Ecology of Early Development (CEED). 

The audit tool, created by renowned scholars Drs. Stephanie Curenton and Ximena Franco also from CEED, is being designed to ease decision making for early childhood center leaders, parents, teachers, community members, education policy makers and program administrators when selecting and adopting a Pre-K curriculum.

The tool will provide insights as to the extent to which Pre-K curricula, particularly the language and literary resources, are culturally responsive, anti-bias and anti-racist, and inclusive of the strengths and intersectional identities that Black and Latinx children bring to the classroom. Additionally, it will help early childhood programs and schools identify improvement plans for curricula currently in use.

“The early childhood field has been a leader for decades in curricula and professional learning related to anti-bias. I am thrilled to be one of the scholars taking up this mantle again by creating tools to help the field measure how well we are doing this work. Our curriculum audit tool, along with classroom quality measures that focus on racial equity like the Assessing Classroom Sociocultural Equity Scale (ACSES), can make a difference in young children’s school experiences by ensuring that classrooms are spaces where children can see themselves represented in the curriculum,” says Children’s Literacy Initiative’s Chief Academic Officer Erica Holmes-Ware.