The National Urban League’s Equity and Excellence Project, launched in 2010, explicitly supports local, state, and national advocacy, engagement, and education reform efforts throughout the Urban League Affiliate Movement and with local, state, and national partners.

$23B

gap between funding provided to majority-white & majority-nonwhite school districts in 2019

4M+

African American/Black students would enroll in an after-school or out-of-school (OST) program if one was available and/or accessible

82%

of our nation’s African American/ Black 4th grade students were not reading at grade level in 2019

Our Approach

Having a local, statewide, and national reach allows us to implement a multi-pronged approach to the Equity and Excellence Project, which includes:

  • Engaging Urban League affiliates, partners, and coalitions in local, state, and national education reform efforts.
  • Ensuring integration across our early learning, youth development, postsecondary success, workforce development, and college completion and attainment agendas.
  • Broadening and deepening our communication efforts to build a different education reform/innovation narrative in—and concerning—the African American/ Black community and other historically excluded communities of color.
  • Building the capacity and executive leadership of the Affiliate Movement, the National Urban League, and the National Urban League Washington Bureau to work more effectively and comprehensively with civil rights/equity partners and the national education reform & innovation community.
  • Organizing local, state, and national convenings centered on different aspects of equity and excellence that include a range of stakeholders, perspectives, and strategies.
  • Creating opportunities for students, parents, and stakeholders to engage meaningfully in order to become effective advocates, to build a sense of agency and voice, and to ultimately drive local education reform and innovation in pursuit of equity and excellence.

To realize a more equitable future, the National Urban League believes that children and youth require systems, policies, and practices that attend to the development of the whole person.

To that end, the EEP targets seven areas that are highly and tightly related to the historic mission of the National Urban League. Improvements in any one of these seven areas would help some students across the full P-16 education spectrum. However, we can help many more students by intentionally and meaningfully combining reform and innovation strategies into a whole-learner equity approach to systematically address the complex barriers that Black and other underserved students, parents, and communities continue to face in pursuit of an equitable and excellent education.

  1. FAIRNESS: Equity and excellence at scale

  2. FOUNDATIONAL INVESTMENT: Early childhood learning and development

  3. CRITICAL PREPARATION: 21st-century skills-based curriculum

  1. ENSURE ACCESS: High-quality curricula, teachers, and administrators

  2. MEASUREMENT: Comprehensive, transparent, user-friendly, culturally appropriate, and aligned data systems

  3. OPPORTUNITY: Out-of-school time learning and development with an emphasis on comprehensive and coherent approaches to child and youth success

  4. FULFILLMENT: Postsecondary degree or credential attainment

 

Please learn more about the EEP, see our campaign No Ceilings on Success.