Helping Kansas City Children

Working Together for Greater Impact

Since opening in 2010, Children’s Campus of Kansas City’s collaborative partnership of researchers, educators, and advocates have been working together to narrow the gap between research and practice in real-world settings to help benefit early childhood education and our community.

Our partner programs connect families to the comprehensive system of services, build highly skilled early childhood educators to improve outcomes for children and advocate for policies that close the achievement gap.
Childrens Campus Kansas City Location

Mission

To promote the well-being of children and families through collaboration, research, practice, and advocacy.

Vision

Our research-to-practice model serves as a demonstration standard that can have a profound impact nationwide. Other learning centers can take our collaborative model to improve their practice and community.

Why It Matters

Quality early education changes lives!

The evidence is in: High quality programs that help children learn in their earliest years — such as early education or home visiting programs — can directly improve the trajectory of children’s lives. This is especially true for children from lower income families who often must overcome obstacles to achieve success. High quality programs that focus on supporting young children and their families can ensure that children get off to a good start.

Early investment pays off

Child poverty is growing in the United States; investing in quality comprehensive birth-to-five early childhood education is a powerful and cost-effective way to reduce the frequent negative effects of poverty on child development and adult opportunity. High quality programs pay for themselves many times over. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, found that an investment in early education produces a 13% per year return in better education, social, health and economic outcomes.

Early care and education programs can reduce the word gap!

Children from low-income backgrounds often face challenges from their environments that hamper their development and lower their chances for success. In language development, children who grow up in poverty hear 30 million fewer words from their caregivers in the first three years of life than children from higher income families. As a result, many children from disadvantaged backgrounds show a lag in vocabulary development as early as 18 months. While these differences can have lasting effects on children’s later achievement, quality early care and education programs can help children change the course of their development in the years before school.

Research
Practice
Advocacy
Newsletter