2026 American Youth Policy Forum, Powered by CDF Thursday Agenda

Day 2 of AYPF opens with the exciting preview of CDF and Chapin Hall’s partnership, launched formally at the 2025 AYPF.  Their first co-authored report, due out in 2027, will examine the impact of our current political environment on CDF Freedom Schools™ Scholars, parents, caregivers and neighbors across three states—through their own eyes.  Day 2 will launch with a video preview of these conversations and upcoming data, accompanied by remarks from Bryan Samuels, Executive Director of Chapin Hall. 

Children’s Defense Fund believes that all children should be able to fulfill the dream of doing better than their parents. Unfortunately, research shows that the racial wealth gap has proven to be persistent and rooted in a history of economic inequity for Black people in America. This has been spurred on by systemic and sustained discrimination, which has prevented Black Americans from realizing economic justice and attaining greater wealth. While the wealth gap is smaller than it was in the 19th century, it remains at approximately 6 to 1 between White and Black Americans. At a time when inequality is widening due to attacks on vital public systems, we must ask ourselves: what does it mean to truly invest in the future of Black children as a matter of public policy? And, what would become possible if the nation fully committed to repairing the economic harms carried across generations—and centered Black children in the process? 

Join us for a fireside chat as we explore ground-breaking research from Dr. William Darity, Jr. that offers a path towards economic justice for young Black people rooted in a child-focused framework for reparations. This session will examine how and why Black children face disproportionately negative outcomes at nearly every developmental stage and how wealth inequity shapes everything from early childhood development, educational attainment, mental health, and long-term economic mobility. Dr. Darity, Jr. will explain why policies that fail to address these disparities leave children vulnerable to continued harm and how a cross-disciplinary framework of reparations for black children to improve economic equity and deliver what is owed to descendants of enslaved African Americans.  

Speakers:

• Annie Donovan, RDF
• Jennifer Jones Austin, FPWA

A core belief of Children’s Defense Fund is that education is a building block for civic life and work, with a major impact on children and young people’s ability to flourish. We believe public education is a cornerstone of democracy, opportunity, and justice — not a privilege to be rationed, but a public good and a civil right that every child deserves, regardless of race, language, ability, or zip code. 

This fireside chat, moderated by Mariana Souto-Manning, PhD, President of the Erikson Institute, is grounded in an emerging vision of child-centered, freedom-oriented pedagogy: an approach to teaching and learning that insists children are not passive recipients of instruction, but full participants in their own learning and liberation, with a right to see their identities, languages, and histories honored rather than erased in the classroom. Unfortunately, we have seen a concerted effort to treat public education as a privilege and not a right. Political polarization, censorship efforts, privatization, disinvestment, and the dismantling of federal education protections are reshaping the future of learning for children and young people. 

Join us as we explore today’s challenges within the broader history of public education as both a site of struggle and a pathway toward opportunity, civic participation, and collective liberation — asking what it means to prepare children not only for work, but for civic life, critical thinking, belonging, and participation in a multiracial democracy, and what advocates, educators, and families must do together to defend and reimagine public education as a public good for the next generation.