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Hi! I am Ashley Reid- a wife and proud mom of two boys whose journey into early childhood education began with a simple desire: to be home with my firstborn. That decision led me to open a Family Child Care Home, and from that very first day, I knew I had found my calling. For more than 24 years, I’ve worked across nearly every area of early childhood education: teaching in classrooms, providing technical assistance, supporting administrators, managing projects, teaching as an adjunct instructor, and designing professional learning sessions for educators. My goal has always been to strengthen the systems that support children, families, and the professionals who serve them.

I am currently a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, majoring in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Urban Education. I was honored to be named a 2023 Urban Education Doctoral Fellow. My research and professional interests center on equity, policy, and improving educational outcomes for young learners in diverse communities. I’ve presented at multiple conferences, published articles, and remain deeply engaged in both scholarship and practice.

As a member of NAEYC and NBCDI for more than a decade, I’m committed to advancing equity and excellence in early learning. My passion for advocacy has taken me from local community meetings to conversations with congressional leaders, where I’ve had the privilege of speaking about the critical importance of funding child care. I’ve also been fortunate to study abroad in Belize and Cambria, Portugal, experiences that broadened my understanding of education across cultures and deepened my belief in the global importance of early learning.

At my core, I believe early childhood education changes lives. Whether I’m researching, teaching, or advocating, my mission is to help others see the value of this work and the profound impact it has on our communities.

Research Statement

My research investigates the complex relationships between early childhood education, culture, policy, and social systems, with a particular emphasis on how structural inequities shape the experiences and developmental trajectories of young children from birth through age eight. Situated at the intersection of educational equity, culturally responsive pedagogy, and public policy, my work seeks to understand and disrupt the mechanisms through which marginalized children, especially Black children, Indigenous children, immigrant children, and children from linguistically diverse households, experience disparate outcomes in early learning environments. I draw on interdisciplinary frameworks from sociology, developmental science, critical race theory (CRT), and educational policy analysis to examine how institutional practices, cultural norms, and political decisions converge to influence children’s opportunities to learn, grow, and thrive.

My scholarly trajectory has been shaped by roles across research, evaluation, teacher development, and policy leadership. As a research associate at the University of Virginia, I analyzed statewide early childhood datasets to assess the efficacy of Virginia’s Pre-K programs. This work provided an empirical foundation for understanding program quality indicators, teacher-child interactions, and child readiness outcomes across diverse contexts. More importantly, it strengthened my commitment to rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods as tools for illuminating disparities and informing systemic improvement. Through subsequent positions in leadership development, professional training, and state-level early childhood initiatives, I have continued to examine how policy intentions translate into practice, how educators navigate structural constraints, and how children experience the consequences of decisions made far outside the classroom.

My research agenda develops across three interrelated strands:

1. Culturally Responsive and Community-Embedded Early Childhood Pedagogy

The first strand explores how early learning environments can be transformed through culturally sustaining and community-driven approaches. Drawing on the work of Paris, Ladson-Billings, I examine how children’s cultural knowledge, linguistic assets, and community identities can be authentically integrated into instructional practice. My recent work investigates how Indigenous epistemologies, intergenerational knowledge-sharing, and culturally embedded mental health supports contribute to children’s socioemotional development and sense of belonging. This line of inquiry highlights both the possibilities and tensions inherent in implementing culturally responsive practice within systems that were historically designed to standardize curricula rather than honor local culture.

2. Racial Disparities and Exclusionary Discipline in Early Childhood Settings

A second strand interrogates the persistent racial disparities in suspensions, expulsions, and other exclusionary discipline practices among young children. Informed by CRT, developmental psychology, and policy analysis, I investigate how teacher beliefs, implicit bias, inconsistent preparation, and organizational culture interact to create disproportionate harm for Black boys and other marginalized groups as early as preschool. My current research examines both the proximal mechanisms (e.g., teacher–child interactions, behavioral attributions) and distal structural conditions (e.g., workforce training systems, accountability frameworks, funding structures) that reproduce inequitable disciplinary patterns. I seek to contribute evidence that supports systemic reform and moves beyond program-level interventions toward policies that center justice, prevention, and developmental appropriateness.

3. Policy, Stress, and the Sociopolitical Determinants of Early Development

The third strand of my work analyzes how broader sociopolitical conditions such as immigration enforcement, community instability, mental health policy, and economic precarity, shape early childhood development. Building on ecological systems theory and trauma-informed frameworks, I examine how children’s stress experiences, such as parental deportation or exposure to unstable family contexts, manifest in early learning environments. My current work explores how early childhood systems can respond through culturally grounded, trauma-informed, and policy-supported practices that buffer the impact of sociopolitical adversity. This research seeks to foreground the voices of families and communities whose perspectives are often absent from policy design and evaluation.

My methodological approach is intentionally interdisciplinary and contextually grounded. I employ mixed methods, combining quantitative analyses of large-scale administrative data with qualitative approaches such as ethnographic observation, policy discourse analysis, interviews, and autoethnographic inquiry. This allows me to capture both systemic patterns and the lived experiences of children, families, and educators. Increasingly, I am committed to participatory and community-engaged methods that position families, teachers, and program leaders as co-researchers and co-designers of solutions. My ongoing doctoral work extends this commitment through a focus on structural reform, intersectionality, and the developmental implications of systemic inequity.

Taken together, my research aims to produce scholarship that not only analyzes inequities but also guides pathways for systemic transformation in early childhood education. Future studies will examine:

• the influence of early cultural identity formation on later educational resilience;

• policy-level approaches to eliminating preschool suspensions and expulsions;

• the role of early childhood systems in mitigating sociopolitical stressors for immigrant and racially marginalized families; and

• the implications of mental health policy for the developmental needs of young children in rural and urban contexts.

My long-term goal is to build a program of research that bridges scholarly inquiry, policy development, and practitioner expertise. I aim to contribute work that reshapes early childhood systems into equitable, culturally affirming learning environments where all children experience dignity, belonging, and developmental opportunity.

To learn more about my academic background, please review my Curriculum Vitae.

-Muhammad Ali