Caroline "Ellie" DeWitt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College. In this role, she is working with Drs. Kristin Smith and Casey Stockstill on a project studying how Vermont Act 76 impacted the retention and recruitment of the New Hampshire early childhood education workforce. She is also mentoring undergraduate students in the Class of 1964 Policy Research Shop. 

Ellie’s scholarship is driven by her commitment to evidence-based problem solving to improve the lives of young children and families who have historically been marginalized and underserved through informing early childhood and education policy. Her passion for these areas of research and policy stem directly from her personal experiences. Ellie’s research has focused on equity and access to high quality early childhood education and early childhood special education services for ethnoracial minority children and children who have experienced early childhood risk factors. Her dissertation investigated the extent to which family poverty, participation in health care, and enrollment in center-based early childhood education and care moderate the relationship between ethnoracial group and disparities in special education identification at and across stages of early childhood.

Ellie received her PhD in Education Policy from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education where she was an Institute of Education Sciences Pre-Doctoral Fellow and a Research Assistant at the Penn Early Childhood and Family Research Center. She has a BA in Psychology and Public Policy (both with honors) with a minor in Educational Studies from Gettysburg College where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and served as one of only two student representatives on the Pennsylvania State Board of Education.