2025 Funding Strategy Updates Across Portfolios

The end of the year is an essential moment of reflection for our team, a time to collectively take stock of what we’ve learned, where we can do better, and what we anticipate in the education and philanthropic landscape in the year ahead. (In case you missed it, read our leadership team’s predictions for 2025.)

We use this time and the insights it generates to celebrate the successes of our grantee partners, which you can see in our recently launched 2024 Grantmaking & Impact Report, and to assess our funding strategies both at the foundation and portfolio levels. This practice ensures that our grantmaking and strategic support remain responsive to the needs of our grantees and their beneficiaries while remaining true to our mission of measurably enhancing education inside and outside the classroom.

Our venture-inspired funding model, which we launched in 2021, incorporates funding across direct impact and ecosystem investments with the goal of identifying and fueling the scale of cost-effective, sustainable programs and solutions that accelerate improvement in key academic and socioemotional outcomes for all children. We believe our approach, which focuses on what works for kids and ways to make those solutions more cost-effective, allows us to intentionally help nonprofits unlock innovation, build evidence, and achieve growth and sustainability.

As our executive director Anu Malipatil detailed in her annual letter, in 2025 we will continue to prioritize uplifting bright spots of what works while addressing some of the most pressing issues facing students, families, and educators. Recognizing the tightened fiscal climate and potential rapid pace of change in the months ahead, we will support grantees in fostering innovation, building evidence, and increasing organizational sustainability by keeping our focus on evidence-based grantmaking, impactful capacity-building engagements, and convening opportunities.

We also will continue to invest in cross-portfolio solutions to address chronic absenteeism and opportunities for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interventions, as well as research to understand the potential of new technology to improve teaching and learning. And lastly, our team is eager to examine implementation and dosage across our direct impact grantees to see how it can be improved to ensure all children receive the full benefits of evidence-based programs.

2025 portfolio strategies

This year’s grantmaking strategies across our portfolios remain largely consistent, with some adjustments to ensure that we’re funding what the evidence shows can lead to the greatest impact in the areas of early childhood, engaging science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, and teaching and learning in kindergarten through ninth grade.

Below is an overview of what you can expect in 2025 from our four main investment areas. We will continue to evaluate these strategies in light of the quickly evolving nature of the education sector at the moment and will make and communicate adjustments as needed.

Early Impact: Creating strong foundations for early learning

Our Early Impact portfolio remains focused on measurably increasing the likelihood that all children enter kindergarten ready to thrive and experience early school success. The portfolio seeks to accomplish this by ensuring that all types of early learning environments—whether at home, center-based, or in-school—are high quality and effectively support children’s development.

Since our team set a goal of increasing kindergarten readiness in 2017, we have seen progress. For example, new federal data indicate that 63 percent of three- to five-year-olds were “on track” toward kindergarten readiness in 2022, compared to 40 percent in 2016. However, other data indicate the pandemic may have negatively impacted kindergarten readiness, with overall declines since 2019 as well as widening disparities.

We continue to center our work around kindergarten readiness because we know it has important implications for later school and life success; kindergarten-ready children are more likely to master basic skills by age 11, less likely to drop out of high school, and more likely to reach middle-class status by age 40. At the same time, the early childhood field faces many challenges. The sector continues to be plagued with workforce challenges and the number of childcare workers remains below pre-pandemic levels while costs rise. Preschool enrollment and spending have reached all-time highs—enrollment was up seven percent during SY 2022-23 and states spent an additional $1.17 billion—but adjusting for inflation, spending per child has not substantially changed in the past 20 years and still falls far short of the cost of high-quality full-day programs.

Additionally, most preschool curricula do not meet young children’s needs, according to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine comprehensive study of preschool curricula. That could be why younger children are not making the same progress as older children post-pandemic, with some falling even further behind, especially in math, and others struggling with social-emotional capabilities and lacking basic skills and competencies that are expected in kindergarten, such as toilet training. Lastly, while data on pandemic and post-pandemic preschool absenteeism are scant, kindergarten has been one of the hardest-hit grades: In California, for example, more than one in three kindergarteners were chronically absent in SY 2022-23.

With past successes and current challenges top of mind, we’re deepening our investments in the areas we continue to believe are best suited to effectively impact young children’s lives, specifically maintaining our focus on parents and early educators as critical supporters of child development. In 2025, this looks like grantmaking that will:

• Develop and scale parent and family supports shown to improve home learning environments, healthy birth outcomes, and early relational health;
• Improve the quality of early learning environments, including supporting better curricula and professional development for early childhood educators; and
• Scale family engagement practices shown to increase the likelihood of early school success, consistent attendance, and student engagement.

Exceptional Educators: Making the educator role more effective and sustainable

The goal of our Exceptional Educators portfolio is to increase educator effectiveness and improve the sustainability of the teaching role so that all children in kindergarten through ninth grade experience rigorous, engaging, and accessible instruction that enables them to learn and thrive.

We know teachers are the most impactful in-school factor affecting student achievement, but many are experiencing circumstances that can negatively impact their ability to deliver rigorous, engaging, and accessible instruction that meets all students’ needs. These include:

• Increased student needs, with too many students performing significantly below grade level and falling further behind, making instruction even more challenging;
• Insufficient professional development, with only 30 percent of teachers reporting they received training to effectively implement new curricula and 27 percent of K-12 teachers considering materials too challenging for the majority of their students; and
• Many new tools with little training on how to use them, with seven in 10 teachers saying they haven’t received any professional development on using AI in the classroom, despite believing this technology could be transformative for student learning.

To address these challenges, we are doubling down on two areas that we believe can be most impactful in the year ahead. Our grantmaking will:

• Increase educators’ participation in high-quality professional learning and/or coaching centered on high-quality instructional materials, aligned assessments, and evidence-based pedagogy. This includes the possibility of using AI to better support professional learning and teacher coaching, making it easier for educators to improve instructional practices and support students with varied learning needs; and
• Develop, test, and scale strategic staffing models that make the educator role more sustainable and effective. This includes exploring whether team-based staffing models can provide teachers with increased growth opportunities, extend the reach of more effective educators, and leverage technology to rethink expectations for teachers’ time.

Within these strategies, we are particularly excited about strengthening the connection between strategic staffing models and high-quality instructional materials. We believe doing so effectively can promote stronger student engagement and accelerated learning in a way that can be catalytic for both the educator and student experience.

Innovative Schools: Supporting student-centered learning environments

Our Innovative Schools portfolio remains dedicated to expanding access to tech-enabled, student-centered learning environments in kindergarten through ninth grade, intentionally designed for all students to thrive.

Despite advances in technology and instruction over the past several years, as well as an influx of federal and state funding to help recover from pandemic-induced learning loss, too many students still lack proficiency in basic math or literacy skills. In fall 2024, only 28 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math; incoming high school students remained a full school year behind pre-pandemic levels in math and reading. And students who were already furthest behind have fallen back even more, with gaps between the lowest- and highest-achieving students growing wider since the pandemic.

The increased needs in today’s classrooms result in a learning experience that is impossible for a single teacher to address without support. We continue to believe that technology can help provide this support, creating student-centered environments that accelerate learning and help students progress at a pace appropriate for them. Yet we also know that a growing evidence base for tech-enabled solutions is not yet leading to the adoption of effective practices, materials, or technology at scale. And, when scaled, even evidenced-based solutions can fail to replicate impact due to challenges with implementation.

To address these challenges and opportunities, the Innovative Schools portfolio will focus its investments in three areas: curriculum, tutoring, and assessments. Specifically, our grantmaking will:

• Support evidence-based organizations, specifically those that provide core and supplemental curricula, to increase impact at scale through improvements in implementation, professional learning, mindset shifts, and ecosystem investments;
• Help curriculum and tutoring organizations increase cost-efficiency through innovation, particularly by integrating advanced AI, which we believe will improve their ability to compete in a dynamic market; and
• Fund the development of diagnostic, formative, and interim assessment products, which we believe will increase in importance as states continue to shift away from summative assessments.

Given the proliferation of AI and the resource constraints many districts will experience in a post-ESSER environment, we are particularly excited to increase our focus on supporting innovation in 2025. We believe helping our nonprofit partners, specifically those that provide resource-heavy interventions and programs such as high-impact tutoring, will be critical as we seek opportunities for catalytic grantmaking.

Inspired Minds: Inspiring young minds through hands-on STEM learning

Our Inspired Minds portfolio aims to build the next generation of confident, creative problem-solvers by expanding access to high-quality, joyful, and rigorous STEM learning experiences designed to spark STEM interest and promote STEM achievement.

Students in the U.S. continue to show low or stagnant STEM achievement: data consistently show low math performance (e.g. 2022 PISA, 2023 NAEP data) and proficient science scores for only one-third of elementary and middle school students. These trends have important ripple effects, resulting in negative impacts on economic competitiveness, variable levels of adult STEM literacy, low math self-efficacy, and increasingly negative views on science. Research shows that both in- and out-of-school settings play important roles in sparking STEM interest, maintaining it, and eventually fostering more durable impacts like STEM identity, skill development, and content knowledge. However, both settings face challenges to doing so successfully.

Out-of-school time STEM programs:

• Reach a limited number of kids—only 10 percent of kids are enrolled in an afterschool program and only 55 percent participate in summer learning;
• Vary in quality, especially when it comes to STEM, given that most programs lack dedicated staff for these content areas; and
• In some instances, may be too short in duration to drive achievement outcomes.

In-school STEM experiences reach all children, but:

• Are often disengaging, with over 85 percent of teachers using practices like lectures and full-group discussions at least once a week;
• Have struggled to improve academic achievement, especially in science, with less than 33 percent of all students scoring proficient on the most recent NAEP; and
• Tend to be deprioritized over more frequently tested subjects like math and ELA, resulting in only approximately 20 minutes per day dedicated to science.

In 2025, to address the challenges above, the portfolio’s strategy continues to center on improving access to joyful and rigorous STEM learning, both in and out of school, the latter piloted in 2024. Over the past year, we’ve also identified a deeper need to improve in-school science instruction by focusing on the growing market of high-quality instructional materials specifically, which you will notice in the strategy below. As such, our grantmaking this year is designed to:

• Increase access to—and evidence for—joyful and rigorous STEM in out-of-school time. This includes a range of out-of-school time experiences across the dosage spectrum, ranging from short duration, highly engaging experiences like field trips that spark STEM interest, to medium- and long-term duration clubs and camps that maintain interest and grow skills; and
• Improve in-school science instruction by increasing access to joyful and rigorous STEM in the classroom. This includes organizations that drive student engagement and achievement through experiences aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, primarily through high-quality instructional materials that promote relevant problem-solving, student-led inquiry and investigations, and debate and collaborative sense-making.

This strategy reorganization reflects the current challenges and opportunities we see in the field, as well as what our grantees have learned from operating within both the in- and out-of-school settings.

From strategy to action

Our 2025 grantmaking is well underway, and we’re eager to monitor our progress and the impact of our work aligned with our mission.

As always, we remain committed to transparently sharing this journey on our blog and LinkedIn, and in our newsletter throughout the year—we hope you will follow along. If your organization fits into any of the strategy areas outlined above, we invite you to contact us.

Header image courtesy of CommonLit