Lessons That Are Shaping Our 2026 Learning Agenda

This post is co-authored by Jon Sotsky, Senior Director, Strategic Impact & Learning, and Anthony Lucchino, Manager, Grant Effectiveness & Strategic Support. 

Each year, our Foundation’s learning agenda serves as a throughline for what we seek to learn across our investments, which studies we fund, and what conversations we facilitate with partners across the field. As our team stepped into 2026, we took stock of the lessons our previous learning questions surfaced and how they connect to our next set of learning priorities in the year ahead.

1. Sustainability: How can grantees effectively diversify revenue streams and adapt their sales strategies to survive and thrive in a challenging fiscal climate?

Despite the expiration of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, nonprofits report feeling less impacted than for-profits. Only 23 percent of nonprofits, compared to 40 percent of for-profits, reported the ESSER funding cliff as a challenge in an EdWeek Market Brief survey commissioned by our foundation last year. While this may point to nonprofits having steadier or more resilient fiscal models, it may also show that nonprofits may be underprepared for the repercussions of ESSER’s expiration. This makes it even more critical that funders understand their grantees’ revenue streams and help nonprofits adapt to thrive in a fiscally-constrained environment.

At the same time, one way education nonprofits have successfully navigated a dynamic fiscal climate is by adapting to meet purchaser needs. Among our grantees, TalkingPoints responded to districts’ focus on absenteeism by launching a stand-alone Attendance Improvement Package. Meanwhile, Fishtank Learning strategically bundled a comprehensive K-12 English language arts and math curriculum, professional learning, and assessment into a digital platform, lowering friction for districts and making adoption more affordable. These examples underscore how education nonprofits can evolve and the importance of flexible funding to allow them to do so.

2. Innovation: How can we support our grantees to build innovation cultures and pilot new approaches to improve programmatic and/or business outcomes?

Strategic innovation enables nonprofits to improve cost-effectiveness and strengthen long-term resilience. In a complex fiscal climate, the organizations that are thriving are not simply tightening budgets, but rethinking how they deliver value. Whether through technology, such as Teaching Lab’s Nisa, an artificial intelligence (AI) coaching platform for teachers and instructional coaches, or new delivery approaches, like LENA’s direct-delivery subscription model, we’ve seen grantees innovate upon existing models to unlock between 20-50 percent reductions in program or implementation costs. In addition, these innovations lowered costs while sustaining, or sometimes even increasing impact, showing how nonprofits can revisit and expand existing models while centering the problem at the heart of the work. When it comes to funding innovation, we’ve also found that strategic, time-bound capital is often the catalyst that moves nonprofits from idea to impact at scale.

To help nonprofits adapt to and integrate AI, funders can go beyond grant dollars to offer structured, intentionally designed capacity-building support. Last year, we teamed up with Charles and Lynn Shusterman Family Philanthropies to launch the inaugural AI Accelerator. In coordination with Leading Educators and Playlab, the AI Accelerator created cohort-based learning environments for 22 nonprofits by providing access to coaching, experimentation time, and peer collaboration. As a result, 93 percent of participants reported improved strategic problem-solving using AI, up from 29 percent at the start, and 58 percent defined a clear AI strategy, up from just four percent. The program demonstrated the potential of well-designed capacity building to turn a curiosity for AI into real-world implementation, while also building much-needed technical capacity within the nonprofit sector. To meet growing demand and sustain this progress, the second AI Accelerator cohort will launch this spring, reaffirming our commitment to equipping nonprofits with the tools and confidence to lead in an AI-enabled future.

3. Artificial Intelligence: To what degree can AI cost-effectively advance student or teacher outcomes?

While AI has the potential to improve student outcomes, the rapid proliferation of AI tools in education has outpaced the evidence base. The most recent EdTech Insiders Generative AI Map, funded by Overdeck Family Foundation, identifies more than 300 AI tools and use cases for the edtech community—signaling sizable growth from even a few months earlier. Encouragingly, EdTech Insiders has launched a partnership with Stanford SCALE to apply a shared taxonomy that documents emerging evidence, which now features more than 1,000 studies. To date, evidence most consistently supports administrative and planning use cases for AI in education, with far less conclusive findings for elementary and middle school student-facing outcomes. These findings suggest the need for funders to build the evidence base and support disciplined experimentation, which we’re excited to do in 2026.

One area with strong emerging evidence is AI-enabled instructional coaching. Emerging research, supported by Overdeck Family Foundation, on coaching tools like M-Powering Teachers suggests that AI-enabled coaching can improve teacher quality while reducing overall coaching time, with preliminary insights suggesting increased student engagement, deeper mathematical thinking, and positive experiences with personalized, practice-embedded feedback for participating students. While much of this research is just beginning, these initial descriptive data points offer an example of how an AI-powered intervention can measurably benefit educators and students.

4. Implementation: How can we support grantees to assess and improve the usage quality and/or fidelity of implementation to achieve greater impact?

There’s growing evidence that edtech products, including tech-enabled tutoring, can be impactful at scale, but only when implemented with fidelity at the recommended dosage. Evidence from Overdeck Family Foundation-supported randomized controlled trials suggests that both tech-enabled tutoring and edtech tools that provide personalized instruction can produce sizable achievement gains at scale, often at a lower cost than traditional instruction. However, impact requires that students both receive sufficient dosage and that usage of the tools or programs is embedded into instructional routines through clear expectations, time allocation, and support. When these conditions are absent, even high-quality tools have little to no impact on achievement in real-world settings, demonstrating the importance of prioritizing investments in implementation.

At the same time, we’ve seen that dosage benchmarks for instructional tools are disconnected from research and rarely met in practice. A study published by Watershed Advisors found that many vendors set recommended dosage levels without internal analysis or external validation. Additionally, most students do not reach the recommended dosage threshold needed to yield impact. Improved implementation will require aligned action from districts and vendors, pairing clear instructional expectations with tools, training, and dosage guidance designed for real classroom conditions.

5. Student Attendance: What approaches to increasing student attendance demonstrate the greatest promise, and what are the most meaningful and actionable measures of student engagement?

Chronic absenteeism remains a challenge, though strategies meaningfully countering it can cost relatively little. Chronic absenteeism can cost districts up to $5,630.00 per student per year, but emerging evidence suggests that low-cost strategies focused on information sharing and family engagement can positively impact attendance rates. Early warning systems, such as those developed by Rhode Island and Connecticut, along with targeted teacher-led messaging, have been shown to meaningfully boost attendance for as low as $2.00 per student. And a study at UC Davis that is part of an Overdeck Family Foundation-funded learning cohort found that family engagement can be a key predictor of absenteeism, with districts that invested in relationships with parents and clear, consistent communication showing increased attendance. These strategies represent high-return opportunities that can meaningfully improve attendance while freeing up district dollars for academic priorities.

Looking ahead to our 2026 Learning Agenda

We’re excited to transform our learnings into practice in the year ahead. Informed by these insights, we’ll continue to deepen our understanding of our grantees’ needs, the rapidly-shifting education landscape, and the role our grantmaking can play in improving educational opportunities for children.

Here are the five questions that we’ll use to guide our learning efforts in 2026:

1. Innovation: How effectively are grantees innovating, including with AI, to increase cost-effectiveness?
2. Implementation: What are the primary barriers to quality implementation at scale, and which supports most reliably ensure interventions reach the required dosage for student-level impact?
3. Strategic Partnerships: How can grantees form strategic partnerships to improve the delivery, impact, and sustainability of their models?
4. Evidence Adoption: What tactics, investments, and partnerships most effectively support greater adoption of evidence-based practices and policies?
5. Internal AI Usage: How can our foundation adopt and apply AI to promote efficiency and time spent on the highest value activities?

As always, we remain committed to transparently sharing what we learn throughout the year. To stay up to date on the latest news from Overdeck Family Foundation, follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.

Header image courtesy of TalkingPoints