Our goal: Expand access to tech-enabled, student-centered K-9 learning environments, intentionally designed for all students to thrive.

The traditional classroom model often fails to provide students with meaningful and engaging learning opportunities that can accelerate their skills in the classroom. This results in too few students performing at grade level, and fewer still engaged and empowered for lifelong success.

The disruptions to learning over the past several years make now a critical time to reimagine the traditional schooling model, transforming how students learn and enabling each individual student to reach their full potential. Our Innovative Schools portfolio supports direct impact and ecosystem grantees that leverage technology to create student-centered, evidence-based K-9 learning environments that engage, challenge, and improve academic, executive function, and social-emotional skills for all students.

Our Learnings

There is continued urgency to support students to reach and exceed grade-level expectations for math and literacy skills.

The array of student needs has widened, leaving educators in search of more personalized ways to engage, support, and empower students.

Embracing student variability can accelerate academic mastery and lead to more engaged, lifelong learners.

The learning environment plays a crucial role in student success.

High-impact tutoring can meaningfully accelerate student learning, and technology can increase accessibility for more students.

A proliferation of edtech tools and a fragmented K-9 market makes it difficult for schools to know which solutions would work best for them.

Grantee Spotlight

Learn more about some of the work funded by the Innovative Schools portfolio.

Student uses computer

CommonLit

Supporting teachers to enhance students’ reading and writing skills.

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Khan Academy

Improving learning and teaching with AI-powered tutoring.

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OnYourMark

Improving students’ early literacy skills through high-impact virtual tutoring.

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six students sit on the floor at school

Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund

Investing in blended literacy and computational thinking models for low-income students in New York City.

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Saga Education

Making math tutoring both impactful and cost-effective.

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ST Math

Bringing a new way of looking at math from the classroom to the home.

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Zearn

Scaling an evidence-based math program to elementary schools across the country.

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Our Approach

Scale Personalized Interventions

Develop and scale technology-enabled interventions, including tutoring and curricula (both core and supplemental), that accelerate students’ mastery of math and literacy knowledge, as well as foundational social-emotional skills.

Our Approach

Increase Active Learning Experiences

Invest in developing tech-enabled active learning experiences that enhance student engagement and allow students to apply their learning to improve mastery of academic and social-emotional outcomes.

Our Approach

Improve Evidence-Based Decision Making

Increase districts’ use of evidence when making edtech purchasing decisions through ongoing validation, field building, and knowledge generation.

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Children work in small groups at computers. Image provided by NewSchools Venture Fund.

Our Questions

To what extent do schools across kindergarten through ninth grade adopt individualized, online, and virtual learning tools and use them in combination, and what impact does this have on student learning outcomes?

What conditions must exist in school communities for tech-enabled, personalized learning interventions and tutoring programs to successfully be implemented, and what do states, school, and districts need to create or strengthen those conditions?

What impact does project-based learning in math have on widely-established measures of academic performance, such as standardized test scores?

How can AI-enabled innovations more cost-effectively advance student and teacher outcomes?

Other Portfolios