CZI Continues to Lead on Remote Learning. Will Other K-12 Funders Catch up?

Remote learning started off as a temporary disruption that educators hoped would not last long, but five months in, school districts find themselves much as they were in March—scrambling to adjust to a new reality.

Several major districts have shifted to remote learning after initially announcing they were opening in person or adopting hybrid models. Schools, it seems, were holding out hope for full reopening, even when it became clear that cases of COVID-19 were surging in most states, and this has resulted in a chaotic sprint to the first day of school.

Adjusting to a New Reality

In recent days, Inside Philanthropy has reported on a spate of giving to help school districts get ready for at least one more quarter of remote learning. Funders and individual donors in Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco have contributed tens of millions to narrow the digital divide for low-income students, providing devices, high-speed internet access, and skills training over several years. The digital divide in America has been a nagging problem for years and only now has serious money been given to tackle it beyond the occasional Band-Aid.

Giving for remote learning is still very much in its infancy, and many education funders have been quiet on the topic, preferring to stay the course with their pre-existing strategies and longstanding grantees, or donating instead to community foundations in response to the pandemic. In other words, their approaches have been largely conservative, reflecting a desire to wait and see what the data eventually tells them.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) stands out as the rare funder that has not shoehorned COVID-19 into its regular portfolio, but instead thinks about how the pandemic is changing education. It has moved past the nuts and bolts of remote learning and dived into questions of engagement, cultural sensitivity and equity. Since the beginning of the pandemic, CZI has granted over $9 million to support educators and students through remote learning, including committing $5 million in COVID-19 response grants to address the social-emotional and mental health of students and families. In recognizing that remote learning must be improved, not just for this upcoming school year, but for the foreseeable future, CZI is ahead of the pack.

As we covered previously, the grantmaker recently announced $850,000 in grants to five organizations to partner with schools serving mostly students of color, in an effort to achieve racial equity and social connectedness in remote learning and school recovery.

Backing a Range of Approaches

Now, CZI has awarded another $950,000 to nine groups that are developing content for students and professional learning for teachers. The grants also focus on culturally relevant content and resources for special-needs students and English language learners. Here’s the rundown:

PBS Learning Media and WGBH received $150,000 for teacher training webinars and standards-aligned content for PreK-12 students.
Springboard Collaborative was awarded $100,000 to form partnerships between teachers and families to improve student literacy.
Teaching Lab received $100,000 to expand its platform for educators to develop equitable, student-centered learning.
CommonLit received $100,000 for its culturally responsive curriculum for students in grades 5-12.
Village of Wisdom received $100,000 to gather research-based, culturally sensitive resources and partner with families to certify products for use among marginalized students.
Educating All Learners Alliance was awarded $100,000 to expand its digital hub for students with special needs.
English Learners Success Forum received $100,000 to help districts and educators plan for the needs of English language learners during school closures.
LiftEd App was awarded $100,000 to develop and expand its cloud-based platform that integrates individualized education programs and allows teachers to access them for daily instruction and interventions.

Needed: New Thinking—and Fast

Funders are known to be risk-averse, but the current moment demands that they depart from their usual grantmaking and experiment. That’s the core of the challenge facing philanthropy, as funders respond to a crisis that is constantly evolving, and our previous assumptions are thrown out the window.

Cities and philanthropies not known for K-12 giving are teaming up to devise more permanent solutions to the digital gap, while many large tech companies and major education funders have yet to muster more than tepid responses, given the huge scale of the challenges schools are facing now.

CZI is well-suited to advance its priorities because it has supported remote learning for several years—sometimes facing criticism for that focus, in fact. Its commitment to an area that has met often hostile resistance may yet bear fruit. CZI is one of the few funders to treat remote learning not as an inconvenience or something to be discarded when the pandemic is under control, but as a necessary and inevitable component of education. Schools and funders must plan for a future that is already here, courtesy of a public health crisis.

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