Why Three Leading K-12 Funders Are Lining Up Behind Education R&D

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When we consider education spending, we typically think about school buildings, teacher training, curriculum innovations and other fixes for immediate needs. But what about deep, longer-term investments in research to solve persistent education issues and inequities? 

In fact, while the U.S. devotes 3% of total expenditures to research and development, just 0.2% of education spending goes to R&D, according to Brookings. Now, major education funders are hoping to make up for this shortfall with the launch of a new R&D initiative called the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF). 

The fund was launched with $200 million in seed money from high-voltage names in the world of education philanthropy: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and the Walton Family Foundation. As IP has reported, Gates and CZI have teamed up in support of R&D initiatives in the past.

“AERDF was created to strengthen our R&D capacity in PreK–12 education, which has long been under-resourced,” said CEO Stacey Childress, when she announced the initiative this week. “Just as the country invests in breakthroughs in sectors like medicine and energy, AERDF’s Inclusive R&D programs will pursue ambitious goals and help push our understanding of what’s possible for student learning and opportunity.” Childress is also the CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, which is backed in part by the same top education funders.

Childress called AERDF “a home base for inclusive R&D programs that can build on evidence from the science of learning and development to create breakthroughs that can accelerate learning for students.” AERDF will support research and development into challenges that disproportionately impact Black, Latino and low-income students. 

Inclusive R&D

AERDF came out of the gate with two R&D programs in its portfolio: EF+ Math, and Assessment for Good. 

EF+ Math, which was created in 2019 by neurologist Melina Uncapher, aims to strengthen executive function skills, which have been shown to enhance math abilities. Indeed, one recent study indicates that strengthening executive function skills could help close the achievement gap for disadvantaged students overall. 

Uncapher cites research underscoring the key role executive function skills play in math achievement. “If you look at national data according to household income, you find that this math gap we worry about so much between students from high- and low-income households is almost non-existent when you look at students with strong executive function skills,” she said. “This body of research is a powerful pointer to the idea that strong executive function skills may actually have a protective effect and help overcome some of the challenges to learning math in under-resourced schools.”

The ambitious goal of the five-year EF+ Math R&D program is to double the number of Black and Latino students in grades 3 through 8 who are proficient in math. 

Assessment for Good is an R&D program that seeks to redesign and redefine how students ages eight through 13 are assessed in school, and to increase access to high-quality learning environments for Black and Latinx students.  

As Temple Lovelace, Assessment for Good program director, pointed out during the AERDF launch, Black and Latino students are currently overrepresented in special education classes. These students are also suspended and expelled at higher rates than their peers (according to research, 21% of Latino students and 36% of Black students have been suspended or expelled from high school.) 

Assessment for Good hopes to reverse those trends and improve outcomes for students with and without disabilities by developing more effective assessments and creating more supportive and culturally affirming learning environments.

“Success for us will be achieved when educators have at their fingertips relevant information about how a particular lesson or group activity helps a young person not only learn academic content in a more accessible way, but also provides additional opportunities for a young person to explore their identity in new and meaningful ways,” Lovelace said. “Success may also be captured in changing how we assess, moving from the measurement of what a student doesn’t know or hasn’t achieved to a strength-based approach.” 

In its programs, AERDF is implementing a model called “inclusive R&D,” which brings diverse teams of educators, researchers and developers to the table at the same time. The AERDF website explains, “Inclusive R&D engages educators, researchers and developers from the beginning in shorter cycles of innovation with clear, ambitious goals. By funding multiple projects in different contexts, Inclusive R&D plans for scalability from the outset, designing approaches and solutions that are meant to work in many communities rather than a single school or district.”

DARPA for Education 

It is not surprising that the biggest K–12 philanthropies would line up behind education research. For many years now, impact-focused funders like Gates and Walton have struggled to find “what works” when it comes to improving outcomes—whether it’s charters, small schools or teacher evaluation.

The idea of boosting education R&D is also not a new one; over the years, there have been a number of proposals for a government-funded education research program. A decade ago, during the Obama administration, for example, there were plans to create an education research program modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The idea was spearheaded by James Shelton, then deputy secretary at the Department of Education; Shelton also worked as president for education at CZI.

ARPA-Ed, as it was dubbed, never got off the ground (see this Brookings analysis to find out more). Perhaps if philanthropy builds it, government will follow.