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Catalyzing innovation

We support improving outcomes for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty through long-term innovation, research, and development. Our investments in education research and development are focused on new ideas and practices with the potential to significantly improve the trajectory of student learning outcomes over the next 10 to 15 years. We are exploring innovative ways to facilitate and accelerate the integration and translation of evidence-informed teaching practices and research into scalable education practices, programs, and tools that support teachers and students.

EF + Math Program

EF+Math program. In 2018, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Gates Foundation began jointly exploring whether breakthrough education solutions can be developed through an accelerated discovery and development effort. This work culminated in a total commitment of $50 million over five years, funded in equal parts by both philanthropies, to support the EF+Math program.

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We aim for every student to have educational opportunities that enable them to develop the knowledge, skills, habits of mind, and agency to realize their full potential and live a healthy, productive, and fulfilling life. In the last decade, promising developments and innovations bring this aspiration within reach. Researchers in education, learning and developmental science, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, technology, and other fields have generated new and significant scientific evidence on how people learn. We know more than ever before about learning across a person’s lifespan from infancy through adulthood. We are exploring innovative ways to facilitate and accelerate the integration and translation of evidence-informed teaching practices and research into scalable education practices, programs, and tools that support teachers and students. We believe it is possible to harness research and development for dramatic and life-changing improvements in learning and developmental outcomes, resetting expectations for students who are not being well-served by our current approaches to education.
The creation of scalable innovations in education has been elusive. Education research has been stymied by underfunded efforts that skew heavily toward basic research. Historic approaches to R & D in education have fallen short on several fronts: (1) Few developments have produced substantial improvements in outcomes for their target populations. (2) Even the most rigorously tested and efficacious developments have struggled to achieve meaningful scale. (3) The diffusion of knowledge between researchers and practitioners lacks consistency and breadth. (4) The pace of testing and evaluating solutions is slow and narrowly focused.
We seek to bring together interdisciplinary teams from education research, human development research, learning measurement, evidence-based technology-enhanced practice, professional development, neuroscience, and other fields. The teams would produce models, practices, tools, and other resources that are designed to achieve specific, measurable improvements in student outcomes (both academic and non-academic) across a large range of education contexts.
This strategy is well-suited to tackling chronic challenges that are driven by complex cognitive, metacognitive, social-emotional learning, and environmental factors. Examples include: (1) Improving mathematical understanding, application, and related mindsets. (2) Measuring and improving executive function. (3) Improving writing: developing the requisite habits, skills, and strategies

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