LPI provides high-quality research to advance education policy and practice. LPI’s Whole Child Policy Toolkit is an interactive website designed to provide state policymakers and education leaders with easy access to strategies, tools and resources to advance whole child policy and systems change. Following the release of the toolkit, LPI and its partners provided direct support to states working to implement toolkit recommendations to advance whole child policy in California, New Mexico, Maine and Washington state.

FFE is working to create healthier and more prosperous communities by advancing the best education for the students who need it the most. FFE is building new high school graduation pathways through capstone projects and graduate profiles. FFE now supports 27 local education agencies across New Mexico and expects for that number to grow in the next year.⁶⁹

The district is also engaging families in designing activities that build on students’ interests and skills, and developing strategies to measure impacts on student learning, school climate and sense of purpose.

UC Irvine supports Anaheim Union High School District to measure the impact of the school district’s Career Preparedness Systems Framework. By leveraging new tools and dashboards built by university researchers, educators across the district are now able to see student growth in both academics and life skills. The district measures progress in 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication, while also fostering youth voice and technical skills. Since implementing this model, the district has seen an increase in student graduation rates, improvements in college readiness and career to technical education pathways, and more.⁷¹

BARR is conducting research to better understand the barriers preventing schools from adopting transformational programs, which have been shown by large bodies of research to have a positive impact on students.

VOW supports family organizing and advocacy groups that are working to eliminate racial injustice in schools. VOW developed tools and resources to help create ideal learning environments for Black and Brown learners. Designed with Black parents and teachers, these resources support teachers and parents in providing culturally affirming instruction. VOW has worked with 180 teachers and reached approximately 1,600 students in Durham.⁷³

CCE partners with schools, districts and communities to increase educational equity and ensure that students succeed and communities thrive. CCE created a process to engage local communities in determining the measures that matter for student success.

GripTape partnered with Cornell University to research these experiences, with the research showing that youth improve in areas that are critical to development and well-being: environmental mastery and sense of control over their responsibilities; the autonomy to act against social pressures and shape their environments; and a sense of self-acceptance. Youth also improve their self-esteem and “pathways of hope” — that is, they’re better able to envision alternative directions forward through stress. Maybe most importantly, the youth-driven experiences help their sense of purpose improve significantly, and an increase in purpose is linked to many other facets of well-being.⁸³

More than 60 nations are represented among the student body, including Navajo, Pueblo, Ute Mountain Ute, Red Lake Band of Chippewa and Sicangu Lakota — to name a few. CZI’s grant is helping NISN to understand the connection between land-based healing and learning practices on student learning.

The AFT is a 1.7-million member union of professionals that champions high-quality public education for students, families and communities. The AFT redesigned its professional learning coursework for new teachers to incorporate the science of learning and development, and disseminated it to 15 states and more than 100 classrooms. In addition, the AFT improved educator well-being in six states through research-based professional development and created a unique, educator-generated measure for nationwide educator workforce well-being assessment.⁸⁵

The ALP, an initiative led by C!E, is dedicated to rethinking the role of assessments to foster student learning, agency and equity. The ALP expanded its membership and built a larger movement to change teacher practice and assessment, and accountability systems. ALP insights also support C!E’s work with a number of states in its Interstate Learning Community as they seek to engage inclusive groups of teachers, students, families and community members in the co-design of state accountability and assessment. States include Kentucky, New Mexico, Georgia, Colorado, New Hampshire and Wyoming.⁸⁶

Leanlab is a nonprofit research organization with a mission to study and grow transformational education innovations that have been co-designed with school communities. Leanlab has evolved from educator trainer and edtech accelerator to an organization that helps edtech companies build better evidence-based products through educator and student co-design research experiences. Leanlab Education is a core partner to CZI and Gradient Learning on the development of new edtech products such as Along — helping teams obtain feedback from educators so that tech solutions are solving the real challenges faced in their classrooms.

The Center is working to dramatically increase the number of Black educators so that low-income Black and other disenfranchised students can reap the full benefits of a quality public education. In a field where only 2% of teachers are Black men,⁹⁸ The Center is a national resource and voice for the recruitment, development and retention of educators of color. The Center has served over 9,400 scholars, teacher apprentices, high school teaching academy students, college students, in-service educators and administrators since 2019, and between 1,500 and 2,000 annually.⁹⁹

BranchED engaged multiple educator preparation programs and initiated new partnerships with K-12 school districts. BranchED’s National Teacher Preparation Transformation Center celebrated the completion of its second cohort and welcomed its fifth cohort of Minority Serving Institutions’ educator preparation programs into a three-year performance-based coaching journey.

Beyond100K unites leading STEM organizations in collaborative problem-solving and knowledge exchange to co-create and implement solutions that will end the STEM teacher shortage by 2043. Beyond100K is working with a national network of more than 130 partners to prepare 150,000 and retain 150,000 excellent STEM teachers who increasingly represent the diversity of our nation’s classrooms and who commit to cultivating classrooms of belonging — beginning in schools in Black, Latinx and Native American communities over the next decade.

The Teaching Well supports educators by fostering adult wellness at the personal, interpersonal and systemic levels. The Teaching Well has provided coaching and professional development to 910 teachers and 115 school/district administrators, and held five statewide racial healing affinity groups in California serving 55 educators.¹⁰²

The American Rescue Plan Act provided more than $120 billion to reopen schools and address the impacts of the pandemic.¹⁰⁵ In collaboration with EducationCounsel and other partners, AASA developed high-quality tools to help school districts take a whole child approach to supporting students. For example, one resource helped school district leaders effectively leverage new federal funding to meet the needs of students experiencing homelessness and housing instability.¹⁰⁶

ISTE is a professional organization for educators who believe in the power of technology to transform teaching and learning. The ISTE Course of Mind helps thousands of educators better understand how to apply learning science practices and strategies in their classrooms, and trains leaders and decision-makers to use learning science principles and evidence of impact to evaluate edtech products.¹⁰⁷

Deans for Impact works to ensure that every child is taught by a well-prepared teacher by working with leaders, teacher-educators and policymakers to improve educator preparation. Deans for Impact launched the inaugural cohort of the Learning by Scientific Design Network with six teacher preparation programs. The network programs, which collectively enroll 3,700 teacher-candidates, incorporated the science of learning and development into curriculum and clinical experiences through extensive training with nearly 100 teacher-educators and mentors. As a result, candidates who experienced the fully redesigned coursework were more prepared to make equitable instructional decisions, scoring 18 points higher on an assessment of knowledge and application of cognitive science principles.¹⁰⁸

HMI, a nonprofit technology arm of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is driven by a mission to translate science into tools to measure and cultivate well-being. HMI pursued the development of two projects: one focused on validating mobile measures of well-being for adolescents, and one focused on a lightweight and impactful well-being intervention for teachers. In the project on the development and validation of mobile measures of well-being, the team created ways to measure core components of youth well-being — including awareness, connection, insight and purpose. Findings from their studies will be published and shared with the education field. HMI evaluated its well-being intervention for teachers in two school districts using a rigorous, randomized controlled design with dramatic results. Findings from the Wisconsin school districts have already been published and findings from the Jefferson County School District in Louisville, Kentucky, are anticipated in early 2024. The findings from both trials show reductions on measures of depression and anxiety greater than 10% and improvements on measures of well-being of 25%. Findings show that the benefits endure at three to six months post intervention.¹¹⁷

LEAP Innovations believes tailoring learning experiences to the needs of each student can help them ignite their potential and that connecting personalized teaching practices coupled with educational technology is a strategy to achieve their vision. LEAP has partnered with 21 schools across Chicago, Illinois, to implement their framework and improve student learning. A 2019 study showed LEAP learners gained an additional 7 percentile points in reading and 12.9 percentile points in math, while students in the bottom third of their class gained an additional 17.3 percentile points in math and 10.5 in reading.¹¹⁸

The e2i Coach by Mathematica is a free platform designed to help school and district leaders generate evidence to understand the impact of their programs, interventions and tech tools. Historically, the e2i Coach has supported schools and districts to conduct rapid cycle evaluations so they can understand the impact of their programs and investments, and ultimately make better decisions for students. The e2i Coach partnered with Proving Ground at the CEPR so that districts across the country could use the analytical tool to examine the impact of a variety of interventions on student outcomes.

Science teachers can incorporate these technology-enabled exercises into their instruction to help students make sense of the natural world, understand engineering challenges and practice applying their scientific knowledge to solve real-world problems. The tasks and supporting resources for teachers are freely available through the Next Generation Science Assessment website.¹²¹

LearnPlatform (recently acquired by Instructure) enables K-12 education institutions to improve teaching and learning outcomes with unique, evidence-based insights to make better operational, financial, product and instructional decisions that build safe, equitable and effective edtech ecosystems. LearnPlatform can validate tools to help districts rapidly evaluate their edtech products’ usage and impact on student learning. They can also support states to develop evidence-based procurement processes.