About Us
Launched in 2021, the Advanced Education Research & Development Fund (AERDF, sounds like air-diff) is a national nonprofit that unlocks breakthrough methods, knowledge, and solutions to solve for the most pressing learning and teaching challenges in PreK–12 education.
At a time when artificial intelligence is evolving faster than our education system is designed to do, AERDF provides the R&D capabilities, infrastructure, partnerships, and expertise for experts and innovators to develop next-generation approaches and solutions to drive necessary change. We go beyond incremental advancements to support multi-year, problem-driven R&D programs that aim for system-wide transformation.
We invest in ambitious, multi-year R&D, build shared infrastructure, and unite educators, researchers, and technologists to drive discovery, invention, and adoption at scale.
We’re building the discovery and invention infrastructure education needs to uncover what’s next and ensure every student can benefit from innovation.
Our Approach
At the core of our work is Advanced Inclusive R&D, a model that drives high-impact, high-reward scientific rigor with co-design from day one. We launch multi-year, breakthrough-focused R&D initiatives designed to unlock bold new solutions, not just improve what already exists.
Our approach transforms how learning innovations are created, tested, and scaled across the field through three strategic pillars:
- Discovery and Invention: We identify the most important research gaps and opportunities to powerfully transform teaching and learning and fund multi-year, high-impact programs that tackle them through research and development.
- Next-Generation R&D Infrastructure: We build shared tools, platforms, and virtual environments for education innovators that compress research timelines and make breakthrough work more efficient and ethical.
- Research-to-Practice Acceleration: We bridge the gap between discovery and adoption, ensuring that bold ideas are co-designed with stakeholders, tested, improved, and ultimately implemented at scale.
Together, these pillars power a system that accelerates innovation, transforms how students learn and thrive, and ensures that bold, research-backed solutions move from idea to impact.
What We've Learned So Far
We are building the discovery and invention infrastructure that education needs to uncover what’s next and ensure every student can benefit from innovation.
Since 2021, we’ve launched high-impact R&D programs delivering evidence-backed education products that are now being scaled by districts and systems nationwide, with potential to reach millions of students. We’ve pioneered national fellowships, grounded in scientific rigor and interdisciplinary collaboration, designed to cultivate ambitious, bold ideas with the potential to transform teaching and learning.
Breakthrough solutions in education don’t have to take decades. With the right model, they can happen in 3–5 years.
Our Story
Every day, over 50 million students enter classrooms full of potential, but their experiences vary depending on factors that have little to do with their potential. Educating children is one of the most complex and important things we do, and yet we fail to match that complexity with an appropriate level of support and resourcing for research and innovation. Less than 0.2% of all federal R&D funding goes to the U.S. Department of Education, leaving us without the scientific infrastructure, tools, coordination, or capacity to discover what’s next. This is just as true now as it was in 2018 when a vision of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) was first conceived.
Without a coordinated hub for discovery, breakthroughs aren’t rooted in real-world needs, don’t leave the lab, and students don’t benefit. Unwilling to let this happen, we launched a national Request for Information, hosted focus groups, and conducted surveys to gather insights from across the education ecosystem. Educators, researchers, developers, and other experts shared innovative ideas to address long-standing challenges in learning. These insights laid the groundwork for what would become AERDF.
We began as a high-level experiment in applying advanced R&D to tackle some of education’s biggest challenges in a new way by providing patient, non-dilutive R&D funding for specific time periods, and making sure that educators were a central part of the R&D process as co-creators and experts.
AERDF launched in 2021 with the mission of building something education has never had: a discovery and invention hub purpose-built for continuous, breakthrough innovation. We are building one that exists to match the pace of change, tackle the most urgent PreK-12 challenges, and deliver research-backed solutions where they matter most: in classrooms.
Our mission is two-fold: explore and create capabilities for the methods, tools, and infrastructure needed to generate breakthroughs in learning, and produce those breakthroughs through our R&D initiatives.