The Problem We’re Solving
Millions of students are falling behind academically, especially those in underserved communities. Schools want to help, but they’re overwhelmed with options and don’t know which interventions actually work or how to implement them effectively at scale.
Our Approach: Connecting Research, Policy, and Practice
Real, lasting change happens when three things come together: knowing what works (research), making it possible (policy), and putting it into action (practice). Most organizations focus on just one. We connect all three.
How It Works: Our Activities
Everything we do falls into four interconnected areas:
- Grantmaking: We fund implementation actors, including states, service providers, and others. We prioritize interventions and strategies based on fidelity of implementation, cost, efficacy, equity, and scalability. We progress monitor and maintain implementation accountability.
- Learning Infrastructure: We drive and inform reporting and data collection from grantees across the implementation chain. We fund, direct, and design research and evaluation studies.
- Knowledge Sharing: We develop a deep understanding of what is happening on the ground. We evaluate, disseminate, and elevate best practices. We translate evidence into compelling messages that inform decision makers.
- Advancing the Field: We connect key stakeholders in the ecosystem. We promote policy and regulatory frameworks that drive implementation. We set the learning agenda to build new knowledge on unanswered questions.
The Outcomes These Activities Create
When we do this work well, we enable critical changes across the education system:
- Investments in programs that impact students: Programs and initiatives that directly impact the student experience and build the capacity of educators, leaders, and other actors to improve student outcomes.
- Evidence that moves the field forward: Efficacy and impact evaluations that move interventions along the ESSA tiers of evidence continuum, establishing tools and standards for progress monitoring, benchmarks, and implementation accountability.
- Shared learning and collaboration: A shared research and impact agenda developed and adopted by key field actors, with lessons learned, playbooks, and communications that engage the field.
- Proof points and coalitions: Proof points of effective state implementation emerge, and coalitions of stakeholders, advocates, and providers engage in sharing and implementing best practices.
- System-level changes: More students experience evidence-based interventions that align to best practices. Improved student outcomes within individual grantee sites. Increased use of rigorous evidence in education decision-making. Reversal of declining national trends in NAEP results. More states adopt policy and implementation strategies that have worked in proof point states. A refocused national conversation on student outcomes.
The Impact: Change at Scale
IF Accelerate invests catalytic funds to build evidence, align policy and practice, and scale cost-effective interventions across the education ecosystem,
THEN millions of students nationwide who are academically behind and in historically underserved communities will experience measurable gains in academic achievement and life outcomes.
This isn’t just a theory—it’s already happening. In states where research, policy, and practice have aligned, we’re seeing students catch up and thrive. Our job is to help more states follow that path.
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