Last year, Accelerate launched the Call for Effective Technology (CET) with a simple premise: as AI-powered tools enter classrooms at speed, students, educators, and states deserve clear, credible evidence about what actually works.
In Year One, CET put that premise into practice — funding ten tools across math, reading, and other subject areas, reaching thousands of students in public schools from New York to Arizona, and pairing every grantee with an independent research team. As CET enters its second year, the goal continues to be a healthier, more evidence-based ecosystem, including real proof points for individual products.
AI is already shaping instruction, influencing purchasing decisions, and redefining what personalization can look like in real classrooms. But adoption is outpacing evidence. Too often, decisions are being made without reliable answers to basic questions: Does this tool work? For which students? Under what conditions? At what cost? And with what implications for equity?
CET exists to help answer those questions, before scale locks in the untested choices.
What Is CET
The Call for Effective Technology (CET) is a grant program (funding $150,000-$250,000 for each project) that supports the implementation and evaluation of promising AI-powered and educational technology tools that strengthen personalized learning and instructional effectiveness in public schools. Through practical research in real classroom settings, CET builds credible evidence on how these tools affect student outcomes, especially in math and reading, and how they can be implemented equitably at scale.
We are not here to pick market winners. We are here to create the conditions for high-quality, policy-relevant evidence that states and districts can trust.
That means:
- Funding implementation and evaluation side by side
- Partnering grantees with independent research teams
- Naming grantees and publishing findings regardless of results
- Focusing on usability, feasibility, impact, and equity
Why Year Two Matters
Nine of ten grantees from the Year One cohort of CET are conducting studies designed to meet ESSA Tier 2 evidence standards — meaning quasi-experimental studies that can speak to whether use of a tool is associated with improvements in student outcomes. That is a meaningful standard. Many ed-tech products never get there. CET grantees are reaching for it in their first year.
Year 2 will build on year 1 by increasing the rigor of the learning (e.g., raising the minimum student sample size to 500), gathering structured information on the cost of implementation, and focusing on tools that solve the hardest instructional problems facing schools.
Apply to CET Year Two
The 2026–27 Call for Effective Technology is now open. CET seeks AI-powered and educational technology tools that:
- Are already in use with students during the school day
- Are grounded in learning science and evidence-based practices
- Can be implemented with at least 500 students across multiple schools
- Are ready to be evaluated transparently and publicly
If you are building a tool that you believe can improve student outcomes, and you are willing to test that belief in real classrooms with real data, we encourage you to apply.
The future of AI and educational technology should not be decided by hype. It should be decided by evidence!
