Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF)

Advanced Education Research & Development Fund (AERDF, sounds like air-diff) is a national nonprofit launched in 2021 that advances scientific discovery & inventions that further learners’ brilliance and transform their PreK-12 futures. AERDF’s ambitious three-to-five-year initiatives (known as programs), funded with budgets up to $25 million, address major teaching and learning challenges and opportunities the public and private sector have historically ignored for Black and Latino learners and learners experiencing poverty in the United States. AERDF programs build on existing community-driven evidence and expertise, as well as learning sciences, to translate fundamental insights into usable knowledge, useful practices, equitable approaches and transformative tools for education practitioners and students. We believe R&D, if led inclusively, can be an engine of innovation that brings together educators, researchers, and product developers to better define problems together and actually co-create solutions. Like the ARPAs (Advanced Research Projects Agencies), AERDF focuses on advanced R&D for scientific discovery and invention. Through partnerships and “bridges" in the ecosystem, we steward our generalizable knowledge, insights, and solutions into the real world for others to carry forward, sustain, and adopt. Our approach to Advanced Inclusive R&D in Education builds learning solutions for the quality education students deserve—and because our teams know the science behind why these solutions work, we are confident that they can work for students nationwide. Since our 2021 launch, our Advanced Inclusive R&D programs – currently focused on math, formative assessment, and reading – have engaged more than 20,000 students