InnovateEDU's Policy Portfolio: Ensuring Effective and Evidence-Based Practices Drive Policy

At InnovateEDU, our work accelerates ecosystem development, radically disrupts system challenges and barriers, and forges uncommon alliances in education through policy, practice, and technology. We aim to create connective tissue in education to advance large-scale systems change.

We’ve discussed enhancing edtech markets and creating an ecosystem that supports interoperability, safety, accountability, fairness, and efficacy for all learners (Technology Portfolio) and building the capacity and connection among educators, stakeholders, and organizations (Sector & Capacity Building Portfolio). Now it’s time to explore the third pillar of our work: our policy portfolio.

Aside from our main projects, InnovateEDU often participates in coalitions and working groups to advise and develop education policy work implemented at the state and national levels. Our work highlights the importance of anchoring in the 80% common principle (read the InnovateEDU Manifesto) and finding common ground for policymakers to come together, understand the problem and challenges, and be a field-centric voice to inform policy and drive systems change. At InnovateEDU, we believe system change happens when you bring policy, practice, and technology together while centering those most proximate to the work.

The National Educational Technology Plan

In January 2024, The U.S. Department of Education teamed up with InnovateEDU, SETDA, Learning Forward, Project Tomorrow, and Whiteboard Advisors to release the 2024 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), a comprehensive guide exploring the role of technology in elevating elementary and secondary education across the nation.

Since 1996, the NETP has served as the flagship educational technology policy document for the United States, setting a vision and plan for K-12 learning enabled by technology across the U.S., territories, tribal lands, and DoDEA schools worldwide.

The last NETP was released in 2017. The 2024 plan updates and expands on the vision of the 2017 NETP. The 2024 NETP aligns with the Activities to Support the Effective Use of Technology (Title IV A) of the Every Student Succeeds Act and continues to promote a vision of equity, active use, and collaborative leadership. It aims to ensure equitable access to technology and the White House with First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to unveil the new Infrastructure Briefs, a series of three documents by the Office of Educational Technology, one of which includes the transformative learning experiences that technology enables.

This latest iteration of the NETP delves into the transformative potential of educational technology, highlighting systemic solutions to bridge the digital divides in use, design, and access, particularly in the context of educational equity.

(Read the 2024 National Educational Technology Plan at tech.ed.gov/netp)

Providing a Roadmap for Scaling a Diverse Workforce

In August 2022, federal, state, and local workforce and education leaders gathered to set a benchmark for high-quality teaching apprenticeship programs nationally. This initiative was launched by First Lady Jill Biden at the White House in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Labor to develop comprehensive guidelines for high-quality educator apprenticeships based on field data and experience.

The Pathways Apprenticeship Working Group, chaired by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, Deans for Impact, and National Center for Grow Your Own, alongside other Pathways organizations and national partners, created the NGS for K-12 Teacher Apprenticeships, which the U.S. Department of Labor recently released. They outline the requirements and responsibilities apprenticeship programs should meet to comply with these standards. In addition, they provide a comprehensive work process schedule outlining apprentices' professional and pedagogical skills. An evidence-based approach to educator development and training, developed in partnership with field-based programs, underpins these guidelines.

Through our years of work, we have learned that when building guidelines and guardrails for the ecosystem to advance systems change, any set of standards must be strong enough to offer widespread quality while remaining flexible enough to be customized based on local needs and requirements when implementing a national program. Developed as part of the Pathways Alliance, The National Guidelines for Apprenticeship Standards for K-12 Teacher Apprenticeships (NGS) strikes a balance and supplies qualified sponsors with a nationally certified standards template - with a progressive wage schedule, first-of-its-kind competency framework and guidelines for on the job learning - that can be tailored to fit the program's specific objectives.

Since their launch, states implementing registered teacher apprenticeships have gone from 2 states to 37 as of Fall 2024, alongside the dozens of partners that make up the Pathways Alliance.

Building Technology Infrastructure for Learning

In August 2023, a group of school superintendents, educators, and education technology vendors met at The White House with First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, and Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to unveil the new Infrastructure Briefs, a series of three documents by the Office of Educational Technology, one including Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The group spoke on the importance of interoperability and cybersecurity in building safe and resilient data ecosystems in K-12. This “Back to School Safely” event framed how to build an interoperable, secure, and privacy-enabled ecosystem for education technology and support the field. InnovateEDU’s Project Unicorn was a key partner in developing these briefs.

(Read the 2023 K-12 Digital Infrastructure Briefs)

BIRD-E: Blueprint for Inclusive Research and Development in Education

Imagine being able to make research more accessible, digestible, and easy to use. That was the vision behind BIRD-E. Based on a model from healthcare and the PICO framework which created a simple data architecture to help the healthcare system understand how to organize research, data, and development aligned to key indicators (patient, intervention, condition, and outcome) and to accelerate the connection between research and practice in healthcare, the Blueprint for Inclusive Research and Development in Education (BIRD-E) aimed similarly modernize education research data infrastructure. Specifically, the project focused on making education research more aligned, usable, discoverable, and actionable for improving teaching and learning in today’s classrooms by creating a data schema to tag, access, and understand information.

Over three years, more than 70 stakeholders, including researchers, practitioners, and federal agency partners, collaborated to outline key education data elements and pilot their use across diverse real-world research projects. In spring 2022, InnovateEDU published the Core and Advanced Versions of the BIRD-E Blueprint.

The Core Blueprint is a critical set of elements that facilitate structured data compilation to understand the impact of a specific intervention on improving student outcomes. The Advanced Blueprint contains elements that allow stakeholders to conduct more nuanced research and evaluation. The Blueprint helps improve the articulation of data across the many stakeholders involved in education R&D and allows for equitable participation in inclusive, accessible, and robust research efforts.

When this project was scoped its vision was to create the schema and have wide-scale adoption within 10 years - the work now is being incorporated into many major international research databases all within 3 years. At InnovateEDU, we’ve moved this project to support those agencies and bodies through our aligned R&D work.

(Read more about BIRD-E and our other Success Stories)

Building Better R&D Infrastructure in Education: The Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI)

Accelerating understanding of education research and adoption into practice is essential, as is building more resources for the work. To continue to build a growing call for action, resources, and alignment in the education R&D community, InnovateEDU became a founding member and leader of The Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI). ALI brings together education nonprofits, practitioners, philanthropy, and the private sector, to advocate for building a better research and development (R&D) infrastructure in education. ALI advocates for increased capacity of education R&D and supports the research and development of evidence-based innovation in education that centers students and practitioners, advances equity, improves talent pathways, and expands the workforce needed in a globally competitive world. At InnovateEDU, we advocate for a learning system underpinned by research and development that can answer the core question - what works for whom, when, and under what conditions?

Comparatively, little money is spent on education R&D, meaning promising teaching, learning, and technology practices go undeveloped and untested and lack sustainability and scale. The Fiscal Year 2022 budget of the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm, was only $642 million, down from $659 million in 2010. By comparison, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spends over $3 billion annually on research related to food and agriculture. As a coalition, ALI advocates for education research and development investments across the federal government, including efforts to address the inequities and silos that can prevent the proliferation and impact of innovations and evidence-based approaches to address long-standing educational inequities.

In May 2024, InnovateEDU led alongside EdCounsel the formation of three task forces to understand the current state of affairs, opportunities, and challenges and to chart a path forward toward an appropriately sized, inclusive, and equity-centered education R&D infrastructure at the federal, state, and local levels. Each task force produced a policy brief outlining recommendations for their priority area (ALI Task Force Briefs):

ALI educates and engages with policymakers in Congress, and federal and state agencies to advocate for increased investment in education research and development. ALI believes that increased federal investment in education R&D and critical policy changes can address barriers that right now prevent innovative and evidence-based approaches from getting to scale. This includes strengthening partnerships between federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Education, as well as supporting public-private partnerships. ALI believes that additional attention and resources should be devoted to the “D” component of Research and Development and the importance of federal support for state longitudinal data systems that build state and local capacity to track employment and educational outcomes.

An appropriately sized, inclusive, and equity-focused education research and development ecosystem would help address the economic and social inequities we experience today by providing all students with an educational experience that creates a learning system, ensures economic mobility, and supports communities, parents, and educators with the knowledge and resources to meet the challenges of today and unlock opportunity for tomorrow.

The National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS)

The National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) is a public-private partnership between AmeriCorps, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center that launched in July 2022 at the White House to bring an additional 250,000 people into evidence-based student support roles as tutors, mentors, student success coaches, postsecondary transition coaches, and wraparound or integrated student support coordinators.

InnovateEDU was deeply involved in the inception of the NPSS, alongside collaborators at the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, City Year, Voices for National Service, EducationCounsel, and others. Following years of operating a high-dosage tutoring and student success coaching program in Brooklyn, NY, InnovateEDU launched a community of practice that brought together a diverse group of practitioners implementing broadly defined “innovative” talent systems and human capital models in education. This group included organizations that, like InnovateEDU, were grappling with how to implement small group instruction best while also developing solid pipelines of educator talent, as well as organizations that were working to implement teacher residency programs, postsecondary transition coaching programs, and creative professional development solutions in schools and districts around the country. This group sought to create a space for practitioners implementing non-traditional human capital models to elevate common challenges and collaborate on shared solutions, including through shared projects. Early on, these shared projects included work on professional learning for tutors and expanding quality pathways into the field of education. In 2021, the community of practice hosted a virtual event making the case for a “corps for student success”—a national effort to bring more people-powered, evidence-based support to students to support pandemic recovery and a longer-term shift toward holistic support for students. This event was followed by a set of policy recommendations that InnovateEDU and other key NPSS Hub collaborators contributed to, including launching a national effort to support the field in achieving this goal–the National Partnership for Student Success.

InnovateEDU continues to be actively engaged in the work of the NPSS as a founding supporting champion, steering committee member of the NPSS Hub, and lead amplification and dissemination partner of the Hub, working to ensure that learnings and resources developed by the coalition are shared with broad audiences for maximum impact. While the NPSS now engages nearly 200 supporting champion organizations, 50 higher education coalition members, and numerous other school districts and youth-serving nonprofits, the strategies that InnovateEDU employed early on in the talent systems community of practice work, as well as other communities of practice such as Data Whiz and the Pathways Alliance remain essential to this work.

AI Literacy Day

InnovateEDU, through the leadership of the EDSAFE AI Alliance, alongside The AI Education Project, AI for Education, Common Sense Media, and The Tech Interactive celebrated the first National AI Literacy Day on April 19, 2024.

This nationwide day of action invited students, parents, educators, and other community members to explore the fundamental question, “What is AI?” catalyzing learning, conversation, and partnership.

Educational events were held across the country, including three tentpole events in Washington, D.C., New York City, and at The Tech Interactive Museum in San Jose. In the months prior to the kickoff of the event, the partner organizations developed and gathered resources including valuable lesson plans for classrooms and after-school programs as well as professional development opportunities for educators to promote AI literacy through education that were made freely available on https://www.ailiteracyday.org/.

After the massive success of the first AI Literacy Day, which engaged thousands of people across the country, the celebration will continue in 2025, with the next National AI Literacy Day scheduled for March 28, 2025.

What’s Next

As we state in our manifesto, the 80% common are the implementation, policy, and/or funding challenges we all share as a sector. We believe we can find common ground to address and work together on.

We believe system change happens when you bring policy, practice, and technology together.

As we reflect on our past 10 years (Read: InnovateEDU at Ten: Pioneering Education Innovation and Launching a Portfolio Approach) and think towards our future, we’ll continue to engage in ensuring policy is informed by practice work as we build uncommon alliances to guide sector level systems change.