Learning Commons, a nonprofit backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, launched an open platform for educators and edtech developers today, alongside six new partner organizations.
The platform represents one of the most ambitious attempts by a single organization to solve a major edtech headache: easily accessing and incorporating state academic standards and proven teaching methods into edtech products and services.
Developers and educators say incorporating evidence-based materials and data into edtech tools is time-consuming, costly and prone to error. By offering free datasets, curricula and evaluation tools from states and many respected industry providers, the initiative helps developers and K-12 schools create evidence-based materials and assessments aligned with state standards. The datasets include academic standards from all 50 states, breakdowns of concepts and foundational skills underlying specific standards, learning progressions mapping prerequisite and successor skills as well as curricula and course materials from prominent providers.
In addition to the open platform, Learning Commons announced integration partnerships with Canva Education, Level, MagicSchool, OKO Labs, Really Great Reading and TalkingPoints.
“What I’m really excited about is the number of partners we’ve been able to collaborate with,” says Sandra Liu Huang, president of Learning Commons. “It’s not just our work — it really feels like the beginning, or maybe the beginning of the beginning.”
According to Huang, Learning Commons has more than 70 partners contributing datasets or integrating its tools, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Since its launch in 2025, Learning Commons’ datasets have been downloaded approximately 20,000 times.
“That foundation didn’t exist before in an open way, and now it does,” Huang says. “I think it sparks people’s imagination: ‘Now I can connect this to curriculum and standards and map it to my context’ — to do things that weren’t quite so doable in the past.”
The platform arrives as lawmakers, educators and parents push to ensure edtech offers evidence and outcomes to support its claims. Educators and industry observers believe the platform could help scale evidence-based research and high-quality instructional materials.
“Trying to make sense of messy, scattered state standards and academic research is exhausting,” says Tambra Clark, technology integration facilitator for Birmingham City Schools in Alabama. “Someone has to do the heavy lifting of turning all that data into clean, machine-readable formats. If a well-funded philanthropy steps up to build these foundational tools openly, it saves cash-strapped school districts and small developers from reinventing the wheel, ultimately making AI in the classroom safer and higher quality for everyone.”
Michael Hernandez, a consultant and former Los Angeles County teacher of the year who specializes in helping educators use AI, also likes the idea of surfacing and vetting high-quality resources and best practices in one place. “There are many respected institutions that offer similar services for science, medicine, and the arts, so I don’t see why this wouldn’t work for education,” he says.
Helen Crompton, executive director of the Research Institute of Digital Innovation in Learning at Old Dominion University, is “cautiously optimistic” about the platform.
“One of the problems we have in education is that excellent research and evidence-based practices often do not make their way into the technologies educators actually use,” she says. “If Learning Commons can help bridge that gap, that could be very beneficial.”
Inside the Platform
The platform consists of two main components: the Knowledge Graph and Evaluators.
The Knowledge Graph offers K-12 education data published on GitHub under an open license, including state academic standards, learning progressions, curricula and durable skills that can integrate into AI tools. The Evaluators measure whether AI-generated content created by schools and vendors is accurate, grade-appropriate, evidence-based and adheres to state academic standards. A third component, Agent Skills, are designed to designed to support teacher planning. Four skills are already available, and additional skills will go live later this year.
Karl Rectanus, CEO of Really Great Reading, says the company used the Knowledge Graph as it developed its new Literacy Outcome System, incorporating documented learning science, evidence, existing standards and progressions, rather than stitching data together from a range of sources. He says it would have taken months for his organization to build its own infrastructure and devote resources to ongoing maintenance.
“We’ve tested [the Knowledge Graph] and integrated it,” he says. “It lets us move faster, together with like-minded organizations, in ways that reflect what educators already know is right — while helping the broader sector succeed, not just us.”
The platform could greatly help vendors as the trend toward outcomes-based contracts grows, says Lawrence Holt, co-founder of OKO Labs and an adviser to Learning Commons.
“A developer can use Learning Commons and find out whether generated material is on grade level and on standard before a student sees it, rather than discovering the problem later, when 40% of the fee is riding on the result,” he says.
Eedi, an 11-year-old company that researches why students struggle to learn math, contributed its data to the platform. “Partnering with Learning Commons goes straight to Eedi’s mission, which is to reach a billion kids by 2030,” says George Mu, president and chief growth officer of Eedi. “We’re a company of about 40 people, so partnering makes sense for us.”
Mu explains that before ChatGPT arrived, it was hard for anyone to use something so structured, descriptive and granular as its math research. “Now, with these tools from Learning Commons, teachers, students and edtech organizations can actually use it,” he says.
How One District Uses the Platform
Jason Markey, assistant superintendent of Lisle District 202 in Illinois, used the beta version of the platform to create a formative math assessment app that simulates questions students see on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness.
“We just hadn’t found a provider that does math assessment that well,” Markey explains. “By connecting it to the Knowledge Graph, we can inform the reports on student progress with a lot more nuance than if we’d built it with AI alone.”
Vincent Slowiak, a teacher at Lisle Junior High School, says the Knowledge Graph included prerequisite state standards that can flag what a student may be lacking or need reteaching on to meet a given standard. “That gives teachers another layer of information about what needs to be covered again,” he says.
In addition to state standards, the Knowledge Graph includes learning materials that the Lisle district already uses. “One resource we use a lot at the elementary level, as we unpack our Common Core standards and look at instructional shifts, is Student Achievement Partners. Seeing that inside Learning Commons was reassuring,” says Meredith McCormick, assistant principal of curriculum and instruction at Lisle Elementary School.
Advice from Educators
Markey and his team of educator-coders only got so far with the Knowledge Graph before they had to rely on outside help. “As [Slowiak] likes to say, ‘You can get to 97% pretty fast,’ but it’s hard to make something fully scalable when none of us have a computer science background,” Markey admits. “Getting it to a point where it’s launchable — single sign-on for students, a dashboard for each teacher — is a lot more complex.”
This past summer, Markey hired two interns — recent computer science college graduates — to finalize the in-house tool. One intern remains on staff. Most school districts lack internal tech teams or college interns to inspect or implement complex datasets safely.
“We’ve also engaged a third party, Upstart Education, to work with us on data analysis and hosting,” Markey says, adding that he and his team made sure to adhere to state and federal student data-privacy rules.
McCormick advises anyone interested in using the Knowledge Graph to make sure the resulting tool is age-appropriate. “Feedback has to be specific enough for, say, a third grader to understand where they are in the learning progression, and that looks very different than it would for a seventh or eighth grader,” she explains.
Is Learning Commons Right for the Job?
Educators and outside observers agree that Learning Commons’ platform could help scale evidence-based instruction and assessment. Their concerns are whether a private organization — especially one based in Silicon Valley — should lead the way on something as important as AI infrastructure.
“I’ve seen this happen so many times before in relation to state- or school-mandated assessments,” says Clark. “We already know how tricky it is when outside entities get to establish the standards for testing. But this time, we’re talking about tech. When a multibillionaire-backed organization starts laying down the ‘plumbing’ for the entire education system, it naturally raises a few eyebrows.”
The optics of an organization based in Silicon Valley may give some people pause, but others want proof to back up concerns. To these observers, a tool that saves time and money and is open to all is cause for celebration.
“A shared learning infrastructure, with shared experience and evidence of growth, is the next step in maturing our sector to the level other industries have already reached,” says Rectanus, a former teacher.
Holt says there are additional organizations trying to raise the bar for edtech by conducting independent reviews or gathering best practices: EdReports reviews K-12 curricula while Evidence for ESSA at Johns Hopkins University and the federal What Works Clearinghouse grade studies.
Hernandez points out that educators already convey a great deal of trust in organizations, whether they are textbook companies or learning management systems. Still, he wishes edtech would not have to rely on one source for AI infrastructure. “If this is to truly work, it should be a coalition of respected organizations who curate and manage this program, not a single corporation,” he says.
“If a nonprofit is willing to step up and do the work, I think it could be beneficial in the short term, but problematic in the long term,” Hernandez continues. “Do we want private industry playing a large role in policy, pedagogy and practice, or do we want our educators and civic institutions to manage this?”
Huang points out that Learning Commons is a nonprofit, private operating foundation. “We operate in the philanthropic interest, and we’re accountable to serving the public good as a result of that structure,” she says.
“I do think our structure and capabilities let us move fast,” she continues. “We can bring the cutting edge of technology to the education sector in a public-good way that I don’t think would otherwise be happening.”
Crompton is concerned about Learning Commons’ goal to be the AI infrastructure for edtech. “Infrastructure is different from simply providing another educational technology tool,” she says. “Once a platform becomes part of the underlying infrastructure upon which many other products are built, it can begin to shape what information is available, what is considered authoritative, what gets measured and ultimately what kinds of educational experiences are created.”
Clark notes, “Whoever controls those underlying knowledge graphs and evaluators holds a massive amount of sway over what the system considers a ‘valid’ approach.”
Huang says she doesn’t think Learning Commons is the only infrastructure. “There’s outcome-based contracting, for example — that’s an important piece of the ecosystem,” she notes.
Crompton does give Learning Commons high marks for making its work open to the public. “It has also published principles around data governance, responsible AI and transparency,” she adds. “But we should not assume that being a nonprofit automatically removes concerns about power or influence.”
“I would also want transparency around how decisions are made about which curricula, research, standards and definitions of high-quality learning are included,” she adds. “Those decisions are pedagogical decisions. They can ultimately influence what millions of teachers and students encounter.”
“The opportunity here is significant, but so is the responsibility,” Crompton says.
Editor’s note: Learning Commons is a financial supporter of EdSurge. This article was produced independently by our newsroom and Learning Commons had no editorial role or influence over its reporting, writing or editing.
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