Vision
- Every student in our country will have access to rigorous, engaging, and supportive learning experiences that will allow them to access economic and social prosperity.
Today we are pleased to share that the LEGO Foundation and members of the Walton family have joined together as anchor investors of A-Street’s Fund II. Their collective $675M in fund commitments and strategic co-investment capacity marks a critical moment in A-Street’s journey. We are grateful for this opportunity for partnership, for this expression of confidence in our theory of change and team, and for the shared enthusiasm for our investment approach at such a critical moment for schools and school systems.
We can hardly imagine a better set of partners for A-Street and our portfolio companies than LEGO and members of the Walton family. We believe A-Street’s investor community represents the premier constellation of partners committed to advancing student-centered solutions that deliver on outcomes.
As proud as we are about the accomplishments of Fund I, and as excited as we are about what lies ahead in Fund II, we know we are just at the beginning. When we look across our portfolio, we see the green shoots of progress. Yet when we visit classrooms, all too often we see that instructional practice looks much as it did a decade or two ago. We see educators striving for something elusive. And we see students ready to be challenged.
Hence our delight at partnering with the LEGO Foundation. For decades, LEGO has personified the joys of learning and the power of curiosity. The allure of LEGO’s product is as timeless as it is irresistible. Again and again, LEGO has centered all of us — our families, our children, our students, ourselves — on the sacred task of discovery, of building from the ground up, of trying and failing and trying again. These are the very attributes we and anyone who cares about the future of learning need now more than ever. These are the qualities that must guide the development of the next generation of learning solutions.
If A-Street’s first five years were a time of enormous uncertainty for schools and school systems, we can be sure that the next five years will bring even greater change. The parade of challenges are in full view: enrollment declines, budget uncertainties, and most importantly student performance trailing pre-pandemic levels.
This comes against the backdrop of the explosion of artificial intelligence, with all of its promise and peril. When A-Street launched just five years ago, AI was not yet in the mainstream. Given the immensity of the challenges at hand and all that is at stake, we can’t help but see promise in this moment. Yet we know, despite a clear mandate for change, schools and school systems remain a doggedly tough terrain for innovation, especially as educators and schools grapple with an overload of disconnected technologies that tax our attention and prove difficult to manage.
A-Street’s goal remains to invest and help to build companies that understand these tensions and can sort through the noise to build solutions that win on outcomes. Grounded in what we’ve learned from our Fund I portfolio companies, we believe more than ever in our theory of change. We envision a reinvigorated educator, empowered and supported to execute a more effective pedagogy that results in improved learning outcomes. We will back solutions that leverage the immense promise of a new technology while enhancing the humanity of classrooms, schools and learning. These solutions must be as effective as they are elegant. They must make the teacher’s job easier and more sustainable, enabling educators to move students to proficiency and beyond. Most importantly, these solutions must earn the trust of teachers and of the classroom’s many constituents by delivering on outcomes.
We know that the continued work of charting new ground in our second fund won’t always come easy. Designing a next generation of solutions will require patience, boldness, and partnership. We are honored to work side-by-side with our investors, new and old, and a remarkable collection of CEOs and teams to advance a next generation of high quality, coherent solutions that our nation’s students need and deserve.
Spring 2026
Since our inception three years ago, A-Street’s mission has been to invest in companies that drive coherent, differentially effective, and equitable solutions to transform the future of PK-12 learning. Over the last three years, we have invested in 11 companies that are aligned with this objective and we are proud to partner with the extraordinary teams and the entrepreneurs who lead them. A-Street’s goal is for our portfolio of companies to contribute to measurable improvements in student outcomes at meaningful scale and deliver strong long-term financial returns. Now, more than ever, we believe in the need for a new model for how capital should be put to work across PK-12 investing. We hope to demonstrate a new way of investing in PK-12 solutions that motivates greater focus on quality and evidence, and better alignment of capital to support transforming the future of PK-12 learning.
At the time of our launch, the realities of the pandemic were just setting in. Grounded in our decades of work in schools and classrooms, we saw that COVID’s disruption of student learning would be profound and lasting. Three years later, the extent of the disruption is clear. 2023 NAEP data shows that reading and math performance of 13-year-olds in the United States has hit the lowest level since 2004 and 1990, respectively. The data also continues to demonstrate that our most vulnerable children are experiencing even bigger declines. Compounding this problem, the educator workforce is in crisis: the state of the profession is at or near its lowest levels in fifty years. While we know progress will take time, and that silver bullets are not a thing in this line of work, these trends make one thing clear: we must do anything we can do to better equip educators to support their students’ learning and growth.
We are clear-eyed about the fact that as the for-profit education industry has grown, student achievement has not. While more for-profit investment has flowed into US K12 education in recent years, only nine out of the top one hundred most popular EdTech products in the US in 2023 had at least promising research evidence. The “high-quality instructional materials” market category is where many of our portfolio companies operate and is where we think better research evidence of quality implementation at scale can lead to improved student outcomes. We have been pleased by the market momentum towards high quality curriculum, as validated by EdReports. Increasingly, states are prioritizing ensuring that their students have access to high quality curriculum, and more and more districts are purchasing these materials: the Center for Education Market Dynamics, for example, estimates that 55% of the districts in their dataset, which includes nearly 1,000 of the largest U.S. districts, report having selected a high quality core material in K-5 mathematics. This has all translated into meaningful progress related to teachers’ use of better materials: according to RAND’s American Instructional Resources Survey (AIRS) project, in the 2023-24 school year, 55% of math and 44% of ELA teachers nationwide report that they are using core curricula that are aligned to grade level standards according to EdReports -- up from 29% and 14% respectively, only five years ago.
This positive development has the potential to point towards commensurate progress in student outcomes. And yet, those gains remain elusive. That is because we know that a better core curriculum is not enough – necessary but not sufficient. It must be in service of a coherent instructional system – one that includes content-based professional learning, actionable curriculum-aligned assessments, and coherent supplemental instructional tools to support acceleration. This instructional system must be implemented well across diverse classroom contexts and at scale, equipping teachers to facilitate excellent instruction that leads to clear evidence of meaningful improvement in student learning outcomes.
We are encouraged by efforts across the field that are laying the groundwork to shift the market to increasingly prioritize and value evidence. For starters, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act outlines four levels of promising evidence that solution providers must demonstrate to be eligible for various federal funding programs – and several large districts have started using this framework for purchasing decisions. The Jacobs Foundation has organized EdFIRST, an international group of education-focused principal investors that A-Street is a part of, to elevate the expectation that EdTech investment funds and companies prioritize evidence-building in their solutions. The Southern Education Foundation has advanced efforts for districts and vendors to execute outcomes-based contracts. There is a growing category of organizations, pioneered by Learn Platform, and including Leanlab Education, that offer “evidence services” to help make it much easier for districts and companies to generate evidence. And a new class of organizations, including Ed Research for Action and Evidence for ESSA, offer objective, user-friendly information for schools and districts to understand the evidence base of various solutions to the problems they are trying to solve.
We believe this activity has the potential to increasingly motivate more companies to prioritize evidence, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the commercially smart approach. At a time of tightening school budgets and in a crowded market of solutions, we believe that evidence will increasingly be a lens for buyers as they decide what to adopt, what to keep, and what to let go of. They’ll grow savvier and more capable of discerning the difference between marketing and substance, between research that only proves impact for a small percentage of the most self-motivated students, or research that a solution works really well -- but not so much at greater scale. Instead, they’ll focus on asking for compelling evidence about what can work in their context, for all of their students.
So where does a company start? A foundational element for any company that is serious about building an evidence base is to document its “logic model” - an articulation of how what you do leads to the change you are claiming will happen for your buyer and user, from input to output to outcome to impact. With a logic model in hand, ongoing research efforts grow more focused and organized on testing the hypotheses, gaining new insights, feeding information back to improve the solutions, and ultimately grow the evidence base of what works and can work in various contexts and settings.
A-Street looks for companies to invest in whose leadership demonstrates an understanding of what it takes to improve teaching and student outcomes at scale. We seek to partner with those who examine how their solutions can lead to that change, and who are prepared to interrogate what they need to do differently to increase impact based on evidence from feedback loops and research. We seek partners who, like us, believe that over the long run, winning financially is fueled by helping schools achieve better outcomes for students. That long-term outlook is necessary to make courageous decisions in the face of pressure to grow the top and bottom line and a myriad of competing priorities that any growing company faces.
At A-Street, we are rolling up our sleeves to continually refine our own theory of change, a living document that captures the impact we are seeking to make. We are hard at work on our own logic model with metrics to allow us to interrogate our progress and continually improve. We have also been working with a few portfolio companies on various impact-focused projects, including articulating their logic model, engaging the board on their research evidence priorities, and sharpening their overall impact strategy. We have been grateful to these leaders and their incredible teams for the trust, partnership, and shared learning that has resulted.
Our team is motivated to continue this research evidence journey alongside our portfolio, our co-investors, education entrepreneurs, and our collaborators in the field. We hope our efforts will lead to new collaborators on this journey – please reach out! Finally, we commit to continuing to share what we are learning as we go forward.
Here's to more and better evidence of impact!
Spring 2024
One year ago, we launched A-Street with the goal of investing in entrepreneurs and ideas capable of reimagining teaching and learning. We launched at a difficult moment for schools and families, as the full extent of COVID’s impact was not yet in focus but grounded in a spirited determination to find opportunities for breakthrough.
The 2022 NAEP scores now provide a stunning measure of this need and of what is at stake for American public education. Twenty years of progress have been erased in math and reading proficiency. Proficiency in math among Black students declined by 13 points, nearly three times the loss experienced by their White peers. Those for whom the stakes are highest and who could least afford to fall further behind did just that.
To the close observer, these latest facts are a sobering reminder of a simple truth well known and broadly accepted: too many schools have been ill-equipped to truly serve students well. This is not for lack of will, effort, or talent, but for the dearth of truly effective strategies and tools that work at scale. A-Street is built on the promise of finding solutions to this problem – tools that work harder for the educator, envelop the highest-quality content, radiate high-utility and real-time data, and bridge digital functionality into the classroom in the right ways. Doing so will require care and nuance. Doing so is about more than just helping classroom teachers – it is about restoring confidence in schools and their ability to truly meet students’ needs.
As we organize for action and source solutions, we find special resonance in the thinking of Professor Richard Elmore, Harvard’s late and respected professor of education. Professor Elmore teaches us that improving the effectiveness of teaching and learning requires a reconsideration of the essential relationship between student, teacher, and content. It is this relationship that A-Street seeks to fortify as we look for solutions that are coherent. Coherent tools build on the presence of a high-quality core curriculum and leverage technology as an enabler of, not a replacement for, excellent teaching. They are thoughtfully designed, rigorous, and connected holistically such that they create a central user experience for the teacher and the student – one journey that builds from minute to minute, day to day, and unit to unit.
As the new school year launches, as the COVID reality normalizes in classrooms, and as students prepare for life in the information economy, we see an opportunity to address the flaws of an aging system that too often explicitly excludes families and students of color, institutionalizes economic inequity into the education system, and belies America’s essential heterogeneity. With a portfolio beginning to take shape, this opportunity for renewal will anchor A-Street in the year to come, as several pronounced themes guide our investing:
What happens in American classrooms in the coming school years is certain to have long-term implications, not just on learning but on the social mobility we count on schools to enable. In partnership with families, educators, entrepreneurs, and aligned investors, we are here – one year into a journey we know has just begun – to do our part to unlock a generation of opportunity and progress.
Spring 2022
The Problem A-Street Seeks to Solve
America’s PK-12 education system is failing to provide our nation’s students with the resources and skills necessary to succeed in life. Today, hardly a quarter of American 8th graders are proficient in math. Less than a third are proficient in reading.1 These data are even more dire among low-income and historically marginalized students, and while exacerbated by the pandemic reflect trendlines that predate COVID. The trends underscore the simple reality that our PK-12 education system is not working, especially for those students and communities most in need. Compounding this problem, the teacher workforce is in distress. Interest in the profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50% since the 1990s and has reached its lowest level in the last 50 years. The percentage of teachers who feel the stress of their job can be sustained has dropped from 81% to 42% in the last 15 years.2
The root causes of these problems are multiple and complicated. One significant influence in our PK-12 education system is capital – both philanthropic and for-profit investment – that is the fuel to pilot solutions and deliver products and services to schools and educators. Sometimes, these products and services are high quality - rigorous in their design, have demonstrated impact, help teachers be more effective, and scale to serve millions of students well. In other cases, solutions are not a good use of precious instructional time, are helpful in isolation but not designed to work in concert with other solutions or might work for some kids but are not designed for the diversity of learners or school settings in the market. Particularly as technology fuels a massive proliferation of new tools, the myriad of solutions that teachers, students, and administrators must manage is greater than ever, even as outcomes are poor and declining.
Many of these solutions are funded by for-profit capital seeking a return on investment. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. But for reasons endemic to how traditional private investment functions, investors are often reluctant to make deep, long-term, patient investments in PK-12 products and services. As a result, funding has tended to flow in large measure to legacy solutions that are incoherent or to tech-forward point solutions which address either a single pain point or favor parts of school budgets that are easier to access and do not address longer-term, systemic change. This has resulted in a marketplace of goods sold to schools that are lower-quality, less coherent, and predominately inequitable – doing little to improve educational outcomes and likely contributing to stagnant (or worse) student performance trends. While money has been made, deeply troubling, inequitable outcomes persist, and the power of market forces has neither been maximized for educational outcomes nor long-term superior financial returns.
Philanthropic capital plays a critical and positive role in this marketplace. Philanthropy often takes a longer-term, risk-tolerant, and outcomes-based view, and thus plays an essential role across research, advocacy, and R&D. However, these efforts are often constrained by the need for the scale and velocity of the capital markets. With an aligned and complementary source of growth capital, philanthropy-backed solutions – with strong evidence and well-designed for systems change – can achieve next level reach and outcomes.
A-Street believes these capital dynamics have undermined PK-12 progress, while also failing to realize the potential to compound economic value in excellent companies that deliver real and long-term value to schools and society.
Opportunity
A-Street will demonstrate a new model for PK-12 investing that blends the profitability and scale motives of for-profit capital with the outcomes orientation of philanthropic capital. We aspire to disrupt existing capital market dynamics and prove the power of long-term, patient, and risk-tolerant investing for generating market-rate returns and demonstrable education improvement. We believe that great education entrepreneurs and businesses have the potential to create solutions that can have a lasting, positive influence on teaching and learning. We believe that to realize the potential of these models requires a differentiated investor, purpose-built as a sophisticated, scale capital source which integrates PK-12 knowledge, resources, and networks to uniquely support companies in creating the most valuable and effective offerings. If we succeed, we will have created excellent financial returns and educational outcomes, and we will have influenced co-investors and other capital allocators to do the same.
Areas of Focus
In each of our investments we focus on the core elements of successful teaching and learning: content, teachers, and students.
As we invest against this mandate, we will maintain a multi-stage orientation even as we continue to prioritize the critical need for growth equity in the PK-12 market. We will focus our time and capital backing companies and situations where A-Street has a “right to win,” such as:
Finally, while A-Street will remain focused on PK-12, we will occasionally (< 10% of our committed capital) make investments outside of our core areas of focus, or with atypical risk or business profiles, if we believe they will serve to advance our mission.
A-Street’s Theory of Change in Summary
If we seek solutions that are coherent, effective and equitable; identify and invest in high-potential companies; support those companies with guidance, connections and expertise; and influence other capital providers to be aligned with our approach …
Then our portfolio will improve learning outcomes while achieving excellent financial results – demonstrating it is possible to do both well at scale without compromise …
Which will lead to more educators and students using coherent, effective and equitable solutions, and more investment capital flowing towards these higher-quality solutions …
Ultimately, this will prove that aligned, sophisticated capital can be deployed at scale to contribute to reshaping the future of PK-12 learning.
If A-Street succeeds over the next decade, we hope the following will be true:
* What do we mean by coherence? A-Street seeks solutions that respect and strengthen the relationship between the teacher, student, and content. Coherent tools build on the presence of high-quality core curriculum and leverage technology as an enabler of, not replacement for, excellent teaching. These tools use data to provide insight into a student’s mastery of knowledge and skill, and to guide how educators spend instructional time. These tools are thoughtfully designed, rigorous, and connected holistically such that they create a coherent user experience for the teacher and the student – one journey that builds from minute to minute, day to day, and unit to unit.
1 See NAEP data reported by the National Center for Education Statistics here. See related reporting by The 74 here.
2 See research report by Matthew Kraft and Melissa Lyon (The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession) here.
Updated Spring 2026
Updated Spring 2026
For more than thirty years the Walton Family Foundation has invested in ideas and leadership to improve our nation’s education system. For the last eight of those years it has been my privilege and honor to lead these efforts, working side-by-side with courageous educators and entrepreneurs, determined organizers and advocates, and a board as generous as it is patient and focused.
Our collective endeavor has been to center the work on two simple ideals: that every student deserves a great education; and that every individual can accomplish the extraordinary when given the opportunity and resources. Over these years, we’ve made exciting progress and more than our share of mistakes. Such is the work of doing hard things worth doing.
This past year, we’ve been reminded of the importance of our work as never before. Parents, educators and more schools than we can count have responded to the COVID-19 disruption with creativity and moxy. But the pandemic has also laid bare what many of us have long known — that our public education system is barely hanging on, failing far too many of its families and teachers, and in need of transformation.
In a recent survey, 25% of classroom teachers said they plan to step away from the profession. Those who do return have their work cut out for them: reports of learning loss are staggering, compounding concerns about America’s global competitiveness, at a moment when we are reminded yet again of the importance of numeracy and literacy in achieving social and economic mobility. And as dramatically as the world has evolved outside the classroom over the last quarter century, inside the classroom the returning educator and student will find things much as they were when I started teaching in 1995.
So now has to be the moment. For big leaps forward in how students learn, and for what teaching and learning can look like. For lifting up the teaching profession by providing more coherent solutions that reorient teachers to their most sacred task: the human-centered work of facilitating community building and knowledge acquisition. Now has to be the moment to advance digital-forward tools that lean into the surging digital access, leveraging breakthroughs that can transform at long last the Industrial Age classroom and into the modern laboratory of learning. Most critically, now has to be the moment to advance equity.
To help catalyze and energize that moment, I am stepping down from my current role as K-12 Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation to launch A-Street, a $200+ million privately sponsored investment fund with a strategic focus on seeding and scaling innovative K- 12 student learning and achievement solutions for students, families, and schools. I am doing so because I believe this moment represents a historic inflection — one long in the making– for transformation. I will transition to support the foundation as a senior advisor on an ongoing basis.
Despite the significant progress made in the last two decades, daunting challenges remain in addressing educational disparities between rich and poor students and communities. Studies in recent years have documented the sharp decline in intergenerational mobility, with Black Americans being the least likely to match or exceed their parents’ economic prosperity. As the future of work shifts toward artificial intelligence, automation, and outsourcing to foreign countries, the financial security of, and accessibility to, America’s middle class has never been more in doubt. In this new world, opportunity and stability will belong to young people who can adapt, think critically, continue learning new skills, thrive in collaborative environments, and lead teams. We need breakthrough innovations in teaching, learning, and measurement to ensure that education can be a true engine of mobility for all students, especially those living in poverty.
To fuel that innovation, A-Street intends to invest in a mix of early-, growth- and late-stage ventures, with a current focus on digital-first instructional materials in curriculum and new paradigms for student assessment. Although A-Street plans to focus primarily on companies operating within the U.S. K-12 market, the Fund may also invest outside of the K-12 spectrum when potential breakthrough applications could benefit the primary and secondary school continuum.
Though we will operate with all the rigor and ambition of a traditional closed end investment fund with aspirations for market rate returns, it is intended for A-Street’s profits to revolve to A- Street or support charitable causes. And while the fund has been generously seeded by interested members of the Walton family, it will be held and operated independently of the Walton Family Foundation.
The road ahead for A-Street won’t always be straight and clear. But now has to be the moment for boldness, for focus, and for breakthrough.
To the entrepreneurs and the idea-makers: we look forward to supporting your vision. Now is the moment for your big thinking, new approaches, and finding common ground that advances progress.
To our fellow investors: we are eager to learn from you and work with you to solve hard problems that are bigger than any one of us.
To our critics: resistance alone will not fashion the more equitable schools we need. We welcome your scrutiny and invite you to bring your ideas for solutions to the problems we all see.
As A-Street navigates forward, we’ll stay centered on what’s at stake: a quality education for every student in America as a promise we must keep in order to unlock our collective promise.
Spring 2021
