Modern Classrooms Project Raises $12 Million to Build a Free Math Curriculum Grounded in Cognitive Science

Modern Classrooms Project Raises $12 Million to Build a Free Math Curriculum Grounded in Cognitive Science

PR Newswire

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9, 2026

Middle school launches in summer 2027 and high school in summer 2028. Core instructional materials will be free to every teacher, school, district, and family, and teachable with no screens at all or with technology used carefully.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Modern Classrooms Project, a nonprofit focused on improving math instruction, announced a $12 million funding round, led by the Skeebo Foundation, to build a complete Tier 1 math curriculum grounded in cognitive science and free to anyone who wants to use it. The curriculum will launch in summer 2027 with middle school. High school will launch in summer 2028.

For more than a decade, American students have lost ground in math, and the students who were already behind have lost the most. Scores peaked in 2013 and have fallen since. On the 2024 Nation's Report Card, 72 percent of eighth graders scored below proficient in math, and the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students was the widest in the history of the assessment.

Modern Classrooms Project's math curriculum will draw on decades of cognitive science research on how students learn math. "Many in the learning science community have been passionate that their research is not being applied to math classrooms at scale," said Kareem Farah, CEO and Co-Founder of Modern Classrooms Project and a former high school math teacher. "Until a math curriculum is released that anchors on cognitive science and is free to anyone who wants it, we cannot fully test whether that body of research is the missing piece to improve math outcomes at scale."

Every class period in the curriculum will have a clear research-informed design: whole-group fluency, then one new skill taught explicitly and accompanied by guided practice and blocked practice, a short skill check, then spaced practice in which skills taught weeks earlier come back interleaved. Because math is hierarchical, every skill is checked the day it is taught, and skills return multiple times throughout the year until they are mastered.

The base version of the curriculum will be completely paper-based and designed for traditional implementation: an educator facilitates whole-group fluency, explicit instruction and guided practice from the front of the room, with blocked practice, skill checks and assessments completed on paper.

A second implementation pathway will be designed for teachers, schools, and systems seeking to leverage technology thoughtfully to more effectively cater to learners' needs. In this pathway, students will be able to access elements of instruction digitally and will progress through the content at a flexible pace based on mastery. This will allow educators to spend the bulk of class time in one-on-one and small-group instruction, using data to address misunderstandings precisely.

Modern Classrooms Project is committed to working with teachers, schools, and districts where they are in their instructional journey, supporting both implementation pathways and studying how each impacts teacher efficacy and student achievement.

The core instructional materials in the curriculum, both student-facing and teacher-facing, will be free and publicly available: ready to print, free to modify, and aligned to standards.

In the coming weeks, Modern Classrooms Project will be announcing its research advisory board, a committed group of cognitive scientists, mathematicians, and education researchers who will help guide key product decisions.

Modern Classrooms Project is looking to grow its community of collaborators as it builds the curriculum: teachers interested in testing early prototypes, schools and districts interested in piloting the curriculum, and research partners interested in studying the curriculum's impacts.

Learn more and get involved at modernclassrooms.org/curriculum.

About Modern Classrooms Project

Modern Classrooms Project is a nonprofit organization that empowers educators to transform their classrooms and schools to meet the needs of every student. Our educator-led, mastery-based instructional approach, grounded in the science of learning, is the foundation of a growing movement of tens of thousands of educators worldwide. Together with our curriculum- and standards-aligned tools, content, and resources, we are reshaping how teaching and learning happen across the country. Learn more at modernclassrooms.org.

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SOURCE Modern Classrooms Project