Digital Promise offers grants up to $600,000 to give teachers more control over AI

A $1 million funding round will support open-source infrastructure for K–12 formative assessment, with US-based applicants eligible to apply by November 20

Digital Promise’s funding round seeks open-source tools that help teachers monitor and guide AI-enabled formative assessment.

Digital Promise is seeking projects that help teachers see what classroom AI tools are doing, guide their responses and adapt instruction to students’ needs. Its K-12 AI Infrastructure Program will make up to two awards from a $1 million pool, with individual grants capped at $600,000.

The funding targets gaps in how teachers and AI systems work together, including conflicting instruction, limited adaptation to different learners and insufficient teacher oversight. Eligible technologies include AI tutors, grading and feedback assistants, content generators and classroom analytics dashboards.

Projects must support formative assessment: gathering evidence of what students understand and using it to decide what to teach next. The request for proposals asks developers to show how shared educational resources can make that process work more coherently across teachers and AI tools.

Rebecca Griffiths, Program Design Director of the K-12 AI Infrastructure Program, highlighted the teacher’s role in a LinkedIn post. She said the program was interested in approaches “to increase teachers' visibility into student interactions and ability to adapt for learner variability.”

Shared infrastructure, with a classroom demonstration

The grants will fund openly licensed tools and workflows that multiple developers can incorporate into their products. Public goods in this context include reusable datasets, models, benchmarks and code developed for education.

Applicants must include a demonstration application that engages teachers, but most of the work must produce infrastructure for other developers. The competition does not fund the creation of proprietary products that directly serve teachers and students.

Potential approaches include adapting the software that coordinates AI models and their supporting information, publishing reusable sample code, or creating a reference application that shows other developers how to integrate educational resources.

“With this round of grants we want to lower the barriers for edtech developers to build on this infrastructure and show what kinds of improvements are possible,” Griffiths says. 

Proposals must identify at least four tasks that improve coordination between teachers and AI tools. One example is using evidence from tutoring sessions to adapt an upcoming lesson, so that classroom teaching and AI tutoring address the same student misconceptions.

Applicants must also explain how educators will help test and refine the work, and how it will accommodate differences among learners, including multilingual and neurodiverse students.

Who can apply and what projects must deliver

The competition is open to US-based entities, including those in US territories. Eligible applicants include edtech companies, nonprofits, school districts and higher education institutions. Nonprofits under fiscal sponsorship can also apply, and outputs must clearly serve US-based students.

Teams must combine AI or technical expertise with education or learning sciences expertise. Most lead organizations may submit one application, with separate provisions for departments or academic divisions in organizations with more than 2,000 staff.

The anticipated grant period is 18 months, beginning February 1, 2027. An initial six-month phase will establish a working prototype using existing public goods. The second phase will incorporate selected resources expected from the program in summer 2027 and evaluate improvements against existing approaches. The final phase will refine the package for developer use and release it publicly following a safety review.

Digital Promise leads the program with Learning Data Insights, DrivenData, Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute and Catalyst @ Penn GSE. Selected recipients are expected to be announced in early 2027.