The Pearson Foundation is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that aims to make a difference by promoting literacy, learning, and great teaching. We do this by collaborating with leading businesses, nonprofits, and education experts to share good practice; foster innovation; and find workable solutions to the educational disadvantages facing young people and adults across the globe.

We believe we can make an important difference by focusing our efforts, resources, and alliances on sharing and helping to scale the key approaches inside and outside the classroom that can most shape a child’s success. We focus on:

• Literacy – We’re sharing books we love, and helping teachers, parents, and great non-profit organizations better ensure that young people are ready to read and learn.
• Great learning – We’re helping to document, share, and scale innovative ways that schools make use of mobile and digital technologies to improve student learning. We are also identifying and supporting new approaches that encourage deeper learning inside and outside the classroom; and celebrating the remarkable ways that young people are employing 21st century skills to make a difference in their local communities.
• Great teaching – We’re honoring great educators in local communities; supporting teaching and leadership that delivers better outcomes for students; and supporting innovative public-private partnerships to improve teaching practice in classrooms around the world. We also share educators’ own perspectives so that teachers everywhere have the potential to improve their own schools and better student outcomes.

 

What We Do

Each year an initial grant from Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, provides us with operating funds we use to develop hands-on programs and partnerships around the world. We also work with Pearson, with other funders, and with a roster of exemplary nonprofit organizations, corporations, and partners to help deliver scalable and replicable educational solutions to students, teachers, and educational institutions.

Whenever we can, we promote literacy, great learning, and great teaching by:

• Providing support and adding capacity to great nonprofit organizations already making a difference in local communities.
• Incubating innovative approaches to teaching and learning that can make an immediate difference in the lives of young people and educators.
• Documenting, sharing, and encouraging innovative practices inside and outside the classroom so that others can build upon proven efforts and can adapt them to help the individuals and organizations they serve.

To showcase some of the best solutions already making a difference in local communities, we’ve developed programs like the New Learning Institute, We Give Books, and the Strong Performers, Successful Reformers video series. These efforts—and others like them—share the common goal of supporting and spreading the word about exemplary practices among the world’s most successful education systems and learning organizations. We’ve also worked with public and private partners to develop new learning approaches of our own—efforts like the BRIDGEIT mobile learning solution, for example; the My Voice student aspirations survey; and, coming prior to Fall, 2014 our sharing of four full year-long, fully digital courses that teachers and students can make use of for free to help meet the needs of the Common Core State Standards.