Tim Arnold

Today, Modern Classrooms Project is announcing that we have raised $12 million to build a free Tier 1 math curriculum for middle and high school, grounded in cognitive science. The more time I spend in math education, the more concerned I get. Outcomes have been falling for more than a decade, and the steepest declines are among the lowest-performing students. Meanwhile, many of the leading cognitive scientists and learning scientists have been sounding the alarm that their research is not being applied at scale in math classrooms. We think they might be right. So we are building a curriculum that treats cognitive science as its north star. We plan to launch middle school in summer 2027 and high school in summer 2028. Three things to know about what we are building: 1. It will be free. All lessons and materials, teacher-facing and student-facing, will be publicly available online, printable, and modifiable. 2. It will be built with the researchers. In the coming weeks, we will announce a research advisory committee of leading learning scientists. We will work as hard as we can to make sure the structure, design, and underlying content align with what cognitive science tells us about how students, especially struggling learners, master math. 3. It will work with or without technology. Modern Classrooms Project has spent years at the intersection of technology and classroom instruction. This curriculum will have two clear implementation pathways. One that is completely paper-based, built around whole-group, teacher-facilitated instruction. The other will be designed to leverage technology to enable flexible pacing, mastery-based progressions, and increased 1-1 and small-group support from educators. Perhaps most importantly, we want to understand what works. While we have conviction that following cognitive science is the right path, we are deeply committed to trying to move the field forward so that students can achieve their full potential in math, particularly students farthest from opportunity. To learn more about what we are building and explore ways to get involved, go to modernclassrooms.org/curricu….