About Us
SERP Institute was incubated at the National Academy of Sciences and founded as an independent nonprofit organization in 2003 to bridge the worlds of education research, practice, and design. Central to all SERP work is a commitment to equity, collaboration, and the agency of teachers and students.
SERP seeks systemic change.
The United States, once an undisputed world leader in public education, now lags behind many other nations. Already, many U.S. corporations are unable to fill skilled labor positions at home. This decline in global standing is not inevitable, but to reverse course, we must invest in an education system that provides equitable access to every one of our students— a system that has a vigorous capacity for continuous improvement. We do not lag behind for lack of evidence or ideas on how to serve all students. What is missing is a coherent approach for turning evidence-based ideas into effective programs and practices that fit within the routines of the classroom, and can therefore readily spread.
SERP seeks to support just such an approach—to bring together education researchers, designers, and practitioners with a shared purpose of creating and testing equitable, scalable solutions, a majority of which are freely accessible to everyone.
SERP continues the National Academies’ tradition of drawing on the nation’s leading scholars. SERP partnerships are unique in giving school district partners the critical role of identifying the problem to be addressed and an ongoing role in developing solutions that meet their needs. The practice-informed design capacity that SERP brings to the collaboration shapes the final products so they fit comfortably into the hands of teachers and students—not only in our partner schools, but in schools across the nation.
SERP’s ultimate goal is not its products or tools. Rather, we are building an institution committed to drawing the talent of our nation’s great universities and colleges into an ongoing collaboration with practitioners in our K-12 schools and school systems—a collaboration that focuses on continuously improving the quality and equity of the education system that is so central to our success as a nation.