Renaissance Philanthropy Opens Call for Ideas on Reimagining K-12 Assessments with Advanced Technologies
Seeking ideas and solutions that use advanced technologies to address critical pain points and opportunities in K-12 assessment.
Today’s K-12 assessment landscape often captures learning at isolated moments, measures only a narrow slice of what students know and can do, and provides educators with limited insight into how to respond. As AI reshapes teaching and learning, there is an opportunity to rethink what assessment can capture and how it connects to instruction.
Renaissance Philanthropy, with generous support from Google.org, is opening a Request for Information (RFI) to surface ideas from the field on how advanced technology can help assessment become more continuous, actionable, and connected to instruction.
Responses will be used to inform funding opportunities such as the Tools Competition, as well as other partnerships and field-building efforts.
The Problem & Opportunity: Assessment Has Not Kept Pace With Learning
Today’s K-12 assessment landscape has not kept pace with what AI now makes possible. Assessments remain largely event-driven, capturing learning at isolated moments rather than as it unfolds, and are predominantly item-centric, measuring a narrow slice of what students actually know and can do.
This creates a persistent mismatch between what assessments measure and what educators need to make informed decisions. Students whose learning needs go unrecognized until they have already fallen behind bear the greatest cost.
Advances in AI create an opportunity to rethink what assessment can capture and how it connects to instruction. AI-enabled approaches can surface how students think, where they struggle, and what they are ready to learn next. This includes richer signals of higher-order reasoning, adaptive skills, and authentic performance that traditional assessments often miss.
As students gain increasing access to AI tools, assessments should also evolve beyond a focus on final outputs and toward capturing the thinking, reasoning, and learning processes behind them.
Open Call for Ideas
Renaissance Philanthropy and Google.org seek to accelerate this shift by exploring where AI creates the greatest opportunity to overcome persistent challenges in K-12 assessment and investing in the solutions needed to make those opportunities real.
We are especially interested in ideas related to:
AI integration and potential: How AI can expand what assessment captures and makes actionable.
High quality instructional materials alignment and implementation: How assessment can better connect to curriculum and what teachers are actually teaching.
Assessment quality and design: How assessment can become more valid, fair, accessible, useful, and able to capture richer evidence of learning.
Student and teacher experience: How assessment can feel more engaging, less burdensome, and more useful.
Connection to student supports: How assessment can better identify support needs and guide intervention, progress monitoring, and coordination.
Across these areas, the goal is to explore how AI can help assessment move from a periodic measure of learning to a continuous source of insight that strengthens instruction, guides timely support, and helps every student make progress.
How to Submit
Submit your responses here by 11:59pm Eastern Time on July 31, 2026. See here for Terms and Conditions.
Questions? Reach out to kristyn.manoukian@renphil.org.
About Renaissance Philanthropy
Renaissance Philanthropy advances ambitious philanthropic initiatives in science, technology, and innovation through philanthropic advising, surfacing breakthrough ideas, and incubating high-impact initiatives. Launched by Tom Kalil and Kumar Garg, former senior advisors to Presidents Clinton and Obama, Renaissance Philanthropy advances technical solutions to major public challenges, including education, in order to fuel a 21st-century renaissance.
The Tools Competition is one of Renaissance Philanthropy’s flagship education initiatives. Through the competition, Renaissance Philanthropy and a global coalition of leading funders, identify and accelerate the next generation of education technologies, research, and public goods with the potential to transform learning at scale.
