Penn’s Graduate School of Education partnered with a multi-million dollar program to build artificial intelligence tools for K-12 education.
The Jan. 29 announcement shared that Catalyst @ Penn GSE joined Digital Promise and three other core partners to invest $26 million toward developing publicly accessible generative AI tools. The initiative, titled the K-12 AI Infrastructure Program, will provide grants to build AI products for primary and secondary schools.
Jeremy Roschelle, the initiative’s executive director, called the program “ambitious and hard” in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian.
“There isn’t an established way that people collect data sets in education for AI or build benchmarks or tune models — it’s all pretty new,” he added. “We really needed to build a first class set of partners to do that work.”
Catalyst joined Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University, Learning Data Insights, and DrivenData as one of the project’s core partners.
“This is an ambitious and hard program,” Catalyst Director Jeremy Roschelle said in an interview with the DP. “If we’re going to get AI to really support the learner, there needs to be data that’s appropriate to that, and I think we’re going to chip away at that problem.”
The program is focused on “formative assessment” — it takes feedback from students and educators to understand their “frustrations” with existing tools. Then, it works to “overcome those frustrations and actually make something that’s a better assistant or a partner for their instructional leadership.”
“If we’re going to get AI to support the learner, there needs to be data appropriate to that,” Roschelle said. “This amount of money can’t do this — but at least we can start.”
RELATED:
Penn Graduate School of Education set to pilot AI masters program in fall 2025
Penn to become first Ivy League school to offer undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence
The grant program intends to improve AI infrastructure by creating free and legally unrestricted open datasets used to train machine learning models. These datasets are meant to improve AI models’ ability to account for factors such as learner variability and teaching principles.
Second-year GSE graduate student Sijie Mei told the DP that the grant is “crucial because it focuses on infrastructure.”
“AI is powerful, but it doesn’t really always understand pedagogy,” Mei said. “For education, we need to be very cautious about the data we use to train. We need to use [data that] has been verified or validated by science, and unbiased tools.”
The program, Mei explained, is “bridging the gap” between technology and “evidence-based learning.”
First-year GSE graduate student Annie Yang — who built an AI-powered platform that supports families of autistic children — said that the grant is an important step in expanding the opportunities available for GSE students to build and test AI models.
“AI works based on people’s behaviors and people’s feedback,” Yang said. “I feel like it’s very good to collaborate with other organizations, because each organization has different perspectives for the AI.”
First-year GSE graduate student Ashley Zingillioglu explained that the grant could “enhance learning outcomes” and improve AI implementation across various educational fields.
“It makes collaboration possible and provides a necessary environment where good ideas can be planted and grow within a community of support,” Zingillioglu said.
GSE’s partnership on this project “just confirms” that the school is “leading the change, not just following the trends,” Mei said.
“It validates that we’re at the right place at the right time,” she added.
This is the GSE’s second major collaboration with Digital Promise. The two organizations worked together in 2024 to launch GSE’s Data Science Methods for Digital Learning Platforms, a 16-week certificate course.
This partnership continues GSE’s trend of researching and promoting ethical AI use in education. In November 2024, GSE’s Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Masters Program became the Ivy League’s first AI-centered education degree.
In January 2025, GSE launched its Pioneering AI in School Systems program aimed at helping the School District of Philadelphia understand and implement AI tools. GSE later used a $1 million donation from Google to expand PASS to five school districts across Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey in October 2025.
