How can we close global education gaps while improving outcomes for every learner?
Challenge Overview
Quality education remains central to improving individual and societal outcomes. Yet with fewer than four years left to reach SDG 4, the challenge of ensuring quality education for all remains steep: over 270 million children are out of school, one in five teachers don’t meet minimum national qualification standards, and aid to education is on track to fall 30% between 2023 and 2027.
EdTech is also at a pivotal moment. AI now offers learners an always-available tutor and gives teachers powerful new support. However, it can also let students bypass the productive struggle through which real learning happens, weaken peer and teacher relationships, and widen the gap between those with access to frontier tools and those without*. Technology backlashes in classrooms, so far concentrated in higher-income countries, and decreasing investment mean builders of education solutions must design for impact and demonstrate clear educational value. That means showing gains in what learners can actually do, not just engagement or completion. Privacy, fairness, safety, human oversight, and accountable data governance must be built in, especially for tools serving children.
MIT Solve seeks exceptional solutions that wield technology to address and close global education gaps, with a particular interest in 2027 for solutions that:
Strengthen teachers’ instructional practice through evidence-grounded tools that augment teachers’ judgment and relationships with learners rather than automate them, with a clear case for technology in and around classrooms
Work in emergency or low-resource settings, including low-bandwidth, offline, or low-cost designs, and tools to bolster school- or district-level systems and capacity
Include assistive technology or multilingual capabilities that better support learners with disabilities or learners using non-dominant languages
Improve assessment of what learners truly know and can do, including formative assessment, diagnostics, or early screening that flag when a learner is off-track so a teacher can intervene
Across all areas, solutions that:
Use AI and other technologies to deepen learning rather than shortcut it
Foster peer, teacher, and community connection rather than isolation
Are designed with, or led by, the communities they serve
Integrate with current curricula and future interoperability
Strengthen public education systems
Every person deserves an excellent education and the opportunities that it unlocks. Let’s make that a reality, together.
