While all of the 100+ challenges are important, the catalyst challenges are the most strategic and efficient areas for impacting the system. Identified through more than 35,000 data points generated from over 750 STEM and education experts, the catalysts are the challenges that, if solved, would have outsized positive effects across the system. 

We call these the catalyst challenges. Once we identified the catalysts, we selected targeted focus areas -- sometimes made up of multiple catalysts -- where our network was well-positioned to make progress. We started out our collective work to address each focus area by doing research and working with a Brain Trust of partners and teachers to “get smart” and deeply understand challenges and bright spots, and used the resulting research and findings to mobilize partners to collaboratively address underlying challenges of the focus areas through Project Teams. 

Explore our three focus areas: 

Nurturing positive work environments for teachers (announced in 2018)

Enabling joyful and rigorous foundational math (announced in 2019)

Increasing equity in high school STEM (announced in 2020)