Education Development Center (EDC) is a global

nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

to improve education, promote health, and expand economic opportunity across the United States and in more than 80 other countries. EDC headquarters are in

Waltham, Massachusetts Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, th ...

, and main offices in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, and

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. EDC has 1,400 employees worldwide. EDC uses technology, most notably radio, to provide educational opportunities for hard to reach learners. During the 2014

Ebola Ebola, also known as Ebola virus disease (EVD) and Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF), is a viral hemorrhagic fever in humans and other primates, caused by ebolaviruses. Symptoms typically start anywhere between two days and three weeks after becom ...

outbreak in Liberia, EDC and its partners used radio to provide lessons to students whose schools were closed due to the disease. Research conducted by EDC on teen smoking has been cited by communities and states as they consider raising the age to purchase tobacco to 21. EDC also works to improve the knowledge base in early childhood development. Named twice to The Boston Globe’s "Top Places to Work," EDC maintains a staff composed of scientists, researchers, mathematicians, educators, and health and technology specialists. Staff expertise includes research, training, policy, curriculum and materials development, and education technology, and their activities range from small seed projects to large-scale national and international initiatives.

History

EDC created the curriculum Man: A Course of Study. The organization was founded (as Educational Services, Inc.) by

Jerrold Zacharias Jerrold Reinach Zacharias (January 23, 1905 – July 16, 1986) was an American physicist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an education reformer. His scientific work was in the area of nuclear physics ...

, a physics professor at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

who started the

Physical Science Study Committee The Physical Science Study Committee, usually abbreviated as PSSC, was inaugurated at a 1956 conference at MIT to review introductory physics education and to design, implement, and monitor improvements. It produced major new physics textbooks, inst ...

, and is credited with developing PSSC Physics funded by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

. PSSC Physics focused on science as the product of experiment and theory, constructed by real people. EDC introduced it successfully in schools across the country and eventually in many parts of the world. Zacharias is credited with changing the way physics is taught in secondary schools and many of the PSSC films are still used in classrooms today. In 1964, ESI received funding from the

Carnegie Corporation of New York The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world. Carnegie Corporation has endowed or otherwise helped to establis ...

to address the high rate of college dropout among African American students. In response, EDC established pre-college centers at six

Historically Black Colleges and Universities Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of primarily serving the African-American community. ...

to increase opportunities for low-income students. The approach was later scaled up to become the model of the federal government’s Upward Bound program. In 1968, ESI merged with the Institute for Educational Innovation to form EDC. One of EDC’s earliest projects was the Elementary Science Study (ESS) funded primarily by the

. In the 1960s, EDC developed dozens of classroom kits and accompanying teacher guides for teaching science and mathematics in the elementary and middle grades. Many spawned variations still in wide use in schools today. Examples include Attribute Blocks and their variants which can be found in most elementary school classrooms. Also,

Pattern Blocks Pattern Blocks are a set of mathematical manipulatives developed in the 1960s. The six shapes are both a play resource and a tool for learning in mathematics, which serve to develop spatial reasoning skills that are fundamental to the learning of m ...

are ubiquitous in U.S. classrooms, still in the very same form (colors and size) as EDC originally created them more than 50 years ago.

References

External links

Articles of Incorporation
{{Authority control Non-profit organizations based in Massachusetts