Just over a year ago, IES — the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, charged with deepening America’s understanding of how schools perform and what students learn — was rocked by a wave of layoffs as Education Secretary Linda McMahon her own agency. The education chapter of Project 2025, a policy wish-list assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, advised that the Institute’s statistical office be moved to the Census Bureau. 

The picture looks somewhat sunnier as winter turns to spring, with Republicans in Congress from significant cuts and . In a recent interview, Lindsey Burke — the author of the Project 2025 recommendations on schooling, now serving as deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Education Department — referred to IES as of the Education Department.

Most striking of all was the publication last month of by Amber Northern, a prominent education researcher and commentator appointed last year as a special advisor to McMahon. While critical of the Institute for its numerous areas of focus and the sometimes-plodding pace of its data releases, Northern’s overview represents a long-term vision for federal support of research that directly answers the needs of educators. McMahon and Acting IES Director Matthew Soldner , suggesting that its prescriptions would find a receptive audience in the administration.

But some insiders said that any attempt to improve the functions of the Institute would depend on a meaningful rebuilding of its capacity, including a move to restore agency staff to something approximating their numbers before last year’s DOGE cuts. What’s more, some tweaks to IES workings and grantmaking would require changes in law that would be impossible without bipartisan cooperation in Congress. That leaves open the question of whether there remains a constituency for the kind of large-scale, public-sector research endeavors that have long received the backing of both Democrats and Republicans.

Northern declined to comment for this story. But her recommendations — broadly, that IES limit its focus to a smaller number of national education challenges, reorient its work toward the practical concerns of schools, and foster cooperation among states to scale up their most promising policies — amplify some broadly shared views of where federal data collection needs to go. 

Sara Schapiro, executive director of the advocacy coalition , noted that her group’s recent made some of the same points, as did from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Not only are many of those ideas the subject of broad agreement, she added; they can also be implemented at the discretion of the Institute’s leadership, with no input from lawmakers necessary.

“One of the recommendations was a smaller set of research priorities — IES can just do that,” Schapiro said. “They can require better dissemination [of research] from grantees. They can do some of the rapid-cycle grants we’ve called for and this report calls for. And they can also review and change some of the NCES data collections.” 

Yet any statutory changes would face major headwinds in an era of intense polarization and divided political attention. In 2023, Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy that would have reauthorized the Education Sciences Reform Act, the law that established IES in 2002. It never received a Senate vote, demonstrating to Schapiro that any legislative efforts would be “extraordinarily hard.” 

“We weren’t able to get it over the finish line during the Biden administration, with an easier congressional landscape,” she acknowledged.

David Cleary, a former high-level Republican staffer who helped pass major education laws across more than two decades working in Congress, wrote in an email that the most promising potential revamp might lie in the of Trump administration official Jim O’Neill to lead the National Science Foundation. An interagency agreement between NSF and IES could allow the two organizations to pool resources and expertise going forward. (Two such agreements between the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Beyond such administrative wrangling, however, Cleary said the education policy community needed to “buckle down and do hard things well instead of doing easy things poorly.” He cited the recent momentum of state-led literacy initiatives, galvanized partly through their partnership with federally funded research labs, as an example for lawmakers to follow. 

“The challenge is getting staff and members to think a little more dispassionately about what needs to be researched and funded,” Cleary wrote. “Instead of letting every question be asked, every project funded, every idea pursued, we should model after the successful endeavors on the science of reading.”

Veteran research administrator Cara Jackson, who worked at a private research organization that collaborated with IES until losing her job last year, said she agreed with portions of Northern’s critique, noting the long wait times that contractors anticipated when receiving feedback from the Institute’s various offices and stakeholders. She argued that greater transparency in the research process, including a dashboard allowing the public to track the time and money expended on each project, would foster more “mutual accountability” on all sides.

Nevertheless, it was a “strange sequence” to call for reforms after largely dismantling the Institute’s workforce, Jackson continued. Well-intentioned proposals to award funding and release data on a faster timetable would likely falter if not enough employees existed to simply push money out the door to grantees and contractors. 

“There were people there who were already acting on these ideas and could have been doing that all this time,” Jackson observed. “Now you’re going to have to hire people to do it. It takes forever to hire government employees, and we haven’t made the job any more attractive by letting go of all these people.”

NCADE would be modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (), a division of the Defense Department that focuses on breakthrough national security technologies. DARPA has also advanced many civilian breakthroughs, including the internet, GPS, advanced microprocessors, and COVID-19 vaccines. There are DARPA-inspired agencies in departments such as Energy, Transportation, and Health and Human Services, all aimed at harnessing modern research methods to produce breakthroughs in their respective policy domains. NEED would bring IES into this movement.

According to the NEED Act, NCADE would “identify, develop and promote advances in and new solutions for teaching and learning, with an emphasis on breakthrough technologies, new pedagogical approaches, innovative learning models and more efficient, reliable and valid forms of assessments.” 

In laying out the criteria for deciding which projects to fund, NEED calls for using “commercial applications of a proposed project to increase the likelihood of scalability of such project.” Scalability is important if IES and NCADE are to improve student outcomes, and commercialization is the best way to achieve it. Legislation specifying commercialization is essential, since it would help overturn a historical bias in IES against commercial firms. 

Under the NEED Act, NCADE must hire broadly, recruiting professionals from, for example, engineering, the learning sciences, and artificial intelligence. This would broaden the narrow pool of academic disciplines from which IES usually draws its program officers.

Shorter-term appointments and wage flexibility would bypass the handcuffs of IES’ current hiring processes, allowing the new center to bring in more creative and energetic personnel.

Beyond these benefits in the proposed legislation, here are a few additions that are not included that should be considered during floor debates.

First, the NEED Act should specifically make sure NCADE follows evolving best practices in contracting. The Department of Defense is undertaking a of its contracting processes — and there are lessons from that effort that should inform NCADE. DOD’s new acquisition strategy emphasizes the need to increase competition, especially by encouraging entry by new firms. When companies hold contracts for too long, they and their government overseers grow , dampening incentives to deliver optimal results for taxpayers. While the NEED Act points to the need to bring in new firms, the call should be even clearer.

NCADE should also more clearly prioritize off-the-shelf solutions, access to up-to-date software and the involvement of true tech companies that are more like  than . The NEED Act should emphasize performance-based contracting but also give NCADE “Other Transaction Authority,” so it can fund prototypes, partner with nontraditional suppliers and move at the speed required for modern innovation — flexibility granted to the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

Second, the NEED Act should foster the much-needed modernization of the National Center for Education Research (NCER). It’s clear that NCER’s business model has run its course, something I describe as (the duration of its grants, the amount of money usually given out and the typical outcome). NCADE will provide an alternative to NCER’s scattershot approach, in which individual projects, mostly led by university-based researchers, win disconnected one-off grants. Though NCER’s current model can fund high-quality research, far too much money goes to areas driven by niche academic interests rather than the education needs of the nation. While NCER is playing catchup with its  in the education sciences program and its , it is still wedded to its outdated field driven research model. NCADE can provide a challenge and an alternative to NCER’s outmoded approach to funding.

The recently announced  initiative is another model for how NCADE should approach funding decisions — and how that approach could profitably spur changes in NCER. Tech Labs’ shift toward team-based, outcomes-oriented funding reflects the growing scale of challenges facing the nation — challenges that are increasingly beyond the reach of individual investigators. There is some pushback against this approach, since it shifts resources away from the traditional individual researcher grants model that has driven the NSF (as well as IES and the National Institutes of Health). There is some concern that Tech Labs will move away from basic science to focus on solutions to emerging problems. This is far less of a concern for IES, since it is by law a mission-based, applied science agency. As the NEED Act is debated, the Tech Labs initiative should be monitored closely to help inform NCADE’s development. 

Of course, hanging over all this is the fate of IES and the Department of Education overall. If IES remains intact, the vision and the goals of the NEED Act can transform how IES supports education research. If that function gets moved to other federal agencies, the NEED Act has identified essential reforms that should inform education research and development no matter where that sits. 

Congratulations and welcome to a place we once knew well. You face any number of tough challenges on behalf of American students, parents, educators and taxpayers, as well as the administration you serve, but your “Department’s Final Mission” shows that you’re well prepared to meet them. We particularly admire your commitment to making American education “the greatest in the world.”

But how will we — and you, and our fellow Americans — know how rapidly we’re getting there? By now, you’re probably aware that the single most important activity of the department you lead is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known to some as NAEP and to many as the Nation’s Report Card.

That’s the primary gauge by which we know how American education is doing, both nationally and in the states to which you rightly seek to restore its control.

Almost four decades ago — during Ronald Reagan’s second term — it was our job to modernize that key barometer of student achievement. Five years after A Nation at Risk told Americans that their education system was far from the world’s greatest, state leaders — governors especially — craved better data on the performance of their students and schools. And they were right. At the time, they had no sure way of monitoring that performance.

That was one of our challenges, back in the day. Advised by a blue-ribbon study group led by outgoing Tennessee governor (and future U.S. senator) Lamar Alexander, and with congressional cooperation spearheaded by the late Ted Kennedy, in 1988 we proposed what became a bipartisan transformation of an occasional government-sponsored test into a regular and systematic appraisal of student achievement in core academic subjects, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (part of your Institute for Education Sciences) and overseen by an independent group of state and local leaders, plus educators and the general public. (One of your responsibilities is appointing several terrific people each year to terms on the 26-member National Assessment Governing Board.) 

That 1988 overhaul made three big changes:

• Creation of that independent board to ensure the data’s integrity, accuracy and utility;
  
• Inauguration of state-level reporting of student achievement in grades 4, 8 and 12, i.e. at  the ends of elementary, middle and high school; and
  
• Authorization for the board to set standards — known as achievement levels — by which to know whether that achievement is satisfactory.

Much else was happening in U.S. education at the time: School choice was gaining traction. States were setting their own academic standards and administering their own assessments. Graduation requirements were rising as the economy modernized and its human capital needs increased. 

As these and other reforms gathered speed, NAEP became the country’s most trusted barometer of what was (and wasn’t) working. You alluded to NAEP data during your confirmation hearing. President Donald Trump deploys it when referencing the shortcomings of U.S. schools. For example, his Jan. 29 executive order on school choice began this way: “According to this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 70% of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72% were below proficient in math.”

Everybody relies on NAEP data, and its governing board’s standards have become the criteria by which states gauge whether their own standards are rigorous enough. Just the other day, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s board of education used them to benchmark Virginia’s tougher expectations for students and .

Reading and math were, and remain, at the heart of NAEP, but today it also tests civics, U.S. history, science and other core subjects — exactly as listed in your speech.

But NAEP is not perfect. It needs another careful modernization. It should make far better use of technology, including artificial intelligence. It should be nimbler and more efficient. The procedures by which its contractors are engaged need overhauling. (The Education Department’s whole procurement process needs that, too — faster, more competitive, more efficient, less expensive!)

Yet NAEP also needs to do more. Today, for instance, it gives state leaders their results only in grades 4 and 8, not at the end of high school. It doesn’t test civics and history nearly often enough, and never in 12^th grade, even though most systematic study of those subjects occurs in high school. (It probably tests fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math too often — the result of a different federal law.) 

Doing more shouldn’t cost any more. Within NAEP’s current budget — approaching $200 million, a drop in the department’s murky fiscal ocean — much more data should be gettable by making new contracts tighter and technology smarter, squeezing more analysis from NAEP’s vast trove and having staffers put shoulders to the wheel. (Former IES director Mark Schneider has the .)  But making this happen will take strong executive leadership, an agile, hardworking governing board and your own oversight. You may decide it’s time for another blue-ribbon group to take a close look at NAEP and recommend how to modernize it again without losing its vital ability to monitor changes over time in student achievement.

Yes, this is all sort of wonky. NAEP results get used all the time, but it’s far down in the bureaucracy and doesn’t make much noise. Nobody in Congress (as far as we know) pays it much attention. Yet it remains — we believe — the single most important activity of your department. Which, frankly, is why it needs your watchful attention! 

We wish you well in your new role. Please let us know if we can help in any way.

Sincerely, 

William J. Bennett, U.S. Secretary of Education (1985-88)

Chester E. Finn Jr., Assistant Secretary for Research & Improvement and Counselor to the Secretary (1985-88) 

Many voters cheer these efforts, frustrated with a system they see as prioritizing elite interests over their problems. The IES chaos energized Trump supporters and horrified the education research community. But few addressed the most important question: What now?

Like many government activities, the value of education research isn’t always immediately obvious. But just because something is obscure, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. In fact, a strong case can be made that the nation underinvests in education research. IES’s budget of $793 million is a fraction of the more than $900 billion spent annually by federal, state and local governments on just K-12 public schools. That’s a staggeringly lower percentage for R&D than most industries — certainly less than what Elon Musk’s companies spend. 

Federal investment in education research focuses on closing the gap between the aspirations of public schools and real-world outcomes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chief architect of the first federal modern education research agency, envisioned it as a way to develop “the art and science of education” to achieve true equality of opportunity. An essential mission — but the U.S. is failing to deliver on it.

“Shoddy work on trivial topics,” research warped by political priorities and bloated bureaucracies draining limited resources. That’s not Elon Musk and DOGE talking, that’s Chester E. Finn Jr., a key architect of federal education research-turned-critic pleading for reform in 2000.

Just two weeks ago, the Nation’s Report Card, produced by IES, showed the largest achievement gaps between the lowest- and highest-achieving students ever recorded. A decade of decline, coupled with disastrous pandemic responses, set achievement for struggling students back to 1990s level. International assessments reveal the U.S. as a global outlier, with a growing share of adults assessed at the lowest levels of literacy.

This is not inevitable. For decades, America made steady gains in educational achievement. States are recovering from the pandemic in differentiated ways. Overall, however, achievement stagnated in the years leading up to COVID, and the nation has clearly failed to recover from the pandemic learning loss, despite significant federal spending on schools. This makes government investments in education research instrumental to understanding America’s slow, halting progress toward making good on the promise of public education, and the cliff it’s gone off the past few years. 

The “science of reading” movement illustrates the power of research and the shortcomings of the existing federal approach. Journalist Emily Hanford’s reporting on reading instruction did more to change classroom practices than the entire What Works Clearinghouse — a federally funded, bureaucratic mechanism for reviewing evidence. 

IES’s mission, to “provide national leadership in expanding fundamental knowledge and understanding of education from early childhood through postsecondary study … to provide parents, educators, students, researchers, policymakers and the general public with reliable information about … the condition and progress of education in the United States” remains essential. Yet IES is not meeting these goals.

The answer is not to jettison the federal role in education research. On the contrary, the nation needs more of it, and better. The lack of outrage from people working in schools about the DOGE cuts is a silence worth listening to.

Here are five ideas for a more strategic, agile, relevant and impact-driven IES:

Confront the Political and Structural Barriers to Implementation 

Developing effective strategies is not enough — the real challenge is getting educators to use them at scale in a decentralized system where states, districts and schools operate independently. Testing and innovation must have buy-in from those in the field so they are more strongly linked to adoption.

Political pressures, bureaucratic inertia and rigid regulations often prevent research-backed solutions from taking hold. IES should prioritize research that not only evaluates effectiveness, but also identifies the policy, governance and systemic barriers that block effective implementation. The agency prioritizes rigorous experimental studies, which is good, but other methods are also needed to answer questions about implementation. And this work must be better disseminated and applied, not just passed around among researchers.

Be a More Active Arbiter of ‘What Works’

Every year, school districts spend billions on curriculum, technology and instructional interventions, often with little regard for evidence. IES should evolve beyond the passive and hard-to-interpret What Works Clearinghouse and become an active information and standards-setting body. That could mean:

• Continuing, even expanding, essential data that inform parents and policymakers, like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the , the Department of Education’s primary database on K-12 schools and districts.
  
• Issuing A-F ratings for educational interventions, modeled after the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in health care.
  
• Convening expert panels, like the National Reading Panel, to resolve key education debates and provide clear, evidence-based guidance.
  
• Tracking successes and failures, publishing reports on which states and districts effectively use research-based strategies.

Tackle Hard Questions Without Fear

For too long, education research has avoided politically sensitive but critical questions. IES should lead on issues such as:

• Why is early reading proficiency still tied so strongly to family income?
  
• How does the teacher pay structure discourage ambitious, high-achieving individuals from entering or staying in the profession?
  
• What outdated regulations and funding mechanisms are stifling school innovation?

IES must be willing to confront uncomfortable truths — and ensure its research drives real policy action.

Better Data and Utilization of Existing Field Capacity. 

The Common Core of Data, along with other information IES collects, represents some of the most used evidence in education research. Yet there are also glaring holes in what IES collects and, therefore, what researchers can explore. Very little is known, for instance, systemically about what teacher candidates learn when they are preparing to teach. Nor is there good, comprehensive national information about how much teachers earn or even what compensation is based on. 

IES can collect some data, but it must ask hard questions about whether this or other data collections should be done in house. Over time, IES has held onto functions that nonprofit organizations like RAND and the Advanced Education Research & Development Fund have proven they can do as well, or better. It can take years for IES to publish results, while others can do it in months. A reformed IES should focus on what it does best — funding and evaluating research, operating nimbly and maintaining quality and independence — while supporting capacity elsewhere in the field for things like large-scale data collection and reporting, fast-turnaround field surveys and DARPA-like R&D investments.

The Department of Defense’s DARPA has pioneered breakthrough innovations in the military by funding high-risk, high-reward research with clear objectives and short timelines. IES could replicate this strategy by funding one or more bold new initiatives to conduct ambitious, time-bound research. This would bring together top scientists, technologists and educators for five-year terms to work on pioneering transformative solutions, such as AI-driven personalized learning, early literacy breakthroughs and reimagined teacher preparation. Notably, DARPA is not a new governmental function; it’s a mechanism for using fieldwide capacity in the private and university sectors as a problem-solving framework. 

Launch a National ‘Moonshot’ for Education

Rather than spreading resources across countless disconnected projects, IES should focus on the most urgent educational challenges. A National Education Challenge Panel should be convened every five years to identify critical research priorities tied to a broader federal policy strategy. Immediate areas of focus could include:

• “Eliminate the early literacy gap by 2035.”
  
• “Ensure every eighth grader can master algebra”
  
• “Ensure every high school graduate is truly college- or career-ready by 2030.”
  
• “Revolutionize the teaching profession to attract a cross-section of top college graduates.”

Instead of fragmented efforts, this would focus the entire education research ecosystem on delivering real, transformative change.

Trump identifies as a deal maker. The ideas here could be the beginning of a new deal for education research, producing timely and usable evidence. We recognize that reforming IES in these ways will be controversial, requiring hard decisions about what research should prioritize and how the federal government should support it. But the status quo or abandonment of federal education research would be worse — leaving progress to a fragmented, underfunded patchwork of individual researchers and often ideological interest groups.

Even if you don’t like how DOGE and the Trump administration are approaching their work — and we don’t — it is past time to substantially mend the federal role in education research. Especially now, if you don’t want to see that role end. 

Disclosure: The authors have all received funding from, or worked on projects funded by, IES and have worked or currently work with RAND. Andy Rotherham sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

Almost all schools with fourth and eighth grades were offering some in-person learning as the end of the school year approached, but more than half of students at those levels remained in hybrid or fully remote programs, according to the final round of school reopening data from the Institute of Education Sciences.

The latest update of the 2021 School Survey, released Thursday, shows the rate of Black and Hispanic students attending full, in-person learning continuing to inch upward, but still falling at least 20 percentage points below that of white students. Asian students were the least likely to attend in-person learning, with 55 percent remaining in remote-only classes.

“Reopening schools and welcoming back students was the first step, but the hardest work is still to come,” Institute for Education Sciences Director Mark Schneider said in a statement. “We must do all we can as a nation to ensure that all students, especially the most high-need students who have already borne the brunt of the coronavirus and its effects, recover from any learning losses.”

The Department of Education launched the in March to comply with an President Joe Biden issued on his first full day in office. At the state and national level, the data confirmed that white students were returning to in-person learning at higher rates than Black, Hispanic and Asian students. It also revealed that some students in remote learning were receiving no more than two hours or less of live instruction each day. With many districts continuing to offer remote options this fall, elementary-age students still not eligible for vaccines and rising concerns over whether the Delta variant of COVID-19 could lead to increased transmission rates, a mixture of schooling arrangements will continue this fall.

, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom is requiring districts to offer families with a medically fragile child a remote, independent study option for the 2021-22 school year. And the from the National Parents Union shows that a third of parents plan to hold their children out until they are vaccinated.

“While the positive overall trends continue, and more Black and Hispanic fourth and eighth graders were being offered and enrolled in in-person instruction, disparities remain,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “As a nation, we cannot rest until all students — including students of color and other historically and presently underserved students — have an equal opportunity to receive in-person instruction in school buildings that are fully reopened and safe.”

While Black and Hispanic students were more likely than Asian students to attend in-person learning in the spring, recent surveys, including one from the RAND Corp., show that preference for online learning is higher among Black and Hispanic parents. A University of Southern California survey shows 15 percent of Black parents plan to keep their children in remote learning, and in Los Angeles shows that bullying, racism and low academic standards, in addition to COVID-19, are among the reasons Black parents kept their children home in the spring.

“It’s great that more districts are adding virtual options, but they really need to be of consistently high quality,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. “I’m skeptical that will be the case given the struggles we saw last year. It’s critical that districts up their game in remote learning by pursuing creative partnerships and by providing intensive teacher training.”

The institute will monitor school options and families’ choices with a new survey launching in August. Designed to build on existing data and capture the pandemic’s ongoing impact on students, the School Pulse Panel will track enrollment in 1,200 elementary, middle and high schools and cover issues such as health and safety, special education and mental health.

Anna Saavedra, a behavioral scientist at the University of Southern California, said spending federal relief funds to make improvements to ventilation systems, air-conditioning and bathrooms are one way to make families feel more positive about the return to school this fall. Communicating COVID-19 prevention strategies could be especially important for Asian families, she added.

“Asian-American families were more cautious in their behaviors about COVID-19 than other racial groups,” she said. “Asian-American families also experienced more discrimination. So particularly for this group, and especially with the dominance of the Delta strain, communication about COVID-19 mitigation practices and weekly case rates will be important.

Using the rest of the summer as a way to rebuild connections with parents and students is also important, she said.

“Districts and schools need to learn what local parents want and clearly communicate a whole-child focus and benefits for students and their families,” she said. “Parents will need more communication than they’ve ever received in the past and for districts to act upon their input.”

Other findings from the latest release include:

• The Midwest saw the highest rate of students attending full-time, in-person learning, with 64 percent of fourth-graders and 59 percent of eighth-graders.
• The percentage of students enrolled in full-time, in-person learning increased for white, Black and Hispanic students between April and May, but not for Asian students.
• The survey aimed to capture data from 3,500 schools each at fourth and eighth grade, but participation lagged. The latest results reflect results from 2,100 schools with fourth grades and 2,000 schools with eighth grades.