But while some of the cuts are, in his words, “dumb,” and show a lack of experience among the cost-cutters, Schneider has also pushed against many critics’ assertions that the Trump administration will effectively destroy the agency. In his view, the cuts offer an opportunity “to clean out the attic” of old, dusty policies and revitalize essential research functions. Those include the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which he maintains has lost its way and grown prohibitively expensive while in some cases duplicating the work of independent researchers.

A conservative who has held top roles in both of the last two Republican administrations, as well as the most recent Democratic one, he’s the ultimate education insider — Schneider’s conversations often invoke an alphabet soup of government agencies, contractors and think tanks. Yet he’s unusually candid about his time in government, especially now that he is no longer there.

A political scientist by training, Schneider has spent nearly two decades in education research. He served three years as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics under President George W. Bush, then spent a decade as a vice president at the non-profit American Institutes for Research. He returned to government in 2018, appointed by President Trump to lead the Institute of Education Sciences, and stayed on until 2024 under President Biden.

Through it all, he has remained an independent voice even while in office, telling ����Ӱ�� in 2023, for instance, that the reason Biden hadn’t fired him along with other Trump appointees was that education research wasn’t considered important enough for the president to bother. 

Over the course of six years at IES, he tried — mostly unsuccessfully, he admits — to reform the department into “a modern science and statistics agency.” He’s honest about his limitations, saying he “tried really hard to modernize the place” without much success. While Musk and his cost-cutters last month took a chainsaw to IES, he observes, when he led it, “I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife.”

While many education advocates are decrying Trump’s bid to eliminate the Education Department, Schneider has said carefully breaking it up could actually produce “a more efficient, dynamic and responsive school system — all things the Department of Education has been hard-pressed to do.”

Schneider sat down for a wide-ranging conversation last week with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo. They discussed the difficulties of reforming what he considers a hidebound agency, the opportunities of starting over and what the future might hold for NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. 

Now a non-resident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he is cagey when pressed about returning to IES in a second Trump term. Schneider notes that the deep cuts have left no actual agency to run. “Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit?” But leading a revamped IES, he admits, would present “a wonderful challenge.”

At the end of the day, though, he says it remains an open question whether the next step in the Trump administration’s plans is rebuilding or neglect.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: I wanted to start with something you said about Musk’s crew a couple of weeks ago — namely that given your work to reform IES, you were “a little envious” they could “do it all in one day.” Let’s drill down. Is that what you had in mind when you were there? Or did this go further?

Schneider: [Laughs.] Let me try to figure out the best way of putting this. The issue, of course, is that IES was a 23-year-old institution. A lot of stuff got locked in. None of this is surprising: Institutions get locked down and they keep doing the same thing over and over again. I tried hard to change things. It was almost impossible. I tried to get Congress to create ARPA Ed — [National Center for Advanced Development in Education, an agency to develop and scale innovative, cutting-edge practices and tools]. A lot of people worked really hard, but we were never able to get it through Congress.

Whether Congress will ever do anything is a different question. But the fact of the matter is that even though people were in favor of it and we had a lot of political support, we still couldn’t get it across the finish line. Well, now the National Center for Education Research doesn’t exist anymore. There’s one person left there. So whether or not this is naive, we don’t need NCADE anymore. We should rebuild NCER to look like ARPA Ed. We don’t need any legislation for that, because it’s in the purview of the director to do that. That’s an amazing opportunity. We can just create a modern research funding organization with no need for congressional action.

My colleague Kevin Mahnken recently talked to Doug Harris from Tulane. He said IES is “being knocked over by these cuts.” I think beneath a lot of this is people like Doug worried that this administration is simply anti-science. It sounds like you are saying the opposite. Should this give people like Doug a little hope?

As of right now, we have no indication except every once in a while some words bubble out: “Oh, we are going to rebuild IES. We are looking for a future direction for IES.” But there is no concrete plan. So the proof is going to happen in the next several months. If the department says, “Yes, we are redoing NCER, we are redoing NCES,” which are the two biggest units that are most in need of repair, and they announce plans to rebuild them in a modern way, then we’re fine. But if nothing ever happens and we end up with three people at NCES and one person at NCER, we’ve got a problem.

You have no sense one way or another?

You probably hear the same things I do. I have no concrete information about any plans to rebuild. I hear rumors. But until concrete plans are announced and actions are undertaken, then we should maintain a healthy skepticism. That said, I still believe that if this administration wants to modernize IES, they have an opportunity that no one’s ever had before — since 2002.

Since they created it.

Congress created IES in 2002, and it was a brand new, innovative organization that radically changed the way education research was done. Well, 23 years later, that opportunity repeats itself. So my hope, and maybe this is naive, is that we grab that opportunity. We know a lot more about education research. We know a lot more about modern statistical data collections — and we learned a lot from NCES. For example, the lack of timeliness hurt them endlessly. So now it’s like an open field. Let’s build a better edifice now than what we had a year ago.

Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of this vision. One of the first shocks to the system we got was in February when DOGE canceled all those federal contracts. And one of the hardest hit was AIR, where you spent 10 years. I wonder to what extent your views have been shaped by being an insider there. Is this a sector that needs a shock to the system?

There are at least two parts of that question. So there’s the question of the quality of the work. AIR does good work. I don’t think there’s any question. The big contract houses are capable of doing quite good work. However, people are really pissed off about the overhead rate [also known as indirect costs covering expenses] that these contract houses and universities charge. The overhead rate is just too high. When I was at IES after the pandemic, AIR got rid of their building on Thomas Jefferson St. [in affluent Georgetown] — a huge, expensive building. Many, many people ended up working at home, and the rest went with much less — and much cheaper — office space.

So after AIR shed that big office space, I called up [Contracts and Acquisition Management], the contracts management people in the department, and I said, “You know, the overhead is based on many factors, but office space and parking are major components. They’ve reduced the cost of their offices — they didn’t get rid of them, but they downsized and went to cheaper places. So let’s renegotiate their overhead rate.” [He imitates CAM officers]: “No, no, no, no, no, no.” I couldn’t get CAM to even consider reducing the overhead rate to reflect the lower cost.

Just to be clear: You couldn’t get the department to lower the cost?

The department had to reopen the negotiations. And they would not. I’m not sure what the right word is. It’s laziness, corruption. This was wrong. Why were we paying such high overhead rates when their costs went down? And you know as well as I do that many, many, many organizations got rid of office space and reduced their costs. So why wasn’t CAM renegotiating overhead rates? I never was able to get a good answer. 

But that’s a department problem, not an AIR or Mathematica problem.

Yes and no. Clearly the department had within its authority to reopen those negotiations. But the problem, of course, is that the agencies end up getting captured by the people they’re supposed to regulate, the people they’re supposed to monitor. [Test developer] ETS and NAEP are an even clearer example: How much money went to ETS to do things that they weren’t capable of doing? 

Such as?

Such as building the platform for NAEP. The software. This is not firsthand, so it could be hearsay, but the people from DOGE looked at the platform that ETS had built for NAEP, and they just said, “What is this? This is not the way modern software is built.” And I believe that’s because we used ETS, which is a testing company, not a tech company, to build the platform. And again, that has to do with the overly close relationship between NCES and ETS.

This is not just an Ed and contractor issue. We know this exists in other places besides education: the close relationship between the contractors and the agencies that are supposed to be supervising them. This is a well-known problem. The companies capture the government agency. [Editors Note: Asked to respond to Schneider’s comments, Christine Betaneli, an associate vice president at ETS, released the following statement Tuesday: “ETS delivers nearly 50 million tests every year across the US and around the world on robust technology platforms. We have consistently delivered innovations on NAEP suited to the specific requests of NCES. We’re incredibly proud of the unmatched quality we have provided to the American people in supporting the Nation’s Report Card. We will continue to innovate on behalf of America’s teachers, parents and children who rely on this critical data to improve access to quality education nationwide.”]

How do you prevent that from happening in the next iteration of this department? Is it just by bringing in totally new people? Is it by changing the contours of the contracts? Is it by doing things totally differently?

There are a couple of things. First of all, there’s a serious cultural issue. That’s clear. I will tell you another story, and this will give you some more depth to how bad this can be. When I first showed up at IES, we brought in [consulting firm] McKinsey & Co. to do an analysis of how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. They went around and interviewed people — staffers, program officers — to try to get some idea of what was going on. And remember, this is an outside consulting company we hired. They interviewed one of the program officers who said to this outside consultant, “I’m never giving up this contract. You will have to pry it out of my dead hands.” I mean, that’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s also illegal. This is a long-term project officer who admitted to an outside person that they had been totally captured, totally in bed with the contract shop. That a veteran project officer would say this to an outside consultant says there’s something really, really wrong.

So the culture is a problem. Is the scope of what the department does a problem as well? 

Yeah. 

Is a breakup necessary to change the culture?

Do we need to break up IES and move all these pieces around? If the goal is to shrink the department, or make the department go away, then we have to find homes for these activities. But when I wrote that last summer, I was not envisioning the disappearance of 90% of the workforce.

I believe if we don’t get congressional approval to end the department, it’s going to be around. But I keep thinking about both NCES and NCER, the two largest units, and there’s now an open field. I’ve always had problems with NCES. As a major federal statistical agency, like many other federal statistical agencies, they just kept falling further and further behind. But we can now imagine, we can actually execute, rebuilding NCES as a modern, lean and mean statistical agency.

For example, the state longitudinal data systems. I’ve written about a different vision of how to build that. The [Trial Urban District Assessments, NAEP tests given in 27 urban school systems] are incredibly expensive. Nobody can tell me how much they cost. I’ve asked many, many times how much they are, and the fact of the matter is, we don’t need them anymore, because we have other ways of getting estimates for these large cities. I’m talking about Tom Kane and Sean Reardon [who have developed an detailing achievement nationwide]. They compute the exact same statistics that TUDA does.

So that actually leads me to my next question: What is your vision for something like NAEP? Can a lot of it go away?

For me, the most important thing about NAEP is the state-by-state comparisons. They’re important because governors hold the keys to so much education reform, and they care about the comparisons. When NAEP came out several months ago, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, they all cared about these things. Virginia had a 50-minute release event with the governor, [Virginia Education Secretary] Aimee Guidera and the Superintendent of Schools [Lisa Coons]. That’s three of the heaviest hitters in the world of education, all lined up, talking about the importance of the state-by-state comparisons and what they were doing to address Virginia’s on NAEP. 

That alone is an amazing demonstration of the power of the state-by-state comparisons. Do we need a $185 million-a-year NAEP to generate the trend line and the state-by-state comparisons? 

I’ll give you another example: There are at least three different sub-domains in NAEP math. I’ve never seen anybody talk about those sub-scores. How much does that cost? Why do we keep doing it? We just need to bring some sanity to what we’ve built over 50 years that have grown up over time, the cost of those things, the backwardness of many of those things, and say, “Hey, we don’t have to keep doing this.” And part of the reason we don’t have to keep doing this — I mean, it’s a sad thing to say — is because the people in NCES who were committed to this are gone. 

I don’t want to leave that point without addressing institutional memory and knowledge. A lot of the people who are gone know how these things work. Getting rid of those people might have changed the culture, but it also might have hollowed out the agency’s ability to get the next NAEP report out. Does that keep you up at night? 

Clearly, that’s the horns of a dilemma. But where is the time, where’s the energy, where are the people to rethink this stuff? Part of the problem was that there was not sufficient rethinking. The machine worked. It got out on time. Many problems were solved by just raising more money. I attended NAGB [National Assessment Governing Board] meetings for 10 years. Every time there was a budget presentation, inevitably, the budget was in the red. And so then we have to cut this, and we have to cut that. And it was never like, “What is it that we need to preserve, instead of going to Congress and asking for another $30 million and getting $10 million?” That wasn’t the thought process.

So I went to OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and asked them to take the appropriation that Congress gave for NAEP and put 10% aside in a separate fund for R&D. I asked Congress to do this, and then OMB, because there was no commitment by the leadership of NCES and NAEP to spend that kind of money on R&D. Instead, it was always, “We need this money for the operations. We need money to do this other task.” As a result, NAEP lost its leading edge. The demands of running the operation are real. But if you never stop to think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to end up behind.

But to many, the way these agencies were trimmed doesn’t seem any smarter. There was a lot of cutting with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel. My sense is that’s going to require a great deal of work just to bring back basic functions. Am I right?

The years that I was at IES, I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife. There are so many quotes about this: “Breaking things is easy, rebuilding things is hard.” From Hamilton: “Winning is easy, governing is hard.” All of that is true. And it’s just so much easier to just say, “No, no, no, no, no,” than to start rebuilding. Mancur Olson, a brilliant economist, wrote a book called . He had his finger right on the pulse. Over time, what happens is that you start accumulating all these lobbyists and all these interest groups and all this stasis, and it just builds up and builds up and nothing can get done, because you end up with this incredible superstructure of groups and people who are totally vested in the status quo. And he says, every once in a while, you just need to just blow the shit up and rebuild.

There’s a lot of concern about the rebuilding. How do you calm people’s fears that there is no rebuilding coming?

Look, there’s nothing we can do right now except wait and lobby Congress and the department that the rebuild is important. And I hope they know that the rebuild is important. Again, you can just give things away: Give NCES to BLS [the Bureau of Labor and Statistics] etc., but some of that stuff is going to require congressional action. Good luck on that. In some ways, again, we have an open field. Let’s take the opportunity to build that back in a much more modern, efficient way.

It seems like a lot of people, especially on the right, are talking in terms of the department reaching its sell-by date. But if you can change the culture and remove the barnacles, or whatever you want to call them, what’s the point of breaking it up?

As they say, that’s above my pay grade. [Laughs.] I’m writing a whole series of papers about what can be done and I think they’re all reasonable and in the realm of the possible. I have not had any contact with anybody in the department about any of my visions or plans. But there are ways to rebuild this so it looks like a modern science and statistics agency.

Would you like to lead it at some point?

If there’s anything there. [Laughs.] There’s nothing there. What do we have, 20 people left in that whole organization? NAGB is moving into [the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building, the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.] because it’s pretty much empty. And I assume IES will also end up moving into LBJ, but the fact of the matter is all of these places are ghost towns now.

Before the pandemic, we were trying to argue, incredibly, about creating 10 more desks for the growth of IES. And then, of course, after the pandemic, there was nobody left. Nobody came back to the office. The place was pretty much empty already. And then the executive order had everybody coming back to the office — and then everybody got fired. I don’t know what happened in between “You must be back in the office five days a week,” and “By the way, you’re fired.” I don’t know what it was like. I know from friends it was not a fun place to be.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly here, it sounds like you’d like to lead IES, but you’d like someone to rebuild it first.

First of all, I’m not answering that question. Many people have asked me if I would go back. But I have a lovely life. I live an eight-minute walk from AEI. AEI is a very generous organization. They’ve never said no to any reasonable request I’ve had, so it’s extremely pleasant, extremely easy. But I spent six years at IES. I tried really hard to modernize the place. For someone who wants to create the next version of IES, there are incredible challenges, but the rewards of doing it would be amazing. But they’ve already eviscerated the unit. Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit? But if there is a taste to rebuild IES to look like a modern organization, that’s a wonderful challenge. 

Could what you’re describing just as easily be done privately?

A lot of people are talking about that: How can philanthropy stand up and take over the role that IES used to have? Even the biggest foundations don’t have the kind of money IES had. IES spent over $100 million a year supporting education research, just from NCER. There’s no foundation that has that kind of money, and I’m not even sure if there’s a coalition of foundations that could come up with anywhere near that kind of money for research.

So there’s an indispensable role for research funded by IES or the Department of Education or some part of the federal government. But the return on that investment was not sufficient. I don’t know if part of the suspicion of IES was just a gut-level reaction to “Too big, too big, too big,” and how much of it was, “Hey, we have spent all these billions of dollars over the last 20 years and what have we got to show? We have declining NAEP scores. We don’t have any evidence of increasing achievement, etc, etc.” I’m not sure if the antagonism towards education research was because it wasn’t working or because it’s just that we were anti-science. I truly don’t know.

Years ago, we looked at how many math interventions have any evidence of success. It turned out to be about 15%. This was a very depressing number, until you start looking around at what the success rate is in any science: 10% of clinical trials work, 90% fail. And then of course, we’re learning that even among the 10% that work, there’s an incredible amount of dishonesty, lying, cheating. The “replication crisis” — we’ve glommed onto that term — says there’s a lot of stuff going on in the sciences that are not kosher. So at one level, the antipathy towards the Department of Education is, “This is not a function that the federal government should be involved in. This is all state and local.” O.K., I got that, and I believe a lot of that is true. But even in the most extreme form of federalism, there is a role for government support of research. There is a government role for statistics. And the question then is: How do we focus that to help states and local governments, parents, teachers, students achieve more? A lot of what happened was that that tight focal point just disappeared.  

If I’m translating what you’re saying correctly, you don’t know how we got to this point in terms of the mechanisms of the cuts, and you don’t know what people were thinking. But in a way, you’re saying it’s not really important, because we needed to get this done.

We needed to get this done. A lot of what was done was incredibly important and was needed. There’s no question about it. But we’re going to come back to the same theme over and over again: For six years I had a butter knife, and then these guys show up in a day with a chainsaw and they cleared out all the detritus and all the underbrush. But what do we do now? That’s what matters.

In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF’s program.

But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1.

Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute’s entire research portfolio, according to several sources. 

Last week, the NSF through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes by the administration.

The moves — as well as a broader of all federal aid, which a judge has temporarily reversed — have spread uncertainty, fear and anger through the education research community. 

“It is incredibly exhausting,” said the research director of a national nonprofit with several active NSF grants and contracts. She asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. “It’s definitely absorbing all of our time right now.” 

Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding.

While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn’t comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health.

“It’s hard to believe this administration is serious about stopping the alarming decline of U.S. student achievement and competitiveness when it puts the kibosh on federally funded research and access to data,” said Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University. “How will policy makers and educators know the bright spots to replicate and what practices are harmful? How will parents make informed choices? How will teachers know the best ways to teach math and prepare students for the jobs of the future?”

CRPE currently receives no federal funding, she said, so the recent moves won’t affect it immediately. But its ongoing work tracking pandemic recovery, studying the impact of social media, AI and school choice rely on “a broad national infrastructure of data, subject experts, and rigorous field studies,” Lake said. “The broad-based destruction of this infrastructure will affect us all and will cripple our efforts to make American students competitive in the world economy.”

Ulrich Boser, CEO of , a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works in education research, likened the recent moves to remodeling a house to make it more efficient. “Would you just cancel all of your contracts with gas, water, electricity, and then just redo them? It’s not a logical way of doing things. It’s just haphazard.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The Learning Agency, which has contracts to, among other things, provide a that answers questions about IES’s What Works Clearinghouse, this week warning that GOP-backed plans to shut down the Education Department could mean the loss or delay of more than $70 billion in funding for students. 

Boser recalled that the recent debacle with college aid took place simply because the Education Department tried to . “It caused massive delays, most harmful to the kids we care about most.” Now take that dynamic, he said, and imagine what gutting an entire Cabinet-level agency could do. 

The recent NSF moves to review grant language are already having an effect: An academic dean at a leading graduate school of education said researchers at the institution are now reframing new funding proposals “in ways that allow them to ask the questions that they want” without being scrutinized — or eliminated altogether — “based on a ‘Ctrl-F review’ process.” Ctrl-F is a keyboard combination used to quickly search a document for keywords.

“I don’t think there’s an upside to the chaos and uncertainty that is being experienced in real time,” the dean said.

Likewise, the director of a research center that has long focused on K-12 education reform said the new administration has brought turmoil to a community that typically performs “non-ideological, empirical” research on issues like literacy and math.

 “I feel like every day there’s new confusion,” he said, adding that restrictions on DEI could also chill a basic function of education research: studying the results of interventions on diverse student populations — students of different races, ethnic backgrounds, economic levels and geographic locations.

“What ‘DEI’ means is really very ambiguous,” he said. “So if you are studying something and you look at differential outcomes between groups, is that DEI? I don’t know.” 

A ‘Man-Made Disaster’

The federal government funds billions of dollars in research each year for K-12 and higher education, but rarely has it scrutinized practitioners to this extent, said the leader of a nonprofit that advocates for better education research. 

She described conversations with scholars who are operating via grants through NSF, IES and elsewhere who “just have no idea what’s going on — they can’t get through to program officers. Sometimes program officers have been put on administrative leave. It’s just a huge amount of chaos, and overall [it] just creates this chilling effect” for both current grantees and future ones.

“This is a man-made disaster,” she said.

Mike England, an NSF spokesman, said the agency “is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.” He referred a journalist to an outlining recent executive orders “and their impact on the U.S. National Science Foundation community.”

An Education Department official on Tuesday said any IES contracts required by law will be re-issued for new competition, but Mark Schneider, who served as the agency’s director in Trump’s first term, said in an interview that the current chaos represents an opportunity to “make something good” in the research realm.

“What we should really do is say, ‘We’ve fallen into a rut for decades in the way we go about doing business,’” he said. “‘We are not focused on the highest reward. We’re not focused on mission-critical work.’ ” 

Now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Schneider has already suggested breaking the Education Department up and distributing its work to other agencies. He said the new administration has the opportunity to refocus to provide “data that the nation needs.”

Schneider noted that the National Center for Education Research last year handed out 42 research grants worth well over $100 million. “If we look at those grants, how many of those are really mission-critical?” He predicted that few focus on improving literacy instruction, which recent NAEP results suggest is in crisis.

The department did not release a list of zeroed-out programs, but a document online indicates that they include research covering a wide range of topics including literacy but also math, science, mental health, attendance, English acquisition and others. Also on the chopping block: contracts for The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (), a test given to students every four years in 64 countries and a key indicator of U.S. competitiveness.

‘I just don’t want more asterisk years’

The long-term impact of research pauses could be devastating, said the senior advisor to a research advocacy group — comparable to the interruption of the COVID epidemic, which shut many researchers out of schools for months, diluting the effectiveness of their research and, in some cases, requiring them to insert asterisks for the years when no data was available.

“I just don’t want more asterisk years,” she said. 

Several researchers said an even bigger fear is the prospect of key education, labor and other data sets such as NAEP being made unavailable. While NAEP data collection was unaffected by the recent moves, contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled, to be offered to new bidders. So far, U.S. Education Department data haven’t been affected, but public health data — including guidance on contraception, a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people; and lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary students — have from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website due to President Trump’s order to strip “gender ideology” from websites and contracts.

Amy O’Hara, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School for Public Policy, cautioned that removing data from public websites would “have a chilling effect on what can be done, what can be measured, what services we deliver to our communities.”

Even if some research funds are restored and researchers can go back to work, O’Hara said, she worries about the uncertainty created at the collegiate graduate school level, as well as for researchers who are early in their careers. “If their funding is disrupted and their access to data is disrupted, they have an incentive to walk away,” she said. “And if they walk away and find other work to do, what is going to be compelling to bring them back?”

CRPE’s Lake put it more bluntly: “I’m a very pragmatic researcher and I believe the feds could do much better in how they fund and support research. But a wholesale end to federal investment in education research feels like a cop-out. The hard but necessary work is making smarter investments.”

The Institute of Education Sciences turns 21 this year. After five years at its helm, Director Mark Schneider is hoping to shepherd its transition to maturity.

When he was appointed by President Trump in 2017, Schneider took over an agency designed to reveal the truth of how schooling is delivered in the United States. IES houses four research centers that measure the effects of educational interventions from preschool to university, and through the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the agency’s most recognizable research product, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — it delivers regular updates on the state of student achievement.

But Schneider sees a new role for federal research endeavors. Through the use of public competitions and artificial intelligence, the director wants IES to help incubate breakthrough technologies and treatments that can help student performance take a giant leap forward in the coming years. Rapid-cycle experimentation and replication, he hopes, will help reverse more than a decade of stagnation in K–12 performance.

Late in his six-year term, Schneider is candid about his status as one of the few holdovers from the previous administration still serving in government. In part, he quips, that’s because education research isn’t considered important enough for a Trump appointee to be fired. But he’s also labored to win the trust of Congress and cultivate bipartisan support for a vision of educational improvement powered by data.

Now he believes that vision could soon be realized. In December, Congress approved a substantial increase in IES’s budget to potentially fund a fifth national center that some have dubbed a “DARPA” for education research (based on the Pentagon’s ). Further legislation is needed to authorize a branch for advanced development in education sciences, but potential research strands are already being theorized.

Schneider — a political scientist who left academia for leadership and research roles at the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute — has a commanding perspective on the federal education bureaucracy, serving as the head of the National Center for Education Statistics in the 2000s. His sometimes tart observations about Washington’s research efforts, and the future of IES, can be found on his .

In a wide-ranging conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Schneider spoke with surprising openness about the Department of Education (which “operates like a bank” in its grantmaking capacity), the “horrifying” reality of university master’s programs (“It’s a money machine, and so you create more of them”), and why he believes some concerns about data privacy are overblown (“If I were really worried about this, I wouldn’t wear an Apple watch.”) 

Above all, he said, the task ahead is to develop a research base that can yield transformative educational tools on the order of COVID vaccines and ChatGPT.

“The goal, using this foundation, is to look at things that pop out, that would not exist otherwise,” Schneider said. “If we can do this with vaccines, if we can use it with chatbots, then what’s our foundation?”

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Tell me a little about what you’re anticipating this year in terms of legislation to establish a DARPA-type program for education.

Mark Schneider: There are two parts of the . The first is to set up the National Center for Advanced Development in Education, NCADE, and the other is for major reinvestment in . Most people focus on the first part, but the second is also really important because we spent a billion dollars building those data systems over the last 18 years. The whole thing is a great system, but it needs to be rebuilt.

What needs to be modified in those systems?

It’s old technology. I think the first round of money for them went out the door in 2006. [Gestures at iPhone sitting on the table] Can you imagine having a technology system that was built in 2006? So they need to be modernized, but the more important thing is that we now have a much more expansive vision of what they can do after almost 20 years of work. 

The example I point to is absenteeism. States have really good records on attendance because money flows based on average daily attendance, and they have to take counts. They know who are chronic absentees, but they don’t know why. It could be food insecurity, health, migration status, could be a dozen things or more. But if we use these longitudinal data systems as a backbone and then plug in information from criminal justice, health, Social Security, we would have a much better sense of what’s going on with any student in a given school. The strength of Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems [SLDS] has always been tracking students over time.

The biggest problem, of course, is that as you merge more data, the issues of privacy become more intense because it’s easier and easier to identify people when there’s more information. We’re nowhere near good enough at privacy protection, but we’re getting way better, and there are so many more ways of protecting privacy than there were 20 years ago.

Given the lengthy timetables of federal projects like the SLDS, do you ever feel like you’re painting the Golden Gate Bridge, and now that you’ve finally established these tools, it’s already time to overhaul them?

Well, we spent a $1 billion building this, and right now, we’re spending about $35 million per year on grants to states to do things with it. What percentage of $1 billion is going back into maintenance and expansions? It’s pocket change. So you always have to remember that this is a state-owned system, designed to help them do their work. And to take an example, Tennessee is surrounded by seven other states, and they end up doing their own collaborations and data exchanges.

Is the inherent federalism of that approach, especially layered over the archaic technology, difficult to manage? How did it play out during the pandemic, for instance, when real-time data was so hard to generate?

The trickiness had nothing to do with SLDS, though. It had to do with the world we woke up to in March 2020.

For me, SLDS is like an exemplar of a federal system where the states assume almost all responsibility. But again, we have more capacity compared with most states. There are states like Massachusetts that are doing an unbelievably good job, and other states are not. Our role there is providing the resources to enable states to a) experiment like Massachusetts and b) bring states that have little capacity up to speed. 

Probably the most alarming federal data coming out of the COVID era has been the release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed huge drops in achievement in reading and especially math. Did those results match what you were expecting?

By the time NAEP landed, we had NWEA results and others that suggested it was going to be a debacle. We knew the scores were going to go down by a bunch. But NAEP is NAEP — it’s national, it’s rock-solid in terms of its methodologies and its sample. So it’s indisputable that this was an awful situation, right?

To connect the dots with SLDS: One of the problems with the system is that it was conceived as a data warehouse strategy. And I tried and tried, but nobody caught that this was a stupid way of phrasing its purpose. I said, “We don’t need a data warehouse. What goes into a warehouse, a forklift?” We want an Amazon model where we also have retail stores, and you can go in and find stuff. 

I understand that states are very hesitant to let random academics and researchers have access to very private data. But as we rebuild the SLDS, we need to make sure that there are use requirements as part of the deal — always, always consistent with privacy protections, but we have to use these more. It’s a little tricky because some states have a history of opening up the doors and letting in researchers, and others just don’t. In the state of Texas, it can depend on who the attorney general is. 

It can be striking come out of, for instance, Wake County, North Carolina.

It’s because they’ve opened the data to more people. And that’s part of the deal, but Wake County is not the United States. We need more. 

My days of active research are behind me, but the possibilities built into these data are incredible. I thought I was going to be able to do a deal with Utah, where there’s an organization doing early childhood interventions; all the evidence is that they’re good, but we need to see if “good” sticks. Well, SLDS is perfectly designed to figure out if interventions stick. I thought this work in Utah would allow us to identify students in their early childhood interventions, work with the state to track those students over time, and find out if those very positive pre-K results — it’s a very inexpensive intervention with great results in the early years — stick. We have the means to do it. We just need to do it.

It seems like efforts like that would be complicated by the growing political salience of data security.

It’s everywhere, and for good reason. I’m not really a privacy hawk, but all the privacy protections need to consider benefits versus costs. In too many places, we’ve concentrated on the risk without considering the benefit. But that’s only half the equation. We have to be able to say, “This risk can be mitigated, and there could be huge benefits to come out of this.” 

This is what political systems do all the time — they balance risks against rewards. But we have to do it in a much more sophisticated way.

Why are you a privacy dove? There is something a little funny about how guarded people are about government intrusions when they so freely hand over their data to Amazon or whomever.

I have an Amazon Echo in every room in my house, and I know that they’re listening! Everyone has a story where they’re talking about something, and then they go on their Amazon account and see an advertisement related to the product they were talking about. It’s really scary, but I’ve only turned off the microphone on one of my devices because of the convenience of being able to say, “Alexa, turn on my lights, play the BBC.” For me, those benefits are worth getting a bunch of stupid advertisements.

If I were really worried about this, I wouldn’t wear an Apple watch or own an Apple phone. We all should be concerned about privacy, and especially when it comes to children. Obviously, the standards have to be high. But again, there are benefits to using a more comprehensive database, which is my vision of what SLDS would be. The technology issues are real, and it’s always a war of whether people hack it and we need to develop better mechanisms for protection. 

What are you trying to achieve, organizationally, with the proposed addition of an advanced research center?

IES is only 20 years old. My predecessor, , was the founding director, and he was brilliant. He set out to modernize the research and development infrastructure, and the coin of the realm. I was the NCES commissioner for three years, and I argued with him all the time about his model of RCTs, which are the gold standard. The way he saw it was — and he knew what he was doing, he’s really smart — “I can’t compromise this at the beginning. If I say, ‘Maybe we do this, maybe we do that,’ then nobody goes in the direction I want, and they just wait me out.”

The problem with the model was that RCTs, as they were originally introduced, were about average effects across populations. But to use a specific example, we’ve now moved into individualized medicine — it’s about what works for you, and under what conditions. So the mantra of IES now is, “What works for whom, and under what conditions?” Of course, we still have studies that look at main effects, but our work is all about identifying what works for individuals or groups of students. This requires a lot of changes about the way we think and how we do business.

My joke is that almost every science has . We don’t have a replication crisis, because we don’t replicate anything. Even if it works, we don’t replicate it! So a few years ago, we launched a replication RFA [request for applications]. IES was moving in that direction anyway, but we needed a much more systematic attention to replication. My mistake was we structured the replication this way: “Something worked in New York City, so give me another $5 million, and I’ll try it in Philadelphia.” Or, “It worked for some African American kids, let’s try it with Hispanic kids.” They were all big experiments, five years long. You can’t make progress that way.

Now we’re , which will be announced before the summer. I’m not sure how generalizable this will be, but the prize is based on using digital learning platforms to run experiments. The critical part is that you have to have 100,000 users on your platform to qualify. You run those experiments, you fail fast — that’s an incredibly important principle, fail fast — and the few things that work, you have to do multiple replications. The original plan was: experiment, replication, then another round of replications. At the end of which, the goal is to say, “Here’s an intervention that worked for these students, but not for these students.” Then you take what worked for those students and push it further. [On May 9, of the $1 million Digital Learning Challenge prize.]

It’s a systematic approach to rapid replication. Not everything in education research can be done in short order. Some things take a long time. But there are many, many things that last a semester or a school year, and at the end of that time, we have . This prize approach is just a different process for how we replicate. 

ChatGPT just opened up a whole world of discussion about the use of AI. But what happened with ChatGPT is like what we’re trying to do. The world has been doing AI for literally decades, but the last 10 years have seen increased computing power and more complexity in the models, and the foundational models have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. We built an incredible foundation: machine learning, data science, AI. And all of a sudden, boom! ChatGPT is the first thing that caught the public’s attention, but it was built on this amazing foundation. Nobody knows what the next thing is that will break through, but they’re all being built on decades’ worth of work that established this foundation. It’s the same thing — the COVID vaccine could not have happened without that foundation.

What I’m trying to do is use IES resources to build this kind of foundation, which includes the learning platforms, rapid-cycle experimentation and replication, transformative research money. And the goal, using this foundation, is to look at things that pop out, that would not exist otherwise. That’s the goal: If we can do this with vaccines, if we can use it with chatbots, then what’s our foundation? What I hope is that, when we get NCADE going, we move this activity there and let it consolidate and interact. Then we start doing new, innovative research based on that foundation.

What are the kinds of research projects and outcomes that perhaps seem fantastical now, but could be realized in the way that MRNA vaccines have been?

The telos, the North Star, is individualized education. The first thing that is popping from this work is that IES is launching with the National Science Foundation, and it’s designed for students’ with speech pathologies. There in schools, so the demand for them is really high. We also do something incredibly stupid by burdening them with unbelievable paperwork.

This AI institute is funded by $20 million, split between IES and the NSF, and it has several prongs to it. The first is to develop an AI-assisted universal screener, because it takes time to diagnose exactly what students’ speech pathologies are — whether it has to do with sentence structure, vocabulary, pronunciation. Medicine has been doing this forever, by the way. The second prong is to use an AI toolbox to help design, update, and monitor the treatment plan. In other words, we’ve got a labor shortage, we know we need assessment and a treatment plan, and AI can do this. Or, AI should be able to do this, whether or not we can pull it off with this group. It’s a risk, like everything we do is a risk. But to me, this is a breakthrough.

I’m very optimistic that they’re going to pull it off, in part because of the third prong, which relates to the paperwork. It’s a lot of work, multiple forms, and it’s routine. Well, guess what can now type up routine paragraphs?

It seems like school districts, let alone Congress, could be really hesitant about deploying AI to write up after-incident reports, or what have you. Some regulatory structure is going to have to be created to govern the use of this technology.

I’m sure, like me, you’ve been monitoring the reaction to ChatGPT. There’s an extreme reaction, “Ban it completely.” Another extreme would be, “This is amazing, go for it!” And then there’s the right reaction: This is a tool that’s never going back in the box. So how do we use it appropriately? How do we use it in classrooms, and to free teachers from drudgery?

At least for the foreseeable future, humans will have a role because ChatGPT is often wrong. And the biggest problem is that we sometimes don’t know when it’s wrong. It’ll get better over time, I don’t think there’s a question about that, but it needs human intervention. Humans have to know that it’s not infallible, and they have to have the intelligence to know how to read ChatGPT and say, “That doesn’t work.”

Of course, it writes very boring prose.

But so do students.

And so do reporters.

Touché. You mentioned that you ran NCES over a decade ago. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed a change in Washington’s ambitions around using federal data to spur school improvement, especially now that the peak reform era is long gone.

It’s true that the level of skepticism is much greater. But the technology has also gotten way, way better. We hired the National Academies [of Science, Engineering, and Medicine] to do three reports for us to coincide with our 20th anniversary. was the most interesting one. It talks about new and somewhat less intrusive measures.

NCES is old. There are lots of arguments about when it started, but the modern NCES was actually a reaction to [sociologist and researcher] , who was intimately involved in the early design of longitudinal studies. They’ve gotten more complicated — the original was “” — and they’re all based on survey data, just going out and talking to people. Well, you know the fate of surveys: Response rates are falling and falling, and it’s harder to get people to talk. 

That’s how bad it’s gotten?

We were forced — “forced” makes it sound like it was a bad idea; and it did turn out to be a bad idea — to ask schools that were participating for a lot of information about IEPs [individualized education programs] and students with special needs. This gets back to that cost/benefit calculation because they would not share the classification of students with special needs, and they just refused to participate. So we ended up canceling that data collection. That was a leading indicator of the problem.

Increasingly, the question is what we can do to get the kind of data that these longitudinal studies generated without having to interview 15,000 or 18,000 kids. It requires a modification in the way you think, and it requires an expansive view of where the data lie. How much of the data that we’re asking students and parents and teachers about resides in state longitudinal data systems, for example? Could we drive the need for human interviewing to 5 percent or 10 percent of what we do now? It actually calls for a different thought process than, “Well, we always do ‘High School and Beyond’ this way!” But federal bureaucracies aren’t known for their innovative thinking, quite frankly. 

This adaptation might also mean that some of the unique things we get from surveys are going to have to go because no one will give them to you.

What, if anything, is the effect of changes in government on a massive organization like IES? You were appointed under President Trump, so the Department of Education has already undergone a really significant change, and now Congress has changed hands as well.

We’re not massive. We’re pretty small, actually.

We’re a science agency, and we were created when the Education Sciences Reform Act was authorized in 2002. I think the vision was that IES would grow not to the size of the  National Institutes for Health or the National Science Foundation, but on a trajectory that would put it into that kind of group. If you look at the original legislation, it’s still there. We have a board that is almost populated now, and the ex officio members include the director of the Census, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and somebody from NIH. You don’t create a board with those kinds of people on it unless you expect it to be a big, major player.

It never got there. The budget is up to $808 million, in part because we got a pretty big chunk of money in the omnibus package. But $30 million of that was for DARPA-Ed, which we don’t have yet. Ten million dollars of that is for the . So Congress is interested in modernization, and we have to prove that this investment is worthwhile. 

What about the difference at the top? Are there notably different attitudes between Secretary DeVos and Secretary Cardona with respect to IES’s mission?

I’ve gotten enormous support from the department. We would not have gotten the money for NCADE, we would not have gotten the money for School Pulse without that support. DeVos’s goal was to make the Education Department go away, so this administration is obviously much more expansive. They’ve been careful in their support of things, but again, NCADE wouldn’t have gotten this far without the full-throated backing of the department, and of the Office of Management and Budget and the White House.

I’m reminded of the parties’ divergent positions on the federal government’s role in education, and how close the Department of Education came to never being authorized.

Jimmy Carter is a really good ex-president and a good human being, but was not a very effective president. As you know, the establishment of the department was in response to support that he got from teachers’ unions. So there is a philosophical debate about the role of the federal government in education, and it’s not a slam dunk. There are things that are worth talking about. A huge chunk of the money that the department manages is Title IV, so it operates like a bank, and it’s by far the smallest cabinet department in terms of workforce.

The other thing I’m not sure people fully understand is that the department isn’t just a grant-making operation, it’s also a contract shop. I taught public policy for decades at Stony Brook University, and when I decided that I was never going back, they asked me to give a talk to my former colleagues — almost all of whom I’d hired — and graduate students. My opening remark set everyone back on their heels because I said, “I taught here for 20 years, and every one of my students should sue me for malpractice.” Nothing I taught had anything to do with the way the sausage is really made. 

You hear this all the time, and academics pooh-pooh it. But I’ve been on both sides of it, and it’s really true: Academic research and the sausage factory are the same. In 20 years of teaching public policy, I never once mentioned contractors. And contractors run the whole show. It’s the way we do business, and it’s even more interesting than just: “I run this agency, but here’s what you, the contractor, should do.” All too often, it’s the contractors doing the actual thinking.

There’s been a long argument over the 20 years, on and off, that I’ve been associated with this stuff. We should, and must, contract out the work and the implementation, but we should not be contracting out the thinking. And that’s easy to articulate, but what’s the dividing line? When are we surrendering our intellectual capital — our control of the ship, if you will — to contractors who now design the ship, build the ship and steer the ship? 

Are there concrete examples from education research where you can point to projects that have gone off-course?

NAEP is $185 million per year, and it gets renewed every five years. Do you know how long Educational Testing Services has had the contract? Forty years. There are reasons why they get this contract — they’re good! But this is decades of either minimal or zero competition. And as the test has gotten bigger and more complicated, even putting together a bid to compete costs millions of dollars. People ask, “Why would we spend millions of dollars to compete with ETS when they’ve had the contract for 40 years and we see no indication that it will ever be different?”

To me, this is a serious issue.

Given that NAEP is the foremost product of NCES, there’s probably very little scope for reimagining it beyond, say, changing the testing modality from pen-and-paper to computers.

I agree on that, it’s largely the same technology that ETS invented 40 years ago. But the world has changed. It’s just gotten more and more expensive, but the amount of reimagining NAEP and its structure — whether or not we can do this cheaper and faster — is just lagging. It’s really frustrating. 

Even before COVID, there was a lot of pondering about the future of NAEP and the costs of administering it. The Long-Term Trends test was postponed between 2012 and 2020, right?

Yeah, but that’s an interesting case. The modern version of NAEP — which measures fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math — was authorized in 2002, I believe. It goes back to the ’70s, really, but we’ve been doing this version of it for 20 years. People love the Long-Term Trends test, but do we really need it when we’ve had 20 years of the main NAEP?

You’ve spent a lot of your career studying the value of higher education. Do you think we’re staring at a financial or demographic apocalypse for colleges and universities?

“Apocalypse” is way too strong a word. There are demographic trends such that the pool of students is shrinking, and there’s also incredible regional variation. The New England and mid-Atlantic states are experiencing much sharper declines than the South and the West. And of course, universities are not mobile; if you invest all this infrastructure in frigid Massachusetts or northern New York, and all the students move, you have to ask, “What do I do with all this infrastructure now?”

As to the value of a four-year degree, you and I operate in a sphere where everybody is highly literate. I read all the time, and I’m not talking about technical stuff. I read novels all the time because it’s an opportunity to live in a different world. But what’s the definition of literacy in the world we now live in, and what skills do we truly need? It’s still only a minority of people who go to four-year programs, but do we need to send even that many students to get four-year degrees? Most of them want jobs and family-sustaining wages, and do we need four-year degrees for that? The answer is obviously not, if you look at what’s happening in Maryland and Pennsylvania [where governors have recently removed degree requirements from thousands of state jobs]. 

The fact of the matter is, this is happening. To the extent that it’s happening, which I believe is necessary and important, the incentives for getting a bachelor’s degree start to decline. It becomes more of an individual question: “I’m going to spend five or six years at a four-year institution. It’s pretty much a cookie cutter, stamp-stamp-stamp experience, and I get a bachelor’s degree. Then, at a job interview, they ask what my skills are, and I can’t answer. Well, I can use ChatGPT!”

That’s quite grim. But is there a way to offer prospective students better information about the value they’re actually getting from college?

When I was at the American Institutes for Research, I ran something called , which was the first systematic attempt to crack all the work that had been done at the university level about what happens to students when they graduate. In the end, it’s the variation in programs that really matters — as soon as we started unpacking student outcomes, program by program, the programs that were technical were the winners. And the numbers were amazing. The first results we published came from and , and I swear to God, when I saw the results, I didn’t believe them. I thought we had an error in the data because associate’s degree holders were out-earning bachelor’s degree holders. 

We repeated this over and over and over again, in maybe 10 different states. It was always technical degrees coming out of community colleges that had the best earnings. In the state of Florida, I think the best postsecondary certificate was “Elevator Mechanic/Constructor.” There aren’t a lot of them, but the starting wage was $100,000! Then you start looking at sociology, English, psychology, and [gestures downward with his hand, makes crashing sound].

It turned out to be that these degree programs were increasingly becoming surrogates for skills. The worst outcome for all students was for those who went into liberal arts and general studies at community colleges. They’re doing that because they want to transfer to a four-year school, but only 20 percent of them actually transfer. They come out with a general education and no skills, and the labor market outcomes were a disaster. 

I was working with , which has employment records for millions of people and scrapes job advertisements, to start looking for what skills were in high demand. The beauty of it was that it was such good data, and even better, it was regional. Most people don’t move that often, so if I’m living and going to school in western Tennessee, it doesn’t help me at all to know what somebody’s hiring for in Miami. It basically asked, “How much money is each skill worth?” Things have probably changed since that time, but one of the highest-demand skills in almost every market was [the customer relationship manager software] , which was worth between $10,000 and $20,000. 

The other thing we did, which made me really popular, was look at the same outcomes for master’s programs. Colleges just create these programs, and the money goes to support everything that academics love: travel, course buyouts, graduate students. But the numbers are horrifying for most master’s programs. You create a master’s program, and they tend to be relatively cheap — and you don’t give TAs to master’s students, so it’s all cash. It’s a money machine, and so you create more of them. 

This brings me back to my previous question. If young people start seeing the value proposition of a four-year degree differently, and American fertility rates are producing fewer young people to begin with, it seems like the music eventually has to stop for the higher education sector. And if that happens, employers are going to have to rely on something besides the apparent prestige of a B.A. to distinguish between job candidates, right?

Both my daughters think I’ve become increasingly conservative because of what goes on in post-secondary education. Look at university endowments: All the money is hidden, but the subsidy we give to well-off students is humungous because their endowments are tax-free. Princeton has a huge endowment and a small student population; Harvard has a bigger endowment, but also a larger enrollment. When I was at the American Institutes for Research, we calculated the subsidy at Princeton per undergraduate student, and the subsidy was something in the vicinity of $100,000 per year. All hidden, nobody talks about it. Meanwhile the total subsidy for Montclair State University, which is down the road, was $12,000; the local community college was $3,000. This includes both state and federal money. What kind of system is this?

I testified at the Senate Finance Committee, and we got a small tax on endowments that was only for the very, very richest schools. I think it’s still on the books, but it was nowhere near as aggressive as it should have been. What I wanted was to take the money and set up a competitive grant program for community colleges because what they do is hard work, and they absolutely need the money. But what happened was that we got a much smaller tax that went into the general fund and didn’t go into improving anything. It was a disappointment.

This leads me to wonder what you make of the Biden administration’s student debt relief!

I’m not going to talk anymore. [Laughs] 

The other part of that same campaign was about property taxes. Georgetown and George Washington University, for example, don’t pay property taxes. Some universities acknowledge that they’re getting police services, fire, sewage, and so forth, and they negotiate something called a PILOT, a payment in lieu of taxes. One case was Harvard, which negotiated a PILOT with Boston that was way lower than what they would have otherwise paid, and ! A past college president told me once, “Your campaign to go after the endowments is never going to happen in a serious way. But if you start attacking our property tax exemption, that gets us worried.” 

Back when I thought some of this was actually going to stick, I . Washington, D.C.’s Office of Tax Revenue turns out to be a pretty good agency, and I asked them for a list of all the properties owned by Georgetown and George Washington. I just asked them to calculate the value of those properties, and what should be the payment given the commercial tax rate. It was a lot of money. The average residential property owner in Princeton, New Jersey, pays thousands of dollars more in taxes than they otherwise would because Princeton University doesn’t pay property taxes. 

Criticizing universities in the Washington Post doesn’t sound like a good way to make friends in your current position.

Well, I haven’t done anything like that in years. And of course, I was appointed by the previous administration, when none of this stuff was particularly poisonous.

So why did I survive when almost nobody else did? I don’t think education research is that important. I think I’m good at my job, and the reforms we’re pursuing — whether it’s establishing NCADE or revising the SLDS — are really strongly supported by the current administration, which I really appreciate. But I’m not important enough to be fired.

Isn’t that something of an indictment of federal policymakers, though? They should care more about education research!

Yeah, but then I would have been fired. [Laughs] 

I was affiliated with AEI [the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank], and I still have many friends there. But this NCADE proposal has Democratic backing in Congress. A lot of the work is still nonpartisan, or bipartisan. We work really hard at this, and some of the things we’re pushing are just so fundamentally important that it doesn’t matter which party you’re in.

Does partisanship make it harder to pursue the higher education issues you’re interested in, though?

I’m only the third IES director that’s been confirmed and served any length of time. Russ Whitehurst was totally focused on early childhood literacy, and John Easton cared the most about K–12. So even over these last five years, IES is predominantly still K–12 oriented.

My newest thing in postsecondary research is to collect data on , and I don’t think people understand how big that is in community college. A lot of it is people enrolling to use a swimming pool, or someone who takes three courses in musicology but isn’t interested in credit or a degree. But increasingly, non-credit activity is being used for non-credit certificates that are job- and career-related. Maybe you need three courses to upgrade my skills for auto body repair, or to upgrade your IT skills, but you don’t want a whole degree or to enroll in college. So you can do it on a non-credit basis.

We don’t even know how many non-credit certificates are being granted because we don’t collect any data on it. [the Integrated Postsecondary Data System, the federal government’s primary source of information on colleges and universities] is rooted in Title IV, and it doesn’t collect information about schools that don’t take federal grants or about non-credit activity. But it’s really big, and many people are betting time and energy and money to acquire non-credit certificates. We’re trying to do some work on that, and OMB is very hesitant to mandate any collections of data because of Title IV, but they’ve approved a voluntary data collection. I don’t do research anymore, but I’m trying to broker deals with researchers and states — Virginia has a beautiful data set, for instance — to find out what happens if you get a non-credit certificate. Indiana is another opportunity. 

Launching this stuff is hard because it’s pretty untraditional, and it requires strong state data systems and the willingness of states to work with independent researchers. And of the $808 million we’ve got, none of it is walking-around money; all of it is competitive, everything’s peer-reviewed. Which it should be, but I can’t just say, “Sure, sounds great, I’ll send you $50,000.”

The law, passed by bipartisan majorities and in the closing days of 2022, includes a $70 million boost to the Institute for Education Sciences, the Department of Education’s arm for statistics, research, and evaluation. Within that 9.6 percent bump — which brings IES’s overall budget to $808 million — $40 million are allocated for research, development, and dissemination, including an unspecified amount intended to foster “quick-turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to improve education outcomes for all students.”

That initiative will be housed within the National Center for Education Research, one of , with the hope that it will eventually be spun off into a fifth such center. In an interview with ����Ӱ��, IES Director Mark Schneider described the infusion of money as a down payment toward “something the department’s been talking about for 20 years.”

“I will be pushing for a separate center,” Schneider said, adding that he and his colleagues were “ecstatic” with what Congress provided. “There’s no question about it, this is a major accomplishment. The department, IES, and many people outside have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get this established.”

The bill’s passage comes after what some in the academic community have called a decade of disinvestment in federal education research. In the wake of in the Obama administration, the Institute’s National Center for Education Statistics had to for administering the federal K–12 assessment known as “the Nation’s Report Card,” one of the U.S. Department of Education’s best-known products. 

More recently, the Institute announced that it would not be offering competitive grant programs in research methodology or systemic replication in education research in Fiscal Year 2023. Those technical-sounding competitions make up much of the federal government’s R&D infrastructure for K–12, contributing to the emergence of ideas and products that improve student learning.

In the hopes of reversing those developments — and spurring a nationwide recovery from COVID-related disruptions to school — Congressional Democrats and Republicans that would have created a “National Center for Advanced Development in Education.” That proposal would have authorized an organization with the specific intention of advancing scalable advances in teaching methods and technology, such as voice recognition software to assess dyslexia. While language authorizing the so-called “NCADE” was included in the House’s FY 2023 budget proposal, it didn’t make it into the bill that ultimately passed Congress. 

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat who co-sponsored the NCADE legislation last year, said in a statement that she would continue working to create a new center within IES in 2023. 

“The [IES] funding increase and language included in the omnibus is a win for innovation in education research,” Bonamici said. “This is an exciting opportunity to expedite the development and adoption of emerging technologies, helping more students and quickly closing learning gaps.”

The idea for a national K–12 center focused on research and development predates both the pandemic and the last few presidential administrations. President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal of such a body, invoking the example of DARPA, the advanced defense research agency that is credited with bringing about such technological innovations as weather satellites, GPS, and the internet. 

The comparative latitude granted to DARPA, which can contract with research partners across multiple sectors and maintains significant flexibility over project deadlines, differs somewhat from Washington’s existing K–12 research institutions. Felice Levine, executive director of the American Education Research Association, said in a statement that the funding offered in the omnibus bill would prove valuable to researchers, policymakers and professional educators at a time when millions of students have experienced setbacks to learning and social-emotional development.

The federal investment represents “a vote of confidence in the role high-quality education research needs to play in identifying and countering the devastating impacts of the pandemic on the nation’s students,” Levine said. 

Schneider added that he hopes to spend much of 2023 reorganizing the Institute — possibly by moving its work on prize competitions and transformative research, as well as the program into the newly established unit — before pushing Congress again to consider a new “NCADE” center.

“We’ve been pushing on this, we’ve been trying to increase the rapidity of our experiments, we’ve tried to make sure there’s replication, we’ve increased our demands for dissemination and scaling up,” Schneider said. “We have a really developed model of what a modern education R&D infrastructure looks like, and…I’m hoping this new unit will be a catalyst to continue to push that change, and ultimately the foundation for NCADE.”

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.