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A much-anticipated report on the future of federal education research makes a strong case for the value of the Institute of Education Sciences and calls for significant changes to make research more useful for educators and policymakers.
The report released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education praises IES for significantly improving the rigor of education research and contributing to a strong body of evidence about what works in schools. But it also says too much previous work by IES hasn’t been put to practical use, has failed to address high-priority issues, or is redundant.
Although the department shared the recommendations, the Trump administration has not committed to adopting them. The administration wants to dismantle the Department of Education and has been parceling out key functions to other agencies in pursuit of that goal. The Institute of Education Sciences was devastated during the early months of the Trump administration, when the U.S. DOGE Service cost-cutting initiative abruptly canceled contracts and eliminated more than 100 positions.
Education research is one of the Education Department functions required by law and is widely considered one of the most important roles played by the federal government. Many researchers and advocates fear states would not make their own investments in education research and that research would not be as widely disseminated without federal involvement. IES directors are appointed for six-year terms that, like those of Federal Reserve chairs, are intended to straddle administrations and insulate the agency from partisan pressures.
The Department of Education hired Amber Northern, senior vice president for research at the center-right Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to look at the work IES had been doing and talk to researchers, state schools chiefs, and others about the best path forward.
“These are not nips and tucks, as IES is struggling in multiple ways to remain relevant and responsive,” Northern wrote in “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences.”
But the report also offers a vigorous defense of the value of a strong federal role in education research, and argues that research must remain independent from political influence.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that IES’s dogged commitment to high-quality empirical studies has transformed the field of education research, shifting it away from less to more rigorous methods and practices,” the report says.
As the administration seeks to dismantle the Department of Education, the report argues that a reinvigorated IES would support larger goals of giving states and parents the tools to improve how schools serve students.
IES is an “entity worth redemption and revitalization, precisely because its work has the potential to empower those who deliver education to the American people, meaning state and local leaders, school leaders, teachers, and the broader public, including parents,” the report says.
The report lists out research projects that have helped educators support struggling readers, improve students’ math skills, and steer high school students to higher education. Practice guides related to literacy and math instruction are downloaded tens of thousands of times each year. The basic data sets that the National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, maintains on student demographics, school finance, and more provide a foundation for public and private research.
And the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP or the nation’s report card, provides essential information about student learning across states and over time.
But too often, research doesn’t make it into the classroom or answer the most urgent questions in education, the report said. And some data collection projects are duplicative or unwieldy and cost too much for the value of data produced.
The report includes numerous recommendations focused on making research easier for schools to use. For example, it says researchers should produce one-page summaries, infographics, and short videos as a condition for funding.
The report also emphasizes funding research that can quickly drive change at the classroom level. There is often tension, however, between speed and determining whether an intervention makes a difference for students years later.
The report’s recommendations include:
- Focusing on fewer problems in education and addressing those problems from multiple angles and across the offices within IES.
- Streamlining data collection and focusing on core functions.
- Prioritizing multi-state projects over requests from individual states and jurisdictions.
- Directing research toward “practicality, innovation, and relevance.”
- Narrowing the scope of the What Works Clearinghouse to practice guides and other tools educators are likely to use.
In its press release, the Education Department thanked Northern for her work and noted the IES “too often delivered research that is slow, siloed, and disconnected from classroom realities.” The press release did not include a commitment to implementing the recommendations.
However, in a blog post, acting IES Director Matthew Soldner described his takeaways: prioritizing needs expressed by states and school districts, supporting rapid research and data collection, and focusing on practices that work.
“The challenge that lies ahead is operationalizing elements of Reimagining while ensuring that IES’s unique role in the education sciences isn’t just continued, but elevated,” he wrote.
Report on reshaping IES gets outside support
In an interview, Northern said one of her first questions when the department approached her about the job was how serious officials were about reinvigorating IES. She said she was impressed with how many people, including those within the administration, wanted to engage on the future of IES.
“Too much research was suited to what researchers wanted to know rather than what the field needs to know,” said Northern, who is continuing in an advisory role through June. “We had no real strategy.”
Mark Schneider, who served as director of IES from 2018 to 2024, said the cuts made by DOGE have opened up an “amazing opportunity” to rebuild the agency. Schneider has described being frustrated in making big changes during his tenure by entrenched interests.
Schneider said he supports the report’s focus on addressing urgent education problems and changing how NCES collects long-term data.
“The statistical data collections were old, creaky,” he said. “They weren’t using modern techniques. They didn’t care enough about timeliness.”
Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance, a national education research coalition, said the report represents a “positive step forward” overall because it promotes the idea that IES is important to federal infrastructure.
“There is a real critical mass of people that feel that IES is a really important agency,” she said.
The report includes important recommendations on connecting research to practice, said Cara Jackson, an education researcher and past president of the Association of Education Finance and Policy. But she worries that in practice, they could lead to more correlational studies and less rigor around causality.
Jackson, who participated in one of the working groups that contributed to the report, said she doesn’t want to open the door to vendors making misleading claims about their products.
She also wonders who will turn the recommendations into policy change.
“They’ve let so many people go,” she said. “I’m worried we’ve done tremendous damage to our ability to recruit people into government work.”
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.
