The Future of Federal Education Research

Early last year, DOGE axed 90 percent of the staff and $900 million worth of contracts at the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The draconian cuts raised a lot of eyebrows and some legitimate concerns , but also offered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink the federal agency charged with investing in education research and collecting vital education statistics. Few people have spent more time trying to rethink IES’s role over the past year than Amber Northern, who was tapped by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to serve as Special Adviser tasked with reimagining IES. This spring, the Department of Education released her report “ Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences ,” sketching a path forward. Last week, in an AEI webinar, I had the chance to get her take on the state of IES, her recommendations, and the future of federal education research. She shared a number of thoughts, several envisioning a more radical overhaul than she was able to call for in the report. For readers who can spare an hour to watch the full conversation, I’d encourage you to do so. For those who can’t, it’s worth highlighting a few of Northern’s key points. On what IES has been doing well, Northern aptly credits founding director Russ Whitehurst for battling to bring rigor into education research. It’s a well-deserved hat tip. Whitehurst took a slew of bullets as he fought to establish some beachheads of serious research in a field long dominated by dreck . But Northern is critical of a lack of focus at IES, saying, “We’ve had fifteen priorities at IES at any one time. It’s been all over the place.” She describes an agency that is spread thin across a sprawling assortment of studies and data collections, and that isn’t doing enough to provide useful findings to teachers, parents, and policymakers. IES, she says, has been “glossing over the importance of conveying information to the people it’s supposed to serve.” Asked what a leaner, more effective IES entails, Northern sketches six proposed shifts, starting with a much tighter research focus. IES would concentrate on a handful of pressing challenges states are actively wrestling with, such as early literacy. The emphasis would shift to multi-state grants designed to generate large-scale studies. She’d also like IES to rethink how it communicates findings—with an emphasis on more tools, graphics, and practical resources; fewer unread academic papers. She argues that federal data collection is critical but needs to be revamped and made timelier. “If we’re asking 28 questions but only using two, why are we still asking the other 26?” Northern would streamline data collection and focus on core tasks like the National Assessment of Educational Progress. She also calls for overhauling the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), which teachers are largely ignoring in favor of ChatGPT. The WWC isn’t even machine-readable—meaning it’s walled off from the online sources teachers rely on—and Northern argues its findings need to be accessible through the digital tools educators already use. All these recommendations can be pursued within existing law. Given that, I asked whether there are other changes worth pursuing if Congress were to take up the Education Sciences Reform Act. One such change, she says, would be to make IES a standalone “microagency” with its own budget appropriation and independent hiring authority. Otherwise, she worries about threats to IES’s autonomy or the risk that a downsized IES will be “swallowed up” by a larger agency through an inter-agency agreement. As she puts it, “IES is not a program. It’s a statistical agency with authority to deliver the best evidence we can to support teaching and learning.” Asked whether we still need a federal research agency given the Trump administration’s emphasis on returning education to the states, Northern answers yes. Her reasoning is twofold. Many states, she says, lack the capacity to conduct rigorous research on their own. And she’s skeptical that shipping research responsibilities out of Washington would depoliticize the work or yield more reliable data. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” she says. “The state level is no less political than the federal level.” Northern has given this a lot of thought and offers a coherent vision for where IES goes from here. Some of what she has to say I find compelling, some less so. But agree or not, her suggestions deserve a serious hearing. The post The Future of Federal Education Research appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .