Federal Board Sets Priorities for Education Research

Washington

The Institute for Education Sciences last week officially set a new research agenda for the U.S. Department of Education, as its advisory board approved the first revised priorities in five years.

The institute’s topics of study won’t change much under the new priorities. They include educational processes, instructional innovations, and teacher recruiting, retention, training, and effectiveness. The latter is in line with the federal economic-stimulus law’s focus on “teacher effectiveness” over the older “teacher quality.” But the new priorities put greater emphasis on placing federally supported education research findings into context “to identify education policies, programs, and practices that improve education outcomes, and to determine how, why, for whom, and under what conditions they are effective.”

The document is intended to guide for the foreseeable future the discretionary grants made through the institute’s $660 million research budget. It’s also likely to change the shape of the regional education laboratory system, which provides technical assistance and research services in 10...