It may sound uncontroversial that evidence should affect school decisions. In practice, though, it is deeply contested. When a district considers a new reading curriculum, a technology platform, or an intervention program, leaders are faced with competing claims from vendors and advocates that are often described as “research-based.” Sorting out which products, programs, and policies will improve student outcomes can be intellectually challenging. Those decisions can be politically challenging as well because a variety of groups are affected by school contracts, jobs, budgets, and priorities.
Local control over decisions about curricula and other important issues has long been a defining feature of American education. States, districts, and schools make many of the decisions that shape what students are taught, how teachers are hired and paid, which programs are adopted, and how resources are allocated. There are good reasons for many of these decisions to be made close to the communities they affect.
But good local decisionmaking depends on something that localities cannot build alone: a public system for producing, reviewing, and judging high-quality research. This system helps local leaders compare programs and proposals, decide when evidence is strong enough to act on, and avoid mistaking marketing or ideology for research. Even leaders with the capacity to evaluate complex research may need to point to independent evidence standards to make decisions that are right for students rather than vendors or interest groups.
Recent debates over federal education policy, however, have framed the issue of where authority should lie as a simple choice between federal control and local control. The Trump administration has argued that federal control over the education system “has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families” and that greater authority should be returned to states and communities. But this framing misses a crucial distinction. Setting high-quality standards for education research and serving as an arbiter of whether research meets those standards is not the same as controlling local education decisions. States and districts should decide what approaches meet their communities’ needs, yes. But those decisions are harder when leaders must judge unassisted which programs are backed by strong research and which rest on thin or selective evidence.
The Institute of Education Sciences has played an important role in supporting local decisionmaking. Created in 2002, IES funds and oversees education research, data collection, evaluation, and evidence review. As the Trump administration’s “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences” report acknowledges, IES helped raise expectations for rigor in understanding “what works” in education. But the agency now faces an uncertain future, after deep staff and contract cuts and amid unresolved questions about its future and core functions. Both the White House and House of Representatives lawmakers have put forward proposals to seriously scale back funding of the agency in the coming fiscal year.
Decisions are harder when leaders must judge unassisted which programs are backed by strong research and which rest on thin or selective evidence.
Although it is difficult to say with certainty whether particular research has resulted in better outcomes for students, evidence from IES-funded studies has shaped education policy and practice in schools, districts, and states across the country. A randomized study supported by IES found that mailing parents a postcard with basic information about their child’s absences reduced chronic absenteeism. Philadelphia adopted the approach, and the nonprofit Attendance Works organization now supports similar low-cost strategies across numerous districts. Mississippi’s rise from the 49th spot in 2013 to 9th in 4th grade reading on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress is attributed in part to the state’s adoption of practices grounded in IES-funded research on literacy instruction. More than 40 states have since enacted laws similar to Mississippi’s.
The IES-funded evidence-base extends to other programs and challenges as well, including high-dosage tutoring, instructional coaching, early-college programs, and community college completion. Districts and states are making significant spending decisions in these areas.
It’s true that IES has not always succeeded in making its research timely or accessible to practitioners who need it most. But the answer is to reform the agency, not dismantle it. Here the “Reimagining IES” report, released by the U.S. Department of Education and developed by senior adviser Amber Northern after public comments and stakeholder consultation, offers a useful road map. Its core argument is that IES should become more relevant and responsive to states and districts by directing its work toward the problems practitioners face.
Reform, though, should not come at the expense of independence and evidence standards that make IES-supported research credible. IES is most valuable when it combines supporting rigor in education research with attention to the decisions facing state and local education leaders. Congress should endorse the recommendations of the report and put them into practice.
As part of that effort, Congress should also advance the idea, promoted by former IES Director Mark Schneider, of creating a specialized division within the agency focused on educational innovation, ensuring that the evidence system does not just evaluate existing practices but actively supports the development of new ones.
For policymakers, political incentives for sticking with the known or going with the new cut in both directions. Some find it safer to continue investing in familiar approaches and avoid the scrutiny that comes with trying something new. Others are drawn to announcing bold new initiatives because they are untested—there are no disappointing results yet to defend. The rapid adoption of education technology during the pandemic, often without rigorous evidence of effectiveness, illustrates how costly that second impulse can be.
Congress could address this directly by pairing access to educational innovation funds with a requirement that initiatives financed by those funds be rigorously evaluated. This would create a virtuous cycle: more experimentation generating more evidence and more evidence raising the quality of future decisions.
This goal is already the law. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed the Evidence Act, built on the bipartisan Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, which called for a future in which “rigorous evidence is created efficiently, as a routine part of government operations, and used to construct effective public policy.” The current moment is a test of whether that commitment was serious.
Abandoning federally supported research leaves local leaders with fewer tools for judging evidence and fewer supports for introducing and testing better approaches. That, in turn, makes leaders more vulnerable to ideology, inertia, and vendors with the loudest claims. If we want to help every student reach their potential, and, in doing so, improve the nation’s long-run economic prospects, this is the wrong time to retreat from the federal government’s role in education evidence. It’s the right time to make that role work better.
