The U.S. Department of Education’s research arm needs to be thoroughly overhauled with a focus on making its products leaner, more relevant, and timelier, concludes a long-awaited report released Friday.
The report was crafted by Amber Northern, who was brought on last May from the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute as a special adviser to review the Institute of Education Sciences’ work.
More than 430 public commentators weighed in on a request for feedback on redesigning IES, calling for a quicker turnaround on awarding research grants so findings get into to the field faster. Commenters also said there was a need for more robust communication about research projects and opportunities, easy-to-understand guidance on implementing practices and products backed by research, and less reliance on contractors for the agency’s core data collections.
Much of what the report concludes generally aligns with that feedback. In particular, it calls for the agency to take a more coherent approach to its work focused on key priorities—ending the way IES’ four internal “centers,” or divisions, work, which has traditionally been in a fairly independent, balkanized fashion.
If literacy is a national priority, the report points out, then the agency’s statistics center should analyze existing data about variation in literacy achievement across the country; its research center should support study of new programs and policies; its special education center should test literacy interventions for students with disabilities; and its evaluation center should provide technical assistance and examine the progress of large-scale policy efforts.
It takes particular aim at the National Center for Education Statistics, the IES hub that crunches numbers and data on the nation’s schools. The report contends that it’s slow to release results and that many of its collections are outdated, rely on vague questions, or are simply no longer useful by the time results become available.
And it suggests that some of its longitudinal collections—some have tracked beginning teachers while others have tracked high school student outcomes—could be less costly, scaled back, or canceled altogether.
Longitudinal data collections are prized by researchers. Because they track the same students year over year, they can be mined for richer insights and support quasi-experimental studies. (Two longitudinal collections—focused on high school graduates and early childhood—were canceled last year during round of contract-cutting by the Trump administration that hit IES projects particularly hard.)
The report also criticizes the Regional Educational Laboratories, which help states and school districts apply education research to improvement strategies. There are 10 labs across the country run by contractors, each assigned a particular region. Some commenters praised their local RELs, but the report noted that some state education chiefs would prefer to set their own research and technical assistance priorities with in-state providers they know.
Northern also noted overlap between the regional labs and the Education Department’s comprehensive centers, which are charged with providing technical assistance to states and districts on solving common problems and complying with federal laws. There are 20 comprehensive centers, with most serving specific regions and others working nationally on Education Department-set priorities.
The Trump administration cut nearly all contracts from both programs last winter before a judge last summer ordered them restored.
Sara Schapiro, executive director of the Alliance for Learning Innovation, a coalition of groups promoting education research, hailed the report’s focus on reorienting IES toward solving real problems that state and schools face and conducting research with an eye toward improving student outcomes.
“We need to empower state and local leaders to get them involved earlier in the research project to define the problems, and then provide them with more usable, plain-language resources that they can actually use in their day-to-day work,” she said.
Will the Education Department move forward with the recommendations?
The suggestions are ambitious in scope. But it is far from clear what—if any—steps senior Education Department leaders plan to take to tackle these reforms, what timeline they envision, and what congressional approval might be needed.
For one thing, the workforce at IES has been greatly reduced. More than 100 staffers were dismissed a year ago, and just three employees remain at NCES. And the report made no mention of investments that would be required to pull off a drastic overhaul of the institute’s structure.
“We read this report, and we want to know what’s next,” Schapiro said. “The big issue that I would call out is staffing at the department and at IES. There need to be staffing levels such that implementation matches the vision that’s set out in this report.”
While IES’ staff is much smaller than it was a year ago, its budget remains mostly intact. President Donald Trump last spring proposed cutting it by two-thirds, but Congress ultimately cut a smaller amount, $28 million from IES’ $793 million allotment in 2025, when it belatedly finalized a 2026 budget earlier this month.
Additionally, some $500 million in unspent funds from fiscal 2025 have been carried over, according to apportionment documents from the White House, and that money should be allocated by September.
In a statement, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon did not commit one way or another to advancing the recommendations. “As we return education to the states, we are committed to improving the Institute to provide best practices that improve outcomes in every classroom across the nation,” she said.
The Education Department didn’t respond to a request seeking additional information from Northern or Matthew Soldner, now the acting director of IES.
Among the report’s other recommendations:
- Preserving the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, which is given to samples of students every few years;
- Prioritizing multistate research awards, so promising strategies for boosting student learning can be tested in a variety of states with different educational contexts, giving a better sense of which approaches have staying power;
- Requiring cause-and-effect research to also study the “how” and “why” conditions in which interventions seem to work;
- Emphasizing practical rather than theoretical research and “rapid cycle” studies;
- Improving how research and evaluation products are disseminated;
- Better coordinating the work of the RELs and Comprehensive Centers;
- Focusing the What Works Clearinghouse, which aims to translate research into tools for educators, on guides for practitioners rather than reviews of one-off studies.
Rachel Dinkes, the president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance, called the report a positive step that reflects recommendations from advocacy groups like hers. It acknowledges the critical nature of IES data collection and work products, she noted.
“It says IES is important, and it makes a recommendation to maintain critical IES infrastructure, and in almost every recommendation to strengthen IES going forward,” she said.
To an extent, the report appears to ignore prior recommendations to overhaul the agency as well as some of the systemic challenges that have limited its work.
A 2022 National Academies report outlined suggestions to make the agency’s work more relevant and targeted, for example. Flat funding for over a decade, coupled with higher contracting costs and additional congressional mandates, have limited what IES can accomplish.
And finally, the report envisions some of IES’ research priorities being shaped by a “carefully chosen” panel, the National Board for Education Sciences.
But that group lacked enough members for a quorum for years and has been the subject of bipartisan neglect: The Biden administration delayed appointing members until halfway through his term—and the Trump administration fired them in 2025.
