Policymakers in Congress and the Trump administration should make career-connected learning a key part of the federal education research agenda, a coalition of more than 130 organizations recommends in a detailed new report.
“The federal government is uniquely positioned to make the sustained investments needed to identify and disseminate which career-connected learning strategies work, for whom, and in what conditions,” says the document released June 9 by the Alliance for Learning Innovation during a briefing on Capitol Hill.
The report says there is a “relevance gap,” or “a disconnect between what students learn and what they need to learn to thrive in the workforce.”
There is also a worker-skills shortage, and more than half of young adults report that they are struggling after their high school graduations, the report says. What’s more, the rise of artificial intelligence is making people even more uncertain about the skills and credentials they will need to thrive in the workforce, it says.
The report comes at a time when student demand for career education is rising and when schools expect to expand their career-and-technical education offerings in the coming years.
It’s also been an uncertain time for federally funded education research. The Trump administration in its first weeks last year ended hundreds of millions of dollars in education research and data-collection projects. It later cut about 90% of the staff from the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm.
The Trump administration has since reversed some of those cuts—in part, due to court orders—and it commissioned a report, released earlier this year, overseen by special adviser Amber Northern, with recommendations for overhauling the federal education research infrastructure to makes its product timelier and more useful to educators.
But the White House this year still hasn’t released hundreds of millions of dollars in education research money appropriated by Congress to the Education Department, meaning the agency can’t spend it yet. And President Donald Trump for a second time has proposed reducing the Institute of Education Sciences budget by two-thirds, with the Education Department saying in budget documents that it’s “finalizing a more efficient, effective, and useful IES.”
The coalition’s report released Tuesday downplays the federal education research cuts that have happened since last year.
Sara Schapiro, the executive director of the alliance, mentioned the changed environment during the briefing before dozens of members of groups in the coalition in the Russell Senate Office Building.
“For many in this room, it felt like the floor had dropped out from under us” when the Trump administration began the reductions early last year, she said. “We took it as a mandate to double down on R and D.”
Although the federal education research cuts last year were troubling, Schapiro said in an interview after the briefing, those in the education research field were heartened when U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon tapped Northern as a special adviser tasked with rethinking IES. Northern is senior adviser at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and serves on the Virginia state board of education.
Schapiro said many recommendations from the resulting report Northern spearheaded aligned with the Alliance for Learning Innovation’s 2025 “Blueprint for the Future of the Federal Role in K-12 Education R&D.”
The two reports show that there was bipartisan support for a strong federal research role and that “the federal government should be in the role of setting a clear research agenda focused on national priorities,” Schapiro said in the interview.
Report recommends a DARPA-like agency for education research
The Alliance for Learning Innovation includes such groups as AASA, the School Superintendents Association; the advocacy organization All4Ed; the National School Boards Association; and policy think tanks the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for American Progress, and New America.
The coalition’s report has 10 specific recommendations for Congress, including the authorization of an education and workforce research and development center, a quasi-independent entity that would collaborate with IES and several other federal agencies.
That recommendation is along the lines of a federal “DARPA,” the nearly 70-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Department of Defense, for education research, Schapiro said.
“This idea, for better or worse, of sort of a DARPA for education has been something that both Republicans and Democrats have gotten behind,” she said.
Another recommendation for lawmakers is to codify and fund an AI research hub as part of the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence action plan. And the report calls on lawmakers to increase funding for the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act and allocate some of that money as competitive, flexible funding for states with innovative approaches to preparing students for continued study and careers in fields that are in demand and pay high wages.
Recommendations for the executive branch include identifying and disseminating evidence-based practices in career and connected learning; directing IES and the National Science Foundation to establish a learning community of states studying career-connected learning interventions; and issuing nonregulatory guidance to help states leverage existing federal funding streams to support innovative, evidence-based career-connected learning.
“Realizing the full potential of career-connected learning will require federal policymakers to make strategic investments in R&D and data infrastructure, fund the implementation of evidence-based initiatives, and align across agencies and partners to translate evidence into impact,” the report says.
