Authored by Amber Northern, senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Education and vice president for research at think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the report says that while the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has produced valuable work for decades, its findings often fail to reach educators quickly or clearly enough to influence real-world classroom decisions.
Drawing on input from several hundreds of stakeholders, including researchers, policymakers, teachers and principals, Northern made the case for a radical shift in the federal research system from producing academic knowledge to delivering actionable evidence.
Mark Schneider, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former director of IES, said many of the report’s recommendations reflect long-standing concerns within the education research community, and that the urgency of IES reform is evident in the nation’s student performance data.
“The report is mostly common sensical,” Schneider continued, noting that he supports many of its goals for IES. But he emphasized a prominent criticism: “How is this ever going to be implemented?”
THE TIMING MISMATCH AND SYSTEMIC GAPS
“The timing of how things occur in the real world, and then the timing of how long it takes to get research funded and off the ground ... those two things really need to align much better," Northern said, adding that by the time results appear, policies or classroom practices may have already changed or been abandoned entirely.
Andrew Weaver, assistant professor of literacy education at Marist University who has used IES data sets in his own research, said the report’s call to modernize federal data systems reflects frustrations many researchers have experienced working with existing infrastructure.
"Streamlined collection, publication and coordination would certainly help researchers,” Weaver wrote in a message to the Center for Digital Education.
The report also identified a fragmentation in the agency’s research agenda. Northern wrote that research topics are too scattered, with IES funding a high volume of individual studies on disparate topics rather than focusing on a few major education challenges. This “scattershot” approach, as described in the proposal, indicates that research often does not build on itself, fails to answer persistent education problems facing U.S. schools, and ultimately produces isolated findings that lack broader impact.
“I can see us having some national goals around where we want the kids at the 10th percentile to be, or the 90th percentile, and tracking our expenditures on grants and contracts,” Northern said. “We all know it's not a straight line between funding and student outcomes. But we can get closer.”
Schneider agreed with the report’s emphasis on concentrating federal research efforts on a smaller number of pressing challenges facing the education system. However, he argued that implementing those changes may prove difficult given longstanding institutional practices within the agency.
“[Northern] identified so many different problems,” Schneider said. “The fact that she did this report, the fact that people are taking it seriously, the fact that there’s a possibility that there’ll be an implementation plan and that some of these goals will actually be turned into facts on the ground … part of the problem was culture, and part of it was practices.”
Moreover, the report addressed that research does not always reach those who need it most: teachers and staff working on school grounds. From Northern’s perspective, even when IES studies meet the highest standards of academic rigor, the results are more often than not too technical or academic for educators to apply in a practical setting.
MANAGING MASS AMOUNTS OF DATA
Northern said IES is already attempting to tap into the massive amount of data generated by ed-tech tools, namely through the SEER Research Network for Digital Learning Platforms (SEERNet). Led by nonprofit Digital Promise Global, SEERNet aims to make research faster and more practical by using data from digital learning platforms students already use, rather than relying on traditional classroom studies. However, major barriers remain to making this data truly useful for research, and the system for utilizing such large-scale information is still incomplete.
The report also noted that "education needs evidence that keeps pace with innovation and classroom realities," indicating a belief that IES should play a role in assessing AI tools as they relate to teaching and learning.
"I do think there's a role [for IES to research AI and ed-tech tools], but honestly, the devil's in the details," Northern said. "It requires a whole new sort of research paradigm ... to evaluate AI tools as quickly as they need to be evaluated in ways that IES has not been equipped to do in the past."
Northern also expressed noticeable openness to utilizing AI and the vast data sets generated by digital learning platforms to transform the research process, noting that the way students interact with tech provides a unique opportunity to pinpoint exactly where learning falls short: "I feel like all of these ways that kids are entering data on computers can also help us to understand where the learning is faltering and where the misconceptions are occurring," she said, describing it as an "overabundance of data" that can answer real questions to improve student outcomes.
She suggested that instead of "reinventing the wheel," IES should support outside organizations — like Digital Promise — that are already studying these tools.
Schneider similarly argued that the federal education research system already possesses extensive data sets that could be used to support AI-driven analysis of student learning, but institutional caution and data restrictions have slowed the adoption of those systems.
He added that modernizing federal data systems may require rethinking how some long-standing data sets are collected and used.
“We need to figure out what the unique contribution … is, and we need to figure out whether or not they’re addressing the critical issues that the nation needs, and are they doing it in a cost-effective manner,” Schneider said.
The advent and rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has also sparked a debate over whether IES should act as a trusted evaluator of ed-tech tools. While some believe districts need reliable federal research before investing in new technology, others argue that federal processes move too slowly to keep up with the seemingly constant advancements of contemporary tech.
“Many practitioner- and tech-affiliated stakeholders noted the plethora of new educationally focused digital tools, primarily AI-driven, that remain largely unevaluated,” Northern wrote in the report. “[IES] could address an unmet need by developing a taxonomy of tech tools and resources used in K-12, postsecondary and workforce settings. This center would research the best methods for assessing the evidence on the tool.”
The biggest challenge, according to Northern, is that private companies are often reluctant to share their proprietary data. She suggested that the government needs to find ways to incentivize these providers to work together so that data sets are not "walled off and isolated."
Weaver, meanwhile, said that while the report’s focus on practical application and translation of research could address long-standing gaps between research and classroom practice, it may also raise questions about how federal priorities shape academic research.
"One can’t help but wonder if this is a way to exert ideological control over academic researchers by limiting what types of research can be funded,” he said.
Weaver added that despite promising ideas in the report, broader uncertainty around the future of federal education research may affect whether those proposals are implemented.
“I think there is a lot of potential for a revamped IES and the report offers a variety of promising suggestions,” he said. “That said … given the way IES was so rapidly dismantled under [the Department of Government Efficiency] DOGE and the lack of alignment between Congress, the Department of Education, and the executive [branch] on what role the federal government should play in funding and prioritizing educational research, I’m not optimistic that it will lead to positive reform.”
Schneider said that, ultimately, the agency’s future may depend on whether policymakers are willing to rethink long-standing approaches to federal education research.
“We’ve got to fix things. We have to modernize. We have to devote scarce resources to more important issues,” Schneider said. “Is IES a welfare agency? No. It is designed to help us understand and solve current [and] future national problems.”
