Today, I submitted a written testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. Click here to download a full PDF of the testimony.
Chairman Aderholt, Ranking Member DeLauro, and Members of the Subcommittee:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Dan Lips. I am a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation, an organization with a mission to develop technology, talent, and ideas that support a better, freer, and more abundant future. I respectfully encourage the subcommittee to modernize the federal education R&D enterprise, establish transparency about American K-12 education, promote evidence-based best practices, and create tools to improve learning opportunities for American students.
The need for evidence-based best practices in the classroom has never been greater, given the declining student achievement and a historic expansion of parental choice options across the United States. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 33 percent of 8th-graders and 40 percent of 4th-graders scored “below basic” in reading, and nationwide reading results continued a decade-long decline. As of 2025, 16 states have established education choice programs with universal eligibility, and more than 20 million students now have access to education choice programs such as education savings accounts. As a result, American parents have more power to choose the right learning environments for their children, which creates an opportunity for teachers and school leaders to prioritize evidence-based best practices in the classroom.
The Trump administration’s plan for reducing the federal government’s role in K-12 education presents questions and opportunities regarding the Department of Education’s responsibilities for collecting and publishing education statistics (which dates back to the 1860s) and promoting and disseminating education research (which originated in the 1950s). In 2025, and through the FY2026 funding bill, it is time to rebuild and modernize an effective federal center to collect and publish federal education statistics and to identify and promote evidence-based best practices to improve American students’ learning opportunities. The purpose of rebuilding and modernizing the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) should be consistent with President Trump’s executive order to promote education freedom and opportunity by giving American parents timely and relevant information about K -12 education so that they can make informed decisions.
First, Congress should direct the Department and IES to rebuild and modernize NCES and publish timely and meaningful information about the United States' elementary and secondary education conditions. NCES’s Digest of Education Statistics and other publications provide invaluable statistical transparency about American education. Congress should ensure that ED and IES maintain this vital work, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In addition, Congress should require ED, IES, and NCES to improve the timeliness and utility of the collected and published statistics, such as by expanding the School Pulse Panel and requiring regular reporting on chronic absenteeism.
Second, Congress should direct ED and IES to promote academic transparency about elementary and secondary education by collecting and publishing federally-mandated data about per-pupil spending and students’ academic achievement. For example, the Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to publish the “per-pupil expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, including actual personnel expenditures and actual non personnel expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, disaggregated by source of funds, for each local educational agency and each school in the State for the preceding fiscal year.” ESSA also requires states to publish information about students’ academic achievement and the state’s testing and accountability systems. Congress should require the Department, IES, or NCES to collect and publish a national database of per-pupil expenditure data for each public school and school district and a dashboard of information from states’ school report cards.
Third, Congress should direct ED and IES to publish the outcomes of all federally funded R&D projects and take steps to make information about best practices broadly available. I commend the Committee for including a reporting requirement in its report accompanying the FY2025 funding bill, encouraging the Department to “take additional steps to publicly release, widely publicize and support the use of research findings” of the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program. Congress should similarly require all federal education R&D programs to provide transparency about their outcomes. In recent years, state lawmakers and education leaders have enacted reforms to require evidence-based literacy instruction, partly due to the growing awareness of the “science of reading,” thanks to the Sold a Story podcast by journalist Emily Hanford. It is disappointing that IES’s What Works Clearinghouse has not offered similar value or effectively promoted evidence-based instruction.
Fourth, Congress should require the Department of Education to provide recommendations for increasing the return on investment from the EIR program. A federally mandated review of the i3 program, which preceded EIR, found that this model for funding education innovation and research provided limited value. A better approach could be for the Department of Education to award grants to organizations that support the development of open source education technology projects and tools, similar to how the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s Open Technology Fund supports the development of internet freedom technologies and has supported the creation of tools used by billions of people.
It is time for Congress, the Department of Education, and the Institute of Education Sciences to thoroughly review, modernize, and rebuild the federal government’s capacity and programs for collecting education statistics and supporting developing and disseminating evidence-based best practices. These reporting requirements could increase the return on investment for American students, parents, and taxpayers from federal education expenditures.
