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Executive Summary

In 2025, a new administration and Congress will have the responsibility to use the levers of federal education programs to expand education opportunities for American students. A focus of these efforts should be employing the federal education R&D enterprise to identify and elevate best practices for improving learning and instruction, while increasing public transparency about the condition of American education.

American education faces great challenges and great opportunities. Prolonged school closures caused widespread learning losses and exacerbated the socioeconomic and racial academic achievement gaps. A dramatic rise in chronic absenteeism, also precipitated by school closures during the pandemic, will make it even more difficult to improve children’s educational outcomes. Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and worsening geopolitical tension will also create new challenges for institutions seeking to prepare students for changing labor markets.

At the same time, the United States is undergoing a historic change in the way that education funding is provided. In recent years, 12 states have enacted universal education choice programs, giving parents’ the power to choose their children’s school or direct control of their children’s resources through education savings accounts. Altogether, nearly 22 million, or roughly 40 percent of American students, have access to such options. This ongoing decentralization is creating demand for new learning options, with the potential to create a new sector of schools and tutoring providers. In addition, parents across the U.S. have become aware of the need to ensure that teachers are using best practices to provide the best instruction possible, as demonstrated by the ongoing movement to implement the science of reading’s instruction methods.

Addressing these challenges and capitalizing on these opportunities will require national and state lawmakers to leverage and reform the federal education R&D enterprise. In the past, government education R&D programs have played an important role in identifying and promoting best practices and helping parents and teachers understand how children learn. The ongoing innovation throughout the country to develop more effective educational institutions makes it essential that R&D efforts give parents the information they need to invest well in their children’s education, and give teachers, administrators, and policymakers the resources they need to support students.

The current challenges in American K-12 education also require a new approach to federally funded R&D activities. This should include a more rapid cycle of R&D and greater scaling of effective activities. Rather than spending years conducting rigorous scientific research to, for example, evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention on 500 students, the R&D enterprise should be identifying and scaling interventions that benefit five million students. In addition, federal policymakers should rethink the current approach of federal education R&D to focus on coordinated initiatives to address national priorities established in federal law, rather than funding many uncoordinated studies with a disorganized impact. In short, the current and ongoing crisis in American education requires both leadership from and a reimagination of the federal education R&D.

To that end, this report offers a comprehensive agenda to strengthen the U.S.’s education R&D system, including the following recommendations:

• Congress and the Department of Education should transfer authority and funding for the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program from the Department of Education to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
• The Department of Education should require the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to publish an annual report identifying the results and outcomes of grants from the EIR program, including any best practices and lessons learned. Congress should also require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) or the Inspector General to evaluate the EIR program to determine whether it is effective.
• IES should require transparency about all publicly funded education R&D, including by publishing annual reports and project summaries on the IES website.
• Congress and IES should end ineffective education R&D programs. For example, Congress could use its statutory or appropriations powers to terminate ineffective programs. Furthermore, Congress could empower the IES director to have greater authority to terminate grants, including by allowing greater discretion to fund short-term grants that can be ended if proven ineffective or renewed if proven valuable.
• IES should establish a Parent Resource Center on its website to provide information about education R&D findings that parents can use to ensure that their children receive a high-quality education. To that end, IES should revise the What Works Clearinghouse so that it prioritizes practical information and best practices identified through research that teachers and school leaders can use to improve instruction.
• The Department of Education and IES should increase the role of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to improve transparency about K-12 education, including by collecting and publishing in a timely fashion school finance (including per-pupil expenditures for each public school and school district in the nation) and state-level academic achievement data required under federal law. NCES should continue and expand the School Pulse Panel to provide timely and relevant information about issues affecting elementary and secondary students and schools.
• IES should be empowered to adopt DARPA-like models to fund the development of new tools and resources with the potential to significantly expand students’ learning opportunities.
• Congress should require IES to conduct all federal education program evaluations, building on IES’s statutory authority under federal law, to identify opportunities to reform federal education programs and activities and increase their return on investment for American students.
• IES should collaborate with states to expand the capacity and capabilities of high-quality Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems, including a transition to ensure that they can securely collect and connect information from pre-K into the workforce.
• Congress should require GAO to conduct biennial audits of the R&D programs within IES, the Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). This should include the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has not been audited since the 1990s despite being the single largest project in IES.
• NSF should publicly report on its website the outcomes and findings of its education R&D projects.
• The White House Committee on STEM Education should take a more assertive management and coordination role to ensure that federal STEM education programs have a high return on investment and do not fund duplicative or overlapping projects.
• The White House should ensure proper coordination and management of federal education R&D activities, including the sharing of information and lessons learned by federal agencies to increase the return on investment of R&D initiatives.