President Biden has nominated Adam Gamoran to be the director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the Department of Education. IES is the center of most of the Department of Education’s R&D activities, serving as the Department’s “statistics, research, and evaluation arm,” and will receive $807 million in funding this year.
Dr. Gamoran currently serves as the president of a charitable foundation and previously was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He recently led a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) review of IES and the future of federal education research. The report stressed the need to focus research on reducing inequality and improving learning for at-risk student groups, two long-standing federal priorities.
Since the IES director role requires Senate confirmation, lawmakers and the members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee will engage in extensive discussions with Dr. Gamoran. Through these questions and the “advise and consent” process, lawmakers will have an opportunity to shape his leadership and the future of IES.
For the past several years, the Foundation for American Innovation has been researching and analyzing federal education R&D programs and issuing recommendations for how to increase the return on investment from these initiatives. As senators meet with and interview Dr. Gamoran during the confirmation process, here are 10 questions they should ask him.
1. What can we learn from “Sold a Story” and the national scandal of the failure to follow the science of reading?
Background: Thirty-percent of 4th graders scored “below basic” in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2022. With public schools spending more than $16,000 per student on average, the typical student will have had roughly $65,000 spent on his or her education by the end of third grade. One of the most significant efforts of the federal education R&D enterprise was the congressionally mandated National Reading Panel of the 1990s, which published a 2000 report concluding that “systematic phonics instruction produces significant benefits for students in kindergarten through 6th grade and for children having difficulty learning to read.” But as Emily Hanford has shown through her prominent Sold a Story podcast, many education programs, teachers, and schools across the country have continued to use ineffective methods of reading instruction that do not use phonics or the science of reading. Thirty-nine states have now passed laws requiring schools to use the science of reading. The next IES director should provide a vision for how the Institute can highlight and provide recommendations for evidence-based practices for instruction and ensure that education R&D makes its way into the classroom.
2. What can we learn from the disappointing history of federal education R&D and other examples of the public education sector ignoring evidence-based best practices identified through research?
Background: In 1972, IES organized a meeting to develop strategies for the emerging field of federally funded education R&D. Alice Rivlin, who would later lead the Congressional Budget Office and serve as vice chair of the Federal Reserve, reasoned that the NIE needed “a Salk vaccine,” or “something that really works, that solves a problem that everyone knows about,” highlighting the need for federal R&D to show clear results for improving how American students learn. A good case can be made that the federal education R&D sector found the equivalent of a Salk vaccine more than four decades ago. The largest federal education experiment in history, Project Follow Through, analyzed 22 different methods of instruction in classrooms across the country. The experiment identified a clear winner by 1977. Direct Instruction, a highly scripted teaching method focusing on mastering basic skills, resulted in higher levels of academic achievement, problem-solving skills, and student self-esteem. But these results were broadly ignored for decades. The next IES director should be asked to reflect on this unfortunate history and what it means for the Institute’s mission and programs. If the traditional public education sector has proved willing to ignore best practices like Direct Instruction that were identified by federally funded research, what needs to change within the public school system, IES, or elsewhere to ensure that in the future, such research is effectively implemented in the classroom?
3. How can IES advance more innovative R&D work, such as applying ARPA or other models to promote innovation?
Background: There is growing interest in Congress, and under the prior IES leadership, in applying new models to encourage innovation through education R&D. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offers one promising model for federal education R&D, if structured appropriately. For FY2023, Congress directed IES to “use a portion of its fiscal year 2023 appropriation to support a new funding opportunity for quick turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to significantly improve outcomes for students.” Former IES Director Mark Schneider applauded this initiative, describing it as a chance to “incorporate DARPA-like methods into the education R&D infrastructure.” In 2024, Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act, which would “create a national center that advances high-risk, high-reward education research projects, similar to the model employed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).” Congress should ask Dr. Gamoran about his vision for promoting advanced research at IES, and for ensuring that new approaches do not repeat old mistakes or waste public funds.
4. How will IES adjust its mission and work following historic expansions of parental choice in education, which could spur parental demand for evidence-based instructional models?
Background: When IES was authorized by Congress in 2002, most American students had few options to attend a school of their parents’ choice. At the beginning of the century, only a few states and cities had private school choice programs, and the promising public charter school sector was just beginning to grow. Today, American parents have unprecedented options to decide where and how their children learn. According to EdChoice, roughly 22 million students (nearly 40 percent of the student population) now have access to a private school choice or education savings account program, which allows parents to directly control a share of public school funding to pay for tuition, tutoring, or other education costs. Nearly four million children are now attending public charter schools. With enrollment in traditional public schools having shrunk by 1 million or more students since the pandemic (and with projections for it to drop by another two million students by 2030), the landscape of schools and education providers is changing. IES must consider how to share best practices identified through federal education R&D directly to parents, teachers, tutors, and new school providers. Unfortunately, the 2022 NASEM report made few mentions of the role of parents as key customers of IES, despite the Institute’s mission including parents as a key audience. Senators could encourage Dr. Gamoran to refocus IES’s work to prioritize educating parents about education research, which in turn could create parental demand for learning options that are informed by best practices.
5. What IES programs or activities should Congress eliminate or deprioritize? Have the Regional Educational Laboratories outlived their purpose?
Background: The Treasury Department has described the nation’s fiscal path as “unsustainable.” The federal government is projected to spend more on interest payments in 2025 than on either the national defense budget or non-defense discretionary programs. Congress and the White House will face increasing fiscal pressure moving forward. With that context, the next IES director will have a responsibility to provide Congress with guidance about opportunities to increase the return on investment of IES-funded projects. In 2024, the Biden administration requested $815 million for IES in 2025—only a modest increase over the $807 million provided this year. But a future administration could push for budget reductions as part of government-wide belt tightening. During the confirmation process, the next IES director should be asked about the value of various programs within the IES budget and identify areas to cut or repurpose funding. For example, senators should ask Dr. Gamoran about the Regional Educational Laboratories, which are intended to provide assistance to state education agencies and school districts but which have been the subject of criticism for decades. The House Appropriations Committee provided no funding for the RELs in its 2025 funding bill. The IES director should help Congress identify where to cut or repurpose funding.
6. Is there a role for IES, through the National Center for Education Statistics, to collect and publish information from state school report cards required by federal law?
Background: The federal government has been involved in collecting and publishing education statistics since the 1860s, and the National Center for Education Statistics plays a vital role by collecting and publishing information about American schools. But NCES could do more to provide transparency about elementary and secondary education, including by collecting and publishing information that states are required by law to publish through school report cards, including testing data and per-pupil spending levels for all public schools. A recent analysis of states’ school report cards found that “most states are failing to provide accessible, transparent longitudinal performance data—at a time when parents, advocates, and the general public need it most to address continued pandemic learning loss.” In addition, states have been publishing school-level per-pupil spending data in ways that require non-government organizations to collect, organize, and publish the data. Would the IES director support a congressional mandate for NCES to collect, organize, and publish this kind of data?
7. What can we learn from the nonpartisan oversight of the federal education R&D enterprise? How will IES collaborate with nonpartisan watchdog organizations once confirmed?
Background: There has been limited oversight of IES and the Department of Education’s R&D programs. The next IES director should consider both how to address past challenges identified by nonpartisan watchdogs and how the Institute will partner with future nonpartisan reviews. A 2014 report by the Government Accountability Office “identified concerns with IES's ability to produce timely and relevant research.” GAO stated:
Although Education’s research and technical assistance groups have taken steps to disseminate relevant research to the education field, IES does not always assess these efforts. Some stakeholders raised concerns about the dissemination of relevant products from the RELs and Research and Development Centers (R & D Center). For example, they told GAO that these groups do not always adapt their products for use by both policymaker and practitioner audiences. Further, IES has not fully assessed REL and R & D Center dissemination efforts. As a result, IES does not know if these efforts are effective in meeting their mandated goal of providing usable research and information to stakeholders.
While a decade has passed since GAO issued these findings (and IES has since implemented GAO’s four recommendations), questions about how the Institute can provide timely and relevant information and assistance remain relevant today.
8. How can IES and the Department of Education improve transparency to increase the usefulness of federally funded education R&D?
Background: Federally funded R&D is only valuable to the extent that people are able to learn from it and stakeholders are able to use it. But it is hard to find information about the outcomes of federally funded R&D at the Department of Education or IES. Recognizing the problem, the House Appropriations Committee report included language encouraging the “Department to take additional steps to publicly release, widely publicize, and support the use of research findings from the [Education Innovation and Research] and its predecessor, the Investing in Innovation program, to stakeholders at the Federal, State, and local levels,” and encouraging “the Department to showcase those programs that have demonstrated, through rigorous research as required by the [Elementary and Secondary Education Act], that their innovations show specific evidence of achievement in educational outcomes.” While the Education Innovation and Research program is not within IES, transparency should be required of all Department of Education research programs. In addition, lawmakers should require the next IES director to commit to reviewing the What Works Clearinghouse and identifying ways to make information published on the IES website useful and relevant for a broader range of education stakeholders, including parents, teachers, and new school leaders.
9. How should IES collaborate or coordinate with other federal agencies involved with R&D and STEM education activities?
Background: Beyond IES and the Department of Education, other federal agencies are involved with funding, supporting, or using education R&D. For example, the National Science Foundation spends nearly $2 billion on twodirectorates that are involved in education research or related work. The Department of Defense also manages a large school system and is in a position to both fund and leverage education R&D to actually improve student learning. Given his leadership of IES, the director is well positioned to advise the White House and encourage broad interagency collaboration and cooperation on education R&D to avoid duplicative efforts, identity and apply best practices, and ensure that federal agencies are working together on national challenges, such as improving the pipeline of students and workers prepared for STEM careers.
10. What will the next director plan to accomplish in five years?
Background: With a five-year term, the director of IES has a limited window of opportunity to reform the Department of Education’s main research arm. In his preface to the 2022 NASEM report, Dr. Gamoran wrote,
More than any other institution, education is central both to our social cohesion and our economic productivity. The federal government is wise to invest not only in the education system itself, but also in research that can point the way toward addressing the serious challenges at hand. The Institute of Education Sciences must carry the torch that illuminates the way forward.
A realistic nominee to lead a large federal agency will likely realize the opportunity to drive only a few major changes in a five-year period. Senators should ask Dr. Gamoran what his top three priorities are for transforming IES into an agency that provides useful guidance and improves the learning opportunities of more than 50 million students. We submit that the key areas of change should be:
- Improving the transparency of all federally funded education R&D to make the findings of research available and useful to all education stakeholders;
- Focusing on parents as the key customers of education R&D. Such a focus should leverage parents’ new and widespread ability to choose the right learning environment for their children to create widespread demand for evidence-based instruction and high-quality learning programs; and
- Leveraging innovative research models, such as a potential ARPA-ED, to develop new tools and learning models that can help parents, teachers, and students across the country.
Suggested reading and listening
- Letter to Senate HELP Committee on children’s literacy
- Testimony to House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies on the Department of Education’s R&D projects
- “Students Deserve Better Information about Billions Spent on Education R&D,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute blog
- “House Republicans Should Improve K-12 Education Research and Transparency,” RealClearEducation
- “Congress Can Improve School Finance Transparency,” The Hill
- Reforming the Education Sciences Reform Act: Improving K-12 Education Through Federal R&D
- STEM and Computer Science Education: Reforming Federal K-12 Education R&D Activities to Strengthen American Competitiveness
- The Case for Reforming and Strengthening Federal Education R&D
- Sold a Story podcast
