Eliminating IES Means Fewer Resources for Districts, States to Educate Well

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In making moves to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, like the large-scale layoffs and dramatic cuts to research grant programs, the Trump administration and Secretary Linda McMahon have promised to eliminate “bureaucratic bloat” without affecting programs mandated by federal law, like student loans, Title I funding, and support for students with disabilities. 

Even if it was possible to dismantle the department without impacting those programs (and it seems very unlikely), eliminating the department’s other valuable work—including in educational research—will have an outsized impact on the ability of our education system to serve all students well. 

As a career education researcher working for an organization focused on access and opportunity for students with disabilities, I have witnessed firsthand the uniquely powerful role the department’s Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) plays in both supporting research directly and setting the agenda for how we measure effective educational practice. Though IES funds are a tiny fraction of federal spending, they play an essential role in focusing educational reform on evidence and data. 

Arguments for eliminating the department seem to center on the idea that few of its functions support teachers and students. Empirically, this is just plain wrong:  At least 71% of the department’s budget goes directly to students, and 96% goes either to student loans or directly to states, localities and tribes. But even the less than 0.5% of that budget focused on research through IES goes beyond bureaucratic largess: It includes essential services and functions that allow schools to focus on their core work and give all Americans valuable information on how students are learning. 

The department’s research arm performs essential functions to maintaining high quality education in the United States. For example: 

• The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest and only continual and nationally representative measure of what students in the United States know and can do. While McMahon has promised to keep the NAEP in some form, it’s important to remember that developing, administering, and validating the assessment is a massive undertaking requiring expertise in educational content and psychometrics; it is also overseen by a publicly accountable governing board that ensures the test accurately reflects key knowledge and skills in three grade levels across multiple subjects. Without this combination of expertise and the mandate of law, it would be impossible to deliver a comprehensive view of student achievement over time and across states. 

•  Research, development, and dissemination grants funded by IES are a critical source of funding for efforts to understand how to teach students well. High-profile efforts to fund and collect research at IES, such as the What Works Clearinghouse, have driven a national conversation on effective teaching and learning in areas like effective reading instruction, teacher training, and behavior management. Our national revolution in reading instruction has been driven, in no small part, by IES-funded research through the Reading for Understanding Research Initiative and other efforts. No entity outside the federal government has the size or scope to make these investments and ensure that the results of that work remain open to the public. 

• The 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) provide critical technical support to school districts large and small to apply research and data to the work of teaching and learning. Most districts aren’t large enough to afford dedicated research or data staff: for these districts, the local REL is often the only resource available to process student achievement data or learn from the work of other nearby districts. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the RELs have served as critical hubs of information about academic recovery, particularly for marginalized students. 

While each of these programs is tiny compared to the scale of the federal budget, they each provide unique value that could not be replicated by private foundations, state departments of education, or districts themselves. Further, IES has served as an important coordinating entity, connecting expertise in education that is otherwise spread across universities around the country and coordinating activities of many overlapping governmental agencies and organizations. 

Eliminating, reducing funding or dramatically altering these programs like these also has an outsized impact on traditionally ignored groups of students, like students with disabilities. Funding cuts have already impacted IES research focused on students with disabilities, including grants aimed at closing achievement gaps widened by the pandemic, improving training for paraeducators, and evaluating early literacy skills programs for students with diverse needs. There are few outside incentives encouraging research like this; in the absence of IES grants, it is unlikely such work would happen at all. 

Like every educational researcher, I don’t agree with every funding choice made by IES since its founding in 2002. Eliminating IES, however, would remove Congressional oversight from any aspect of how educational research is conducted or prioritized: and with it, the accountability that ensures that research focuses on the needs of all students. Perhaps more troublingly, lawmakers and superintendents would have significantly less evidence to drive decisions in policy and practice, like data on teacher shortages or whether costly education programs are actually effective. 

At a time when student achievement is stagnating, it can be tempting to change everything about how federal education programs function. But make no mistake: destroying the programs that give the federal government a voice in the education conversation isn’t reform, it’s giving up on public education, at a time when the stakes couldn’t be higher.

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