Align R&D on Redesigning the Institute of Education Sciences
The US Department of Education sent out a Request for Information on Redesigning the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). As a team we worked firsthand in leading innovation initiatives through IES’s Accelerate, Transform, Scale program, and have insights on how IES could modernize its programs, processes, and priorities to better serve the needs of the field and American students. We’re pleased to have the opportunity to formally share our experience and learnings to support the continued efforts of IES.
Our full response is below. You may download a copy here.
Re: Docket ID number ED-2025-IES-0844
Dear Dr. Northern:
Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback on redesigning the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Align R&D is an organization founded to build an education R&D ecosystem aligned towards the priority needs of today and the emerging challenges of tomorrow. Align R&D’s four co-founders - Erin Higgins, Jessica Tsang, Alex Resch, and Katherine McEldoon - worked at IES to establish and lead the Accelerate, Transform, Scale Initiative. Our job was to design programs at IES to support R&D to develop and build evidence for breakthrough, innovative solutions to education's most persistent problems.
Our experiences at IES centered on the work that the National Center for Education Research conducts, so our response will primarily focus on Area of Interest #2: “Leverage its grantmaking to advance impactful, practitioner-relevant research on pressing topics, with specific input on the identification of those topics.” As former IES staff who sought to make changes at IES and more broadly in the field, we appreciate the opportunity to share what we have learned. We have two main recommendations: (1) continue the work of the ATS Initiative and build on the strategies we had established while we led that initiative and (2) address the barriers to change at IES so that the recommendations you receive can be implemented with minimal friction.
1. Continue the ATS Initiative and build on its core principles
The ATS Initiative work was guided by the following principles, and we recommend that IES continues to build upon and champion these throughout its grant programs:
Focus on how a new innovation will scale throughout the entire R&D process, from problem definition to intervention development to efficacy testing. This includes understanding the practitioner- or student-oriented problem that the innovation is addressing, thinking proactively about how a new innovation would be integrated into practice, and determining how to build and scale a sustainable venture. IES, through the ATS Initiative, funded the LEARN Network to build capacity in the field to think about scaling from the beginning and to support teams who have built evidence-based products to address the issues they have encountered while trying to scale.
Fund cross-sector teams that include people with research, product development, and practitioner perspectives and skillsets. Incorporating these perspectives from the start increases the likelihood that new innovations will be useful, usable, and have the desired impact on learning outcomes. Through the ATS Initiative work, we learned that the field also needs capacity-building and training to learn to work within a cross-sector team. The ATS Initiative programs Transformative Research in the Education Sciences, SEERNet Network, and From Seedlings to Scale all emphasize the importance of cross-sector teams. For example, SEERNet teams are building infrastructure to facilitate stronger researcher/product developer partnerships and to speed up the process to scale up findings from research.
Establish new funding structures to encourage bold thinking, innovative ideas, and new applicants who bring new perspectives to the work. These funding structures should allow for IES to take responsible risks, by which we mean IES would invest in new and different ideas that may or may not succeed, but would have built in milestones and checkpoints in place to discontinue a project that is unlikely to be successful. The From Seedlings to Scale program was developed with this responsible risk concept in mind. Grantees would be given a year to show success on milestones determined by IES, and only a subset of grants would be selected for the next phase of work. Below we note the barriers that need to be removed in order to use the full range of funding mechanisms that other R&D agencies have available.
Continue the Innovation in Education Interagency Working Group (IWG). The RFI explicitly asks for recommendations to support cross-agency communications and collaboration. The Innovation in Education IWG met monthly and included members of key offices at ED, NSF, and DOL. The IWG was growing throughout 2024 and was hoping to add members from other agencies after a successful cross-agency convening in November 2024. This convening included over 100 participants from over 30 unique agencies and program offices. Monthly meetings served as opportunities to communicate across agencies about initiatives related to education innovation and education R&D. Members discussed shared opportunities and challenges. We strongly recommend re-establishing this working group as a way to keep in communication with colleagues across agencies and forge collaborations as opportunities arise.
Early successes from the ATS Initiative investments mentioned above, in addition to the Education R&D Centers on Generative AI include many new applicants, including substantially more businesses and nonprofit applicants than has been typical for IES grant competitions; establishment of new phased grant structures that can be replicated in future grant programs; and new infrastructure (e.g., SEERNet) and resources (e.g., the LEARN Network toolkit) that the field can leverage to support scaling and cross-sector collaboration. IES should continue to learn from these investments and grow this initiative.
2. Address barriers to change at IES
Our team had to advocate for a number of changes at IES to build the ATS Initiative. In our experience, making changes at IES was slow and difficult due to a number of barriers. These include:
Speed of decision-making: When changes to processes need to happen, a number of staff are involved, including the entire IES executive team as well as ED lawyers. These staff are very busy and there are many facets of a decision that need to be considered, including whether it complies with IES’s guiding legislation, whether it can be implemented within the Standards and Review established processes, and whether IES has sufficient staffing to make it happen. In addition, IES is a small agency without any administrative or logistical support for its leadership team. These staffing and capacity constraints have direct implications on project timelines, meaning that changes to processes take a very long time to implement. IES leadership should be provided with administrative and logistical support, which is common in other agencies, to free up their time to focus on strategic initiatives. IES should also consider processes for accelerating timelines and streamlining decision-making, including identifying who needs to be involved for each type of change and encouraging decentralized decision-making where appropriate to reduce burden on busy staff.
Outdated legislation and processes: The Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) was authorized in 2002. This legislation needs to be updated in order to free IES up to structure itself differently. The initial purpose of IES was to provide “national leadership in expanding fundamental knowledge and understanding of education from early childhood through postsecondary study” (ESRA, 2002). IES has made huge strides in bringing rigor to education research and in training a new generation of education scientists to meet the charge laid out in ESRA in 2002. Now IES needs to evolve with the needs of the field. There is recognition of this at IES, and staff were constantly looking for ways to stay in touch with the needs in the field, but all changes had to comply with this 2002 legislation. As it relates to the ATS Initiative, unlike DARPA and other ARPA agencies that have Other Transaction Authority (OTA), IES does not. OTA provides the flexibility to collaborate with and fund a wide range of providers. Through updated legislation, IES could be granted OTA to rapidly pilot and fund innovative R&D projects and to partner with a wider range of organizations that may not typically engage with federal grants. Additionally, our team explored whether we could use Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) to support research and development, as this is another tool that R&D agencies across government use to expand who is eligible to apply for funding (one of the key ways to encourage more innovative thinking); however, ED had never used this mechanism before, so there was hesitation to employ it. Consequently, we were unable to leverage it for our initiatives.
Insufficient staff to support a wider range of peer review processes: The peer review process needs to be more flexible and responsive to the needs of particular grant programs. The ATS Initiative was trying different funding structures, all of which required new types of reviewers, faster review turnarounds, and more reviews in a given program (e.g., From Seedlings to Scale is a phased grant program, so review is required at multiple stages of a project). However, without sufficient staff, there is no capacity to adapt the process in this way and do so quickly. IES must increase staffing to support peer review and encourage the use of a broader range of peer review processes to better support the unique needs of different types of grant programs. Additionally, some grant programs - especially newer programs - would benefit from more involvement from IES staff during the peer review process to level set reviewers on program goals to calibrate review priorities. IES needs to get approval from the National Board for Education Sciences for a wider range of peer review processes so that peer review can be customized to the needs of a particular grant program.
Limited funding and staff across IES: The total amount of funding and the number of staff at IES are significantly lower than other science agencies, such as HHS, NSF, and DARPA. For example, the ATS Initiative was being led by a single staff person for its first few years. Eventually 2 fellows were added, and in October 2024, years after the need for more staff was identified, a second federal employee was hired. All of these staff along with most staff at IES have separated from the agency due to layoffs and expired fellowship terms. To increase the pace and scale of R&D in education, we need significantly increased funding and staffing. Another example of inadequate staffing is in IES’s communications office. This office typically has only one person on staff. One person cannot effectively support the communications needs of four centers, plus lead an overarching IES communications strategy at the same time. Overburdened technical staff within each center have tried to take on some communications work as time allows, but these staff are not experts in communications, nor did they have enough time to carry out this work. The lack of investment in communications staffing has severely diminished the impact of IES investments and has led to misconceptions about what IES does since IES largely does not control the narrative.
Capacity of the education R&D field: What IES can accomplish is limited by the strengths and priorities of the broader education R&D field. Investments in training and capacity building are necessary to improve the quality of the work that IES produces. Our team found that when IES put out new grant opportunities that required innovative partnerships or R&D approaches, training and capacity building was needed to receive quality applications with the features IES was looking for. For example, when IES grants programs began requiring cost analyses, it took the field 2-3 years plus access to a technical assistance center on cost analysis to get to a majority of applications with high quality cost analysis plans. As IES pushes for improvements in how research is conducted, it needs to recognize that the field has to be willing and able to change as well, which requires continued investments in training programs and upskilling opportunities for education researchers.
Thank you for the opportunity to share our perspective on how IES can improve upon its strong foundation as the nation’s leading source for rigorous, independent education research, evaluation and statistics. If you would like to follow up with us about any of our recommendations, you may contact us at contact@align-rd.org.
Sincerely,
Align R&D
