IES is being asked to do too much
Authored by: Alex Resch
As a former fellow at the Institute of Education Sciences, I’ve been reading the commentary about IES’s role with great interest since Amber Northern’s Reimagining IES report was released a few weeks ago. In late 2023, I joined IES as a Federation of American Scientists Impact Fellow, supporting the Accelerate, Transform, Scale Initiative that was charged with supporting R&D to develop and build evidence for breakthrough, innovative solutions to education's most persistent problems. After 19 months working at IES and 9 months reflecting on what I learned and what that implies for our path forward as a field, the thing I keep coming back to is that IES faces a challenge that is common to many schools and districts - they are being asked to do too much and with too few resources.
Before I came to IES, I worked closely with educators and district staff, product developers, and philanthropic funders of education R&D to try to implement evidence-based practices locally and to learn as much as possible about what’s likely to work in what context. Through this work, I observed that the actors in each sector often misunderstand the constraints and priorities of their counterparts and everyone had strong opinions on what IES should be doing differently. My impression was that many researchers and funders had wildly different understandings of what IES was trying to achieve and what constraints it faced. I was excited to join IES to learn more about this disconnect and better understand IES’s role in education R&D.
At the highest level, IES is charged with providing “national leadership in expanding fundamental knowledge and understanding of education from early childhood through postsecondary study, in order to provide parents, educators, students, researchers, policymakers, and the general public with reliable information,” which seems reasonable. But when you dig into the specifics, there are a lot of constraints on how IES is organized and what it must pursue. To bring in a research analogy, this doesn’t leave the agency with many degrees of freedom - there are many requirements and constraints imposed by the authorizing legislation, and relatively few resources (both in terms of dollars and people) to achieve them all.
As one example, IES’s authorizing legislation, the Education Sciences Reform Act or ESRA, specifies that NCER shall (in other words, must) sponsor research in 11 topic areas. NCEE has 5 topics specified, NCES has 15, and NCSER has 17 examples of activities it could undertake. These topics are overlapping and generally allow leeway in identifying areas of need to educators, but because these are statutory constraints, staff must spend time and resources ensuring and documenting that their programs meet the specific requirements. In practice, topics are distributed across staff to provide a clear point of contact and allow staff to develop expertise, yet this can create additional silos and can restrict the ability to coordinate and collaborate across centers. Improving coordination and collaboration would take additional staff and resources. Even before last year’s layoffs, IES felt understaffed to me and now there’s just a skeleton crew trying to meet these requirements and keep IES’s important work going.
I like the idea in the report to organize R&D efforts around problems in the field and this could be a useful tool for reorganizing IES. But this is not a new idea and it’s not going to be easy. When I started my fellowship, I worked with other FAS fellows to develop a list of pressing problems of practice in education. The problems are at different grain sizes and implicate different actors and decision makers in the system. We divided the problems into 8 topics to provide some organization, but many problems overlap with others in other topics. I’ve found it very difficult to categorize these into clear problems that R&D can address. Partly this is because I’m not close enough to daily work in schools and districts, so getting input from those who are could help. But it will also be challenging and time consuming to prioritize among the many possible problems. And who decides? A bottom up process that genuinely engages educators will take time and careful facilitation. And a top down process where some centralized body decides is unlikely to be seen as responsive to local needs and compliant with local control of education.
I agree that this is a time to take stock and think about how we could improve IES. But I worry that a root cause of insufficient progress throughout the education system is a lack of resources and a lack of trust in the institutions we’ve established to do this work. We can’t keep asking people to do more with less and expect better results. If I were to make one recommendation about the future of education R&D, it would be to provide the level of funding for R&D that’s found in other sectors of similar importance to our society and economy.
