DOGE cutalmost $900 millionfrom the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the department's nonpartisan research arm. Does that matter? Yes, because too many faculty members in leading schools of education have replaced education research with progressive activism, ignoring the needs of educators. That means if we want schools to improve, the government must fund education research because somebody has to.
As we detailed in “Education Researchers Are Not Doing the Research Educators Need,” principals and teachers face serious challenges, from COVID learning loss to which reading program to use, challenges that leading education professors are failing to address.
Last year, we attended the annual American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference. Nearly every plenary speaker presented highly abstract, jargon-laden variations of critical race theory. Word searches of the 2024 conference program show more mentions of race (531) than reading and math combined (507), more of safe spaces (102) and queer theory (81) than COVID learning loss (68), and more on “resistance” (321) than anything butrace.
We found fewer than 20 mentions of student absenteeism, despite it being a top concern of educators. Phonics got just 15 mentions, many of them negative, portraying phonics as a manifestation of white supremacy rather than a logical and effective way to teach English or any alphabetic language.
In short, many leading education researchers fail to focus on the things that matter to regular educators who want to teach kids to succeed in this country, rather than subvert it.
Members of leading educational research organizations have failed to help educators, but so, too, have many private foundations. Foundations often fund a project one year, and yank funds the next based on their personal whims or political calculations.
One of us saw this firsthand in the early 2010s. The Gates Foundation supported small high schools in New York City, which evaluations by researchersHoward Bloom and Rebecca Untermanshowed to be highly successful, improving both achievement and graduation rates among disadvantaged kids, with no extra spending. The innovation replaced huge high schools with over 100 small schools where principals knew all the students, so they could help all succeed.
At the very moment small schools proved successful, the Gates Foundation dropped them, perhaps to appeal to small school skeptics like American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who Gates hoped would support the Common Core State Standards. The Foundation could throw small schools under the school bus since, after all, Bill and Melinda Gates’ kids never attended public schools, much less big city public schools. We have no reason to think a philanthropic billionaire will put research findings above personal or political calculations.
That leaves the government. On education research---and as skeptics it pains us to say this---the government has actually done pretty well. The shift to phonics as the primary method of teaching reading was spread not by education professors or billionaires, but by journalist Emily Hanford’s Sold a Storypodcast, which humanized years of IES-funded research showing that particularly for low-income and special education children, phonics-based teaching works far better than “three-cueing” and other whole language approaches. Without government-funded research, elementary educators would still be in the dark about how best to teach reading.
This is no anomaly. As Harvard’s Paul Petersondetails in Education Next, IES has funded a disproportionate share of the most important education research. Unlike many foundations and universities, its sponsored studies also “appear to be free of progressive or other ideological bias.” Indeed, many IES findings, such as those showing the long-term benefits of Boston charter schools, would have been buried by status quo interests, or never researched in the first place. In short, IES depoliticized education research.
As one of us wrote herelast September, eliminating the Department of Education would neither be a cure-all nor a catastrophe since many of the existing programs, like Title I and special education funding, will persist in other cabinet departments. However, educational research funding is one area that hangs in the balance at present. We are not saying that IES cannot be trimmed, moved, or reformed. If the Department of Education does end---something unlikely given existing statutes---then IES could be transferred to the National Science Foundation, the Department of Labor, or elsewhere.
One promising avenue for reforming education research would involve funding multi-site investigations.As former IES director Mark Schneider noted, there is a pressing need for replication work to validate findings across different settings before they are widely adopted. This would be a better approach than funding individual studies that are rarely replicated, as is now typical. IES is uniquely positioned to lead such reforms.
Yet broadly, at a time when one federal research program that escaped the DOGE axe, the National Assessment of Education Progress, shows that students have lost two decades of academic gains, educators need unbiased science to inform their efforts to set things right. For this reason, we are not optimistic that anything can replace the government-funded IES.
