Just over a year ago, IES — the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, charged with deepening America’s understanding of how schools perform and what students learn — was rocked by a wave of layoffs as Education Secretary Linda McMahon her own agency. The education chapter of Project 2025, a policy wish-list assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, advised that the Institute’s statistical office be moved to the Census Bureau. 

The picture looks somewhat sunnier as winter turns to spring, with Republicans in Congress from significant cuts and . In a recent interview, Lindsey Burke — the author of the Project 2025 recommendations on schooling, now serving as deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Education Department — referred to IES as of the Education Department.

Most striking of all was the publication last month of by Amber Northern, a prominent education researcher and commentator appointed last year as a special advisor to McMahon. While critical of the Institute for its numerous areas of focus and the sometimes-plodding pace of its data releases, Northern’s overview represents a long-term vision for federal support of research that directly answers the needs of educators. McMahon and Acting IES Director Matthew Soldner , suggesting that its prescriptions would find a receptive audience in the administration.

But some insiders said that any attempt to improve the functions of the Institute would depend on a meaningful rebuilding of its capacity, including a move to restore agency staff to something approximating their numbers before last year’s DOGE cuts. What’s more, some tweaks to IES workings and grantmaking would require changes in law that would be impossible without bipartisan cooperation in Congress. That leaves open the question of whether there remains a constituency for the kind of large-scale, public-sector research endeavors that have long received the backing of both Democrats and Republicans.

Northern declined to comment for this story. But her recommendations — broadly, that IES limit its focus to a smaller number of national education challenges, reorient its work toward the practical concerns of schools, and foster cooperation among states to scale up their most promising policies — amplify some broadly shared views of where federal data collection needs to go. 

Sara Schapiro, executive director of the advocacy coalition , noted that her group’s recent made some of the same points, as did from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Not only are many of those ideas the subject of broad agreement, she added; they can also be implemented at the discretion of the Institute’s leadership, with no input from lawmakers necessary.

“One of the recommendations was a smaller set of research priorities — IES can just do that,” Schapiro said. “They can require better dissemination [of research] from grantees. They can do some of the rapid-cycle grants we’ve called for and this report calls for. And they can also review and change some of the NCES data collections.” 

Yet any statutory changes would face major headwinds in an era of intense polarization and divided political attention. In 2023, Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy that would have reauthorized the Education Sciences Reform Act, the law that established IES in 2002. It never received a Senate vote, demonstrating to Schapiro that any legislative efforts would be “extraordinarily hard.” 

“We weren’t able to get it over the finish line during the Biden administration, with an easier congressional landscape,” she acknowledged.

David Cleary, a former high-level Republican staffer who helped pass major education laws across more than two decades working in Congress, wrote in an email that the most promising potential revamp might lie in the of Trump administration official Jim O’Neill to lead the National Science Foundation. An interagency agreement between NSF and IES could allow the two organizations to pool resources and expertise going forward. (Two such agreements between the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Beyond such administrative wrangling, however, Cleary said the education policy community needed to “buckle down and do hard things well instead of doing easy things poorly.” He cited the recent momentum of state-led literacy initiatives, galvanized partly through their partnership with federally funded research labs, as an example for lawmakers to follow. 

“The challenge is getting staff and members to think a little more dispassionately about what needs to be researched and funded,” Cleary wrote. “Instead of letting every question be asked, every project funded, every idea pursued, we should model after the successful endeavors on the science of reading.”

Veteran research administrator Cara Jackson, who worked at a private research organization that collaborated with IES until losing her job last year, said she agreed with portions of Northern’s critique, noting the long wait times that contractors anticipated when receiving feedback from the Institute’s various offices and stakeholders. She argued that greater transparency in the research process, including a dashboard allowing the public to track the time and money expended on each project, would foster more “mutual accountability” on all sides.

Nevertheless, it was a “strange sequence” to call for reforms after largely dismantling the Institute’s workforce, Jackson continued. Well-intentioned proposals to award funding and release data on a faster timetable would likely falter if not enough employees existed to simply push money out the door to grantees and contractors. 

“There were people there who were already acting on these ideas and could have been doing that all this time,” Jackson observed. “Now you’re going to have to hire people to do it. It takes forever to hire government employees, and we haven’t made the job any more attractive by letting go of all these people.”

In one classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language: an exercise in labeling text features. Students defined the types of language and carefully annotated the text with examples of both kinds, concluding with a perfunctory discussion.

In the other classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language, but went further, grappling with what Neil Armstrong meant by “one giant leap for mankind” and connecting the famous phrase to the broader significance of the moon landing. The teacher engaged students by asking them if they, third graders firmly located on planet Earth, were part of the “mankind” of whom Armstrong spoke as he stepped onto the moon. The power of the text and the instruction echoed through that classroom.

Both teachers used the same high quality instructional materials. Only one truly supported students in building meaning. Across classrooms and districts, this pattern repeats, according to a.

In nearly two-thirds of 111 observed comprehension lessons, the work that students did supported only surface-level comprehension — a literal or task-oriented, partial understanding of the text that stops short of the deeper and fuller comprehension work readers need to engage in to succeed in later grades and beyond. Only 24% of lessons fostered robust comprehension, the kind that integrates literal and inferential understanding into a cohesive mental model of the text.

In other words: the curriculum is there. The materials are being used. But, in many classrooms, the meaning-making is missing.

SRI’s research focused on four large school districts that have implemented high quality curricula — including Core Knowledge Language Arts, Wit & Wisdom, and EL Education — for several years. Researchers surveyed 539 teachers who reported near-daily use of their district-adopted curriculum.

Students in these districts are reading and discussing knowledge-rich texts. On paper, this is what policymakers hoped for when states began recommending adoption of such curriculum.

But SRI also sent observers into classrooms in those four districts. The observations showed that teachers spent high proportions of class time on comprehension instruction, and that lessons featured many opportunities for student participation and highly engaged students. These findings represent the notable successes of the districts’ comprehension-focused curriculum implementation. But the comprehension instruction often stopped with the task — finding details, answering literal questions, naming text structures — without guiding students toward the bigger ideas and themes that define deep comprehension.

High quality instructional materials can lay the foundation for robust comprehension instruction. But they cannot deliver it on their own.

This is not just an instruction problem; it’s a systems problem. Curriculum designers, district leaders and instructional coaches may be unaware of the extent to which systemic practices determine the depth of comprehension instruction. SRI’s findings point to multiple well-meaning school and district forces that unintentionally nudge instruction toward the shallow end.

SRI researchers found narrow “standards-aligned,” “data-driven” approaches guiding teachers to focus on discrete skills and individual standards, despite the reality that comprehension standards are not individually measurable. There’s also insufficient teacher time spent discussing, analyzing and mastering the texts — and their content — as they prepare to teach knowledge-rich curriculum

Administrator classroom walkthrough observation rubrics and checklists often reward the most visible aspects of a comprehension lesson — posted objectives, student participation andx curricular materials in use — rather than what actually matters: Are students making meaning?

In short, well-intentioned systems may be signaling to teachers that addressing standards, completing tasks and tests, and simply using curriculum materials are the most important goals. But SRI’s findings suggest that these efforts might distract teachers from the true goal of teaching students to understand texts.  

SRI’s analysis of the 24% of observed lessons that did foster robust comprehension points to six teaching practices that matter. These practices include engaging students in text-specific analysis, modeling meaning-making, leveraging prior knowledge, providing instructive feedback, creating opportunities for text-based reasoning and structuring peer learning. These practices were more tightly correlated with robust comprehension — suggesting they could be steps toward how teachers might shift their practice toward that goal.

None of these are new ideas. Educators have talked for years about modeling, text-based evidence, and rich peer-to-peer discussion. What is new is the clarity with which we observed how these practices must be oriented toward the big ideas of a text — not merely toward a task — to move instruction from surface to substance.

For example, in one lesson, a teacher used strong instructional modeling to show students how to collect key details and paraphrase a main idea. Then, she showed students how to do it in a history text about how new navigational technologies facilitated European exploration of the New World, truly unlocking robust comprehension.

For policymakers and system leaders who championed high quality materials as a lever for literacy improvement, these findings offer both a warning and a roadmap. Fortunately, the districts involved have the literacy leadership and professional learning infrastructure to make key shifts toward robust comprehension instruction. Three next steps for literacy leaders stand out:

1. Define and communicate a clear vision for robust comprehension instruction. Districts must go beyond “fidelity” to curriculum and articulate what deep understanding looks like for students and what it demands from instruction. Discussion, writing, knowledge-building, and standards are all part of the story, but ultimately, robust comprehension must be the target.

2. Reorient professional learning around the knowledge-building texts and their meaning. Teachers need structured opportunities to build the historical, literary, and scientific content knowledge necessary to facilitate robust understandings of the knowledge-building texts. Their professional learning should require deep, collective unpacking of all the nuances in the texts. .

3. Align observation and assessment systems to priorities for instruction. If tools and interim assessments measure only surface features, surface-level instruction will persist. Systems must adopt tools that can discern whether instruction leads students toward robust comprehension and use that data transparently to support improvement.

These changes are not small lifts, but they are essential.

Perhaps the most hopeful finding in the study is this: Lessons that supported robust comprehension didn’t just deepen learning, they increased student motivation and engagement. Students liked these lessons more. The students in the robust One Giant Leap lesson could see themselves in the Apollo mission — and on the moon.

In short, the path to better literacy outcomes is also a path to more joyful teaching and learning.

SRI Education and The 74 both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies

A University of Southern California published Monday surveyed roughly 1,700 parents and 364 students ages 13 to 17 last fall. Researchers used the annual to analyze students’ cellphone use and their , along with parents’ perceptions of the restrictions. At least have some form of ban or limitation on cellphones during instructional time.

About 98% of students attend schools with cell phone restrictions, according to the study. Some 76% of teens and 93% of parents said they support some type of ban. 

But the researchers found that students still use their cellphones in school. About two-thirds of teens at schools with complete phone bans said they use their device during the day, including in class, and more than half of students whose school restricts cellphones during instructional time don’t follow the rules.

“The results are pointing towards both parents and teens wanting to have at least some form of restrictions on cell phone use in classrooms — neither are reporting major downsides,” said Anna Saavedra, one of the study’s researchers. “(Students and parents) are really supportive of the restrictions and they even support making rules stronger. Part of the challenge has been that even though schools have these rules, teens are telling us that they’re breaking them.”

Most students reported two categories of cellphone bans: either prohibiting use for the entire day or only during instructional time. Nearly 75% of teens said that no matter the policy, their school still lets them keep their phones with them. Some 5% said their school doesn’t permit cellphones on school property. 

The study also found that teens use their phone in school for an average of 1.5 hours a day regardless of the type of ban. That matches other that found students ages 13 to 18 spend an average of 70 minutes on their smartphones during the school day, typically using social media or gaming apps. 

Restricting cellphone use only during class instruction is a rule that 68% of students and 53% of parents support. About 24% of teens and 7% of parents said they would prefer no restrictions.

Overall, 42% of teens and 76% of parents said their schools’ rules are “just right.” About 48% of students and 8% of parents thought they were too strict. Half of students said their school’s rules were different and stricter than the previous year’s. 

Most teachers enforce phone policies, according to the study. Nearly two-thirds of students said their teacher gives a verbal warning if someone breaks the rules. Other common consequences include taking the device away for the rest of class or for the entire day; notifying parents; giving detention; or requiring a parent to pick up the phone.

Though the rise of smartphones has been linked to negative student outcomes like poor academic achievement, the teens and adults surveyed by USC said they don’t believe cellphone policies have much of an effect. The majority said the rules had no impact in areas such as sense of community, relationships with teachers and bullying or fighting. The majority of students also said there was no effect on academic performance, making friends or their likelihood of attending school.

About 28% of the teens said the rules made the classroom learning environment better, while 26% said they made it worse. One-third of students said the policies improve academic integrity or reduce cheating, while 19% said the opposite.

A recent University of Pennsylvania of 20,000 educators found that stricter cell phone policies are associated with more positive outcomes reported by teachers. Nearly half of schools in the study have a “no show” rule — where students can have their phones if they keep them out of sight — but this policy isn’t as effective as more restrictive rules. 

“The stricter the policy, the happier the teacher and the less likely students are to be using their phones when they aren’t supposed to,” said University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth about the data. “We’re also finding that focus on academics is higher in schools that do not permit students to keep their phones nearby, including in their backpacks or back pockets.”

Disclosure: The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Working in high schools, for example, I had never heard of “,” or the body of evidence against teaching young readers to use “contextual and syntactic clues” instead of phonics. But this research explained why the 17-year-old student who read “indignant” as “indifferent” continued to struggle when I instructed him to look at the letters in the word again.

 It also made sense that excessive was harmful and that having a in a random subject didn’t necessarily make someone a better teacher. I was glad to learn that researchers cared about these issues and that educational leaders could rely on serious evidence to inform their policies. 

I was also open to being persuaded by the evidence. As an English language arts teacher, I’d repeatedly been told that it didn’t really matter what books students were reading as long as they were learning the right skills. Research demonstrating the crucial role of content knowledge, however, cast my classroom experiences in a new light. I don’t regret introducing my students to engaging young adult novels, but I do wish we had spent more time on “classic” texts. 

But what never sat right with me was the research community’s prevalent view that a teacher’s experience didn’t make much difference after the first few years. Some decades ago, several empirical studies failed to detect significant gains after three to five years of teaching. What emerged from these findings was an oversimplified narrative that teachers’ abilities simply plateau after the initial learning curve. “Once somebody has taught for three years,” Bill Gates, “their teaching quality does not change thereafter.” 

Of course, some teachers stop improving. That’s true of professionals in any field. But the idea that most teachers are as effective after 15 years on the job as they are after three to five is entirely at odds with my experience. 

During my six years as a high school teacher — with a backdrop of six years teaching college undergrads — I felt myself improve in myriad ways. Some of the biggest changes were indeed during the first few years. Early feedback from supervisors helped me foster more substantive discussions and better align my end-of-class assessments to the learning objectives. 

But other things took more time. I developed organizational systems that worked for me. I continued to refine my approach with students, finding that balance between approachable and serious. I got better at anticipating student misconceptions and knowing which explanations would be most likely to land. 

The most experienced teachers whom I observed also did these things — and many more that are tough to reduce to a single sentence. Having been in the classroom longer, they had simply encountered more situations to inform their decision-making in the present. 

Students getting heated arguing in class? Based on what had (and hadn’t) worked before, highly experienced teachers smoothly de-escalated. Revisiting related ideas across course units? Years of familiarity with the curriculum helped them notice patterns, understand student perceptions, and weave together content. Possible red flags around new behaviors or trends? These teachers had longstanding relationships with staff and faculty across the school, equipping them to communicate questions and concerns efficiently and often nipping problems in the bud as a result. 

Reflecting these realities, recent empirical research complicates the longstanding three-to-five-year-plateau narrative. As detailed in from the Learning Policy Institute and my own organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, teachers improve most quickly in their first few years, but they continue to improve for up to two decades into their careers. 

This doesn’t mean that every experienced teacher will be better than every new-ish colleague, but rather that teachers tend to improve compared to their own prior performance. All this is especially true when teachers work in collaborative environments (can confirm!) and have consistent teaching assignments (sounds dreamy!). 

So what does that mean in practical terms? 

For administrators and policymakers, the biggest takeaway is that it’s worthwhile to ensure quality mentorships, professional learning and opportunities for collaboration. Where feasible, it makes sense to keep teachers with the same course assignments. Rotating grade levels might give teachers a breadth of knowledge, for example, but they’re going to be better equipped to educate students if they have a depth of course-specific knowledge. 

Perhaps most challenging to address is the unfortunate reality that the highest-need schools tend to have. There’s no silver bullet to address this complex phenomenon, but evidence suggests that improving, offering and creating career ladders can each help. 

Schools are complex places, and ultimately, no single study or perspective is adequate to guide policymaking. In the new year, education leaders should use insights from both research and practice to support teacher growth and retention and, in turn, improve student outcomes.

The revealed that of the 16 states that require districts to offer paid parental leave, only two — Arkansas and Delaware — give teachers their full wages up to 12 weeks. Six other states offer partial pay for up to three months.

Access to paid leave decreases postpartum depression and boosts the likelihood that employees will return to their jobs after having a child, according to the study. Multiple national medical organizations a minimum of 12 weeks of paid time off for new parents.

The number of large school districts offering paid parental leave has in the last three years, from 27 to 64. About 40 are located in states that don’t require the benefit. While this shows district-level progress, the lack of state mandates allows schools to refuse to take action, said Heather Peske, NCTQ president.

“What we know is that leaving it up to districts leaves too much to chance, and it leaves too many teachers high and dry,” she said. 

A 2024 by RAND Corp. found that 32% of teachers have access to paid parental leave, compared with 46% of similar working adults. Of those who received the benefit, 46% of teachers thought it was an adequate amount, compared with 78% of other adults.

The new report highlighted Arkansas as a , saying it’s a prime example of why states need to enact paid leave requirements. An optional program created in 2023 allowed the state and districts to evenly split the cost of substitutes who covered for teachers who were absent for up to 12 weeks. But only 10% of districts participated. 

Last year, lawmakers changed it to a mandatory, state-funded benefit that covered the full cost of long-term substitutes. The study said results of the new program are still unknown because it only took effect in August.

Washington state offers teachers the most time off: 12 to 16 weeks that can be extended to 18 in cases where pregnancy or birth complications arise. But the state offers only partial pay.

Maryland has a cap of $1,000 per week during parental leave, while Minnesota’s program covers between 55% and 90% of teachers’ salaries, depending on income level. In 2019, New Jersey increased its for eligible workers — including teachers — from 66% to 85% of their average wage. That change resulted in a 70% hike in program participation.

Seven states and the District of Columbia provide educators with full pay, but for a shorter amount of time, like six or eight weeks.

In , lawmakers debated in 2018 whether paid parental leave was the best use of limited state dollars, according to the study. Following months of advocacy, Delaware eventually created the nation’s first paid parental leave program for teachers, which NCTQ considers to be a model policy. It offered 12 weeks off, funded by an employee payroll contribution of less than 1%, and the state reimbursed districts for the cost of long-term substitutes. About 3% of teachers used the paid leave benefit in 2024.

“If states reimburse districts the cost of long-term substitutes, districts need only maintain normal operating costs by paying teachers’ salaries as usual,” the study said. “This policy ensures that educators receive their full pay during leave, while having minimal impact on the state’s overall budget.”

NCTQ also recommends that states extend paid parental leave to all teachers who become parents, including fathers and educators who foster or adopt children. About one-third of states that provide paid leave offer reduced benefits for non-birthing parents or none at all. 

“Research shows that when both parents have access to paid leave, families grow stronger, children are healthier and women experience greater career outcomes,” Peske said. “Ensuring leave benefits for all parents helps attract and retain talented teachers in the classroom.”

The , published Jan. 13 from the , analyzed records from more than 1.7 million Michigan K-8 students who switched from a district to a charter school between 2013 and 2018. 

The nonprofit concluded that while students with disabilities spent more time in general-education classrooms and received less intensive services than their peers in traditional public schools, their standardized test scores increased along with those of their classmates who didn’t qualify for special ed.

Charter enrollment for students with disabilities has historically trailed behind that of public schools. While parents sometimes charter schools after poor experiences with traditional districts, charters also have a regarding special education. One found that charter schools may discourage parents from enrolling their children with disabilities because of concerns about how special education students impact overall academic performance and budgets.

But the results in Michigan show that children who receive special education services do well academically with fewer supports when they enter charter schools, “suggesting charters may have adopted, identified and developed approaches to teaching students with disabilities that warrant further study,” the research says.

“Charter schools can be a useful educational tool for parents with students with disabilities,” said Scott Imberman, one of the study’s authors. “They shouldn’t be quick to rule it out, because it does seem that, for at least a substantial segment of disabled students, charter schools are helpful for them — at least for their academic performance.”

The study found that math and reading test scores improved for both special education and general education students for at least two years after they enrolled in a charter school. Absence rates also decreased.

These findings match a in Boston, which revealed that children with disabilities who were accepted at a charter school through a lottery system were more likely to meet college-ready benchmarks than special education students in traditional public schools.

Imberman said that because children with complicated special education needs tend not to enroll in charter schools, the study’s results suggest students with less severe disabilities can thrive alongside the general-education population.

The study used students’ individualized education plans to see how special education services changed after enrollment in a charter school. Before switching, all students spent an average of 2.3% of their school day in a special education setting. The rate dropped to 1.2% immediately after entering a charter school but rebounded to pre-charter levels by the third year of enrollment.

Identification rates for special education students also mostly stayed the same — around 14.5% — when students switched, but then gradually increased. Two to three years after charter school enrollment, special education identification rates increased 1 to 2 percentage points.

The study also analyzed the use of resource and cognitive programs, two areas of special education services that are tailored to specific student needs. Resource programs often provide services to students who spend most of their school day in a general education classroom, while cognitive programs include more costly and intensive therapies, and students usually work with a designated special education instructor, according to the study. 

Once Michigan students with IEPs switched from a traditional public school to a charter, participation in resource programs increased by 4 percentage points, while cognitive programming decreased by 5 points.

A key limitation of the study is that the research only shows what was written in students’ IEPs and what changed post-enrollment in a charter. It does not reveal whether the school actually followed through with required services. 

“Our data also does not reflect the perspectives of students and families,” the study said. “It is essential that students with disabilities are included in future research on school choice to understand whether their needs are being met in different choice contexts.”

Recently, charter schools in and were found to have violated special education laws, and one in suspended students with disabilities at three times the state average.

Imberman said many charter schools aren’t set up to effectively serve some special education students, especially those with severe disabilities that require costly therapies and assistance.

“This is a large concern in the back and forth with traditional schools and charter schools, particularly when it comes to students with disabilities — that even if students with disabilities are entering charters, the ones who are most expensive are the ones who remain in the traditional public schools,” he said. “That creates a disproportionate burden on the traditional public schools.”

The , led by the University of California-Riverside, followed more than 54,000 South Carolina students from the time they entered ninth grade at low-performing schools — primarily between the years 2000 and 2005 — until 2017, when most were in their early 30s.

The arrest rate for graduates of unsatisfactory schools was 19.7%, versus 22.4% for below-average schools. 

The study also found improvements in student academic performance and school climate, but no changes involving teacher turnover, per-pupil spending or the replacement of principals.

“It appears that accountability pressures prompted schools to implement policies that led to changes in school climate, which, in turn, manifest as improvements in short-term success and long-term reductions in criminal involvement,” the study said.

In , schools can be labeled unsatisfactory, below average, average, good or excellent. Low-performing schools are often required to create an improvement plan and set by the state. If schools don’t make progress, the state may replace their leaders or even take over. 

Researchers have of school accountability systems — another recent study found that only 29% of school leaders across the nation said the ratings help improve student outcomes. 

But other that turnaround programs are associated with better attendance, test scores and graduation rates.

The California researchers measured school climate by the percentage of students who felt satisfied with their learning, social and physical environments at school. The student satisfaction with the learning environment at unsatisfactory schools was nearly 65%, compared with 60.6% in below-average schools. Satisfaction with the social and physical environment was about 71% for unsatisfactory schools but 66.4% for those that were below average.

More than 64% of 10th graders passed standardized tests in unsatisfactory schools compared to 61.6% in below average schools. 

“Improving low-performing schools is a perennial problem,” the study said. “Policymakers have implemented various strategies to turn around struggling schools. Our findings are intriguing in that they suggest the existence of policies and practices that low-performing schools have implemented when they faced increased accountability pressures.”

Amid these developments — some amazing research and resources have emerged for the field. As the year comes to a close, zero2eight asked early care and education experts to share what they consider to be the sector’s must-read research of 2025. What emerged from their responses were a collection of reports, studies and data tools relevant to a number of urgent themes. These include the sector’s ability to respond to current events, new ways of thinking about preschool gains and economic analysis of some of the ongoing challenges facing the early care and education workforce. 

Here are some of the themes, studies and resources identified by the field’s insiders as essential to moving the sector forward.

1. Timely Research and Resources for Challenging Times

Steeply rising costs, and have all contributed to a challenging, fast-changing landscape for families and early educators, and reliant on public benefits. The following new research and tools offer timely insights into how such pressures are reshaping families’ lives and the early care and education sector, with some offering inspiration for how to respond. 

Working Paper: 

Authors: Thomas S. Dee, economist and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: Immigration raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with especially large increases among the youngest students. 

This study highlights the field’s “ability to innovate and be nimble to understand impacts of policy and policy enforcement,” said nominator Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood who studies family well-being. It examines the collateral damage of unexpected immigration raids in California’s Central Valley, documenting a clear pattern in children’s school attendance, said second nominator Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, adding that “ICE raids are associated with increased school absenteeism.” According to the working paper, young children are expected to be the most likely to miss school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade estimated to be far more likely to miss school as a result of immigration raids than high school students. 

Report:

Authors: Children’s Funding Project staff, including Bruno Showers, state policy manager; Lisa Christensen Gee, director of tax policy; Olivia Allen, vice president of strategy and advocacy; Josh Weinstock, policy analyst (former); and Marina Mendoza, senior manager of early childhood impact

Key Takeaway: Facing dwindling federal funds, several states have innovated ways to provide dedicated funding for early care and education and youth programs.

With pandemic-era relief funds running out, states are in desperate need of models for how to continue supporting early care and education, said Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), who nominated this recent report. The report — from Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that helps secure sustainable public funding for children’s services — offers exactly that by providing a crucial, “very comprehensive overview” of how some states are building long-term, dedicated revenue streams for child care, early education and youth programs as federal money runs dry. As the report’s authors explain, stable, dedicated funding is critical to thriving programs, letting states and providers to “budget more than one year at a time, allowing them to make longer-term investments in quality improvement, facilities, staff education, and other key elements of evidence-based programs and services.” 

Data Tools: and

Authors: The diaper need mapping tool was published as part of a research collaboration between the Urban Institute and the National Diaper Bank Network. The affordability tracker was published by the Urban Institute. 

Key takeaway: Families are facing mounting economic insecurity 

The Urban Institute recently released two innovative data tools for policymakers, advocates and researchers that illuminate the increasing economic precariousness facing too many families, said Carman of the RAPID Survey Project. The interactive, produced in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Initiative, shows how many diapers each county across the nation needs to address diaper shortages facing homes with young children that are below 300% of the federal poverty level. illustrates the rising cost pressures facing families across various indicators, including how the price of groceries has changed in counties and congressional districts in recent years. “Being able to see and understand scale and drivers of economic insecurity nationally is very powerful,” wrote Carman. 

2. New Research Reveals Preschool’s Overlooked Impacts

The body of early education research about how preschool affects children often measures child outcomes such as kindergarten readiness, standardized test scores or later graduation rates. While those are all important, Christina Weiland, professor at the Marsal School of Education at the University of Michigan and the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in an email, “we’ve long suspected they aren’t the full picture of preschool’s effects.” Weiland nominated the following working paper as part of what she considers to be a new wave of research that explores a broader set of outcomes than the field has typically examined, such as parent earnings, and subsequent schooling environments. “Together, these studies suggest benefits of preschool programs that have been largely overlooked,” but that are key to fully understanding the potential benefits of early learning investments for children and families, noted Weiland.

Working Paper:

Authors: John Eric Humphries, faculty research fellow at Yale University’s Department of Economics; Christopher Neilson, research associate at Yale University; Xiaoyang Ye, Brown University; and Seth D. Zimmerman, research associate at Yale School of Management 

Key Takeaway: New Haven’s universal pre-K (UPK) program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years.

Weiland said that this notable study, published in 2024 and updated in 2025, expands the preschool picture by looking at how UPK might impact parents’ earnings,” and uses that to estimate the program’s returns on investment. It found that New Haven’s UPK program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years, concluding that the returns to UPK investment are “high.” As one of the first studies looking at “earnings data in modern-day pre-K studies,” noted Weiland, it offers more evidence that the field is “likely underestimating the return on investment early education programs have.” 

3. Spotlight on the Early Child Care Workforce

Back in the spring, child care economist Chris Herbst spoke with zero2eight about how the COVID pandemic demonstrated how the child care workforce is “like a leaf blowing in the wind” — “sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.” Because of this, a new surge of recent research by economists has focused on the workforce, with researchers seeking to understand how early care providers respond to policy and market changes. Nominators pointed toward two such studies. 

Working Paper:

Authors: Katharine C. Sadowski, assistant professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: An increase in minimum wage changes who provides child care

Combining “rich data with sensible research designs,” this study examines how an increase in the minimum wage could impact child care quality and access, noted nominator Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 

Author Katharine C. Sadowski’s findings suggest that an increase to the minimum wage doesn’t lead to a decrease in the number of child care programs or the number of people working in the sector. However, minimum wage policies can influence who provides child care: larger enterprises, such as child care centers, are more likely to open and remain in operation, while smaller, self-employed providers, such as home-based child care programs, are less likely to open or remain in business. Among the smaller establishments that do stay open, the owners are less likely to have advanced degrees, the study found, potentially impacting the quality of child care provided, according to the author. “Unfortunately, minimum wage policy is binding and too important for a lot of child care employers and employees due to chronic underinvestment in the sector,” wrote Sojourner, adding that this is the first paper he’s seen to leverage “restricted-use data available through the U.S. Census Research Data Center system to generate insights on the sector.”

Study:

Authors: Chris M. Herbst, foundation professor in Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs 

Key Takeaway: The education of the early education workforce has dropped over time, possibly due to the sector’s low wages 

This study found that the education levels and cognitive test scores of the early education workforce have been declining over time, suggesting lower teacher quality, which could have implications for children’s development. The study links this dip in teacher skills to the proliferation of early education programs which might divert future child care workers away from four-year colleges. It also looks at how low wages — which have remained low even as wages for other jobs for similarly-skilled workers have increased — might lead highly qualified individuals to choose other occupations. 

“This is analogous to what,” wrote Jessica Brown, assistant professor of economics at University of South Carolina, who nominated the study. It “underscores the importance of the discussion of compensation in early childhood education.” Brown notes that it’s a difficult topic for the field to discuss, because “no one wants to imply that the current workforce is not high quality. But the reality is that compensation challenges mean that child care is not a very attractive job, and that has implications for the quality of the workforce.”

The , published Thursday by the left-leaning , polled 309 K-12 teachers from 38 states and Washington, D.C., with fewer than five years of experience in February about educator retention. 

The issues that have been driving teachers away have worsened in recent years, said Weadé James, one of the survey report’s authors. 

“Teachers are expected to be all things to their students. Not just an instructor, but also a counselor … and then when you factor that into the changes we’ve seen in our economy — teachers cannot afford to live,” she said. “We’ve seen this issue become more prominent in the last 10 or 15 years.”

Nearly 70% of respondents said they have considered quitting or have already left their teaching job. When asked why, 77% said working conditions, including student behavior; 73% chose lack of support, such as professional development; and 69% said insufficient compensation. Other reasons included low student achievement and limited advancement opportunities.

While nearly two-thirds said they received resources or programming from their school during their initial year in the classroom, the majority still felt unprepared to properly teach English learners and students with disabilities.

“Many induction programs are one year,” James said. “You get that intensive support in your first year only, and [schools] neglect to recognize that new teachers are still developing and honing their skills through year five.”

About 80% of respondents said their induction programs included mentorship, and 78% said they received professional development. After their programs ended, teachers felt the most prepared to foster relationships with students, provide data-informed instruction and assess progress in learning.

When it came to compensation, about 64% of teachers surveyed said they disagree or strongly disagree that their pay reflects their area’s cost of living. Only 16% said they are adequately paid for the work they do, while 15% said their salary is high enough to support their family.

Respondents were asked to rank policy issues in order of importance for improving early-career teacher retention. Their top three were pay, benefits and mental health support. Teachers surveyed also want access to affordable housing, high-quality professional development and career advancement.

The most popular solution to low pay, chosen by nearly half of respondents, was to increase salary floors for all positions. With the national average starting teacher salary at $46,526, many educators are making less than what they need to live comfortably in any state, according to the survey. Salary floor increases were in New Mexico, where teachers now make between $55,000 to $75,000, depending on their license.

Other suggestions for improving compensation included eliminating student debt, giving additional pay for performing extra duties and providing raises for teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subject areas.

Teachers surveyed said an increase in sick time would be the best employee benefit a school could offer. Respondents also wanted more paid time off, lower health insurance costs, better insurance coverage, parental leave and a retirement account with employer contributions.

The survey found that teachers with access to paid maternity or parental leave were 11% less likely to consider quitting than those without either option. 

The most common suggestion about how to support teacher well-being was to include time off for mental health days in employee contracts. In 2022, Illinois that allowed teachers to use sick time for mental health days. 

Teachers surveyed said they also need mandated planning time during the day — a change that can improve working conditions, said report co-author Paige Shoemaker DeMio.

“When teachers don’t have enough time in their days to do other aspects of their job — planning for the instruction, grading, contacting parents, analyzing student data — that is really impactful on their working conditions,” she said. “It’s causing a lot of stress, and it’s also causing teachers to spend a lot of time outside of their day doing additional work.”

The , which publishes a national district leader survey every five years, found in a that finance and budget problems are consuming the most time and inhibiting job effectiveness. It also details small gains in superintendent gender and race diversity, but researchers say wide gaps still remain. 

The nonprofit collected responses in September 2024 from nearly 1,100 superintendents from 49 states. About 56% worked in rural districts, while 13% were in a small city and 31% in a suburban or urban area.

About 62% of superintendents said inadequate financing of schools was the largest issue that hindered their job effectiveness, but only 18% chose fiscal management as a top strength. More than half (54%) of respondents said financial issues consumed most of their time, an increase from 45% in 2020.

Underfunding from state governments, the expiration of federal pandemic aid, enrollment declines and funding cuts under the Trump administration have contributed to budget shortfalls for many U.S. districts. The federal education budget for fiscal year 2026 is still under negotiation and .

In a Dec. 4 virtual briefing about the results, Ann LoBue, a Columbia University policy analyst and one of the study’s contributors, said decreased school funding hasn’t kept up with the rising costs of student and family needs.

“As the survey showed, it’s money that matters,” she said. “When asked about the most important problem facing the districts they lead, funding was the most common answer.”

More than one-third of superintendents surveyed said finance and budget planning is a needed area of improvement. Other top answers included stress management, school reform, district politics and community relations. Nearly half of respondents said their district’s financial condition was the most important factor in decisionmaking. 

David Law, superintendent of Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota, said at the briefing that the state education budget is declining as the . While lobbying in the legislature this year, he reminded lawmakers that schools aren’t asking for more money, but instead for a smaller reduction of state aid. 

“Our portion of the state budget and the federal budget is shrinking at a time [when] utilities and health care and transportation are growing at three and four times the rate of investment,” he said. “As a superintendent, we’re having all these conversations about finances, because we’re in this unprecedented time where we’re getting less and things are costing more at an accelerated rate.”

The survey also explored demographics among superintendents nationwide. About 10% of respondents were people of color, an increase from nearly 9% in 2020. The percentage of female superintendents increased from 27% in 2020 to 30% in 2025. 

Despite the upward trend, survey authors said in the briefing that there’s still a lot of work to do to improve gender and race equity among U.S. superintendents. 

The study found that superintendents who were female and identified as Black or Hispanic were more likely to lead districts with higher diversity and more student needs. About 18% of males reached superintendency with just two to four years of teaching experience, versus 9% of females. About 25% of female superintendents had more than 13 years as a classroom teacher, compared with 15% of men.

While 48% of white superintendents said they felt very supported by their communities, only 37% of Black district leaders said the same. 

The survey also projected the percentage of superintendents of color would increase to 12% by 2030. Shawn Joseph, a contributor to the study and superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland, said during the briefing that he’s not optimistic the nation will reach that goal. 

“We’ve got a problem in America with how we prepare leaders of color. In many institutions around the country, you’ll go through a master’s program, a doctoral program and you’ll never experience frameworks that center Black thought or Latinx thought,” he said. “I went to some decent universities to get my doctorate [and] master’s and I was ill equipped to come out and be a Black superintendent.” 

Joseph recommended that professional learning, conferences and workshops focused on superintendent diversity should become more accessible to local leaders to improve the numbers.

In other survey findings: Three-quarters of superintendents said they are spending less time with their family, and 56% reported having fewer or no children because of the job. 

About 89% said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their job, compared with 92% in 2020. Nearly 60% of those surveyed said they planned on being a superintendent in the next five years, which is the same finding as in the 2020 survey. In 2010, the response was 51%.

A published Wednesday from the National Council on Teacher Quality found that teacher preparation programs have contributed to the stagnant growth in educator diversity, which is lagging behind the diversity of the nation’s adult population. While roughly of U.S. working-age adults identify with historically disadvantaged racial groups, such as Black, Native American or Hispanic, only 21% of teachers do.

The NCTQ analyzed 1,526 U.S. teacher colleges from the 2018-19 school year to 2022-23 in its report and found that 40% don’t produce graduating classes that are as diverse as their state’s educator workforce. 

About 21% of teachers in Alabama come from historically disadvantaged groups, versus 16% of candidates who graduate from preparation programs. In Washington, D.C., the educator workforce has a 69% diversity rate, but its teacher college graduates are at 32%. 

The most diverse programs are alternative certification pathways run by companies or nonprofits, but research shows that these options have lower standards than traditional colleges and lead to higher teacher turnover.

A diverse teacher workforce at schools improves academic performance, attendance, discipline and sense of belonging for students of color, according to the study. For example, who have one Black teacher are 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to go to college than their peers who didn’t have a teacher of color.

Too many teacher colleges are failing to produce diverse graduating classes and causing students to lose out, said Heather Peske, NCTQ president. 

“We know that a diverse teacher workforce benefits all students, and it especially benefits Black and brown students,” she said. “There’s a lot that we can do right now — on the part of teacher prep programs and states — to reduce the obstacles that particularly discourage Black and brown candidates from coming into the profession and becoming teachers.”

The NCTQ report has three recommendations for state policymakers, schools and teacher colleges to increase workforce diversity: bolstering program enrollment by increasing teacher salaries, providing college stipends and introducing younger students to the education field. 

The report said teacher candidates also need more support to earn their certification, such as flexible course schedules and pay for completing required hours in the classroom before graduation. Districts should also improve hiring practices by developing strategies to recruit more school leaders of color, providing mentors to new teachers and improving work culture so educators from historically disadvantaged groups feel welcome, according to the report. 

Teacher preparation programs that have been the target of the federal government this year. In February, the Trump administration canceled millions of dollars in teacher training funding, a decision that’s still wrapped up in .

Peske said many of the NCTQ recommendations are race-neutral and can help all teacher candidates while improving workforce diversity. 

“We really need to focus on the fact that having a diverse teacher workforce means having a high-quality teacher workforce and thinking of practices that can support those goals,” she said.

The report, published Oct. 23, was paired with an online panel discussion featuring Robin Lake, director of the and a group of high school students who shared their perspectives about generative AI. They recommended that schools create policies around generative AI and incorporate it into their everyday learning while being aware of the challenges that come with it.   

Schools have to decide whether to take the leap and invest in these tools or risk missing opportunities to improve instruction, said Lake.

“Whether we like it or not, AI is our future, and our young people will be inheriting it,” she said. . “So we need to act. The question is really whether our education systems will prepare them to shape that future, or be shaped by it — that’s why we think it’s so important that we look at the data carefully and think very intentionally about how we need to make” next steps.

For 22 years, Project Tomorrow has published its Speak Up National Report about technology in education. This year’s polled 29,461 middle and high school students, 5,025 parents, 7,127 teachers and 3,495 administrators about AI.

Here are three takeaways from the report and briefing, which included student panelists Ian Son, a senior at Redondo Union High School in California; Neha Palla, a senior at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Kentucky; and Arnav Hingorani, a junior at Desert Mountain High School in Arizona.

Students think generative AI tools should play a central role in their everyday learning

Today’s students already consider AI part of their education, said Julie Evans, Project Tomorrow’s CEO and moderator of the panel.

“They don’t see it as a bystander, as [something] on the side,” she said. “This isn’t like a project we’re going to do with AI today but you’re not allowed to use it for other things. The students actually see it as part of their entire learning process. We need to catch up and think about what makes sense.”

The report found that 68% of students are familiar with different types of generative AI tools. Two-thirds of middle schoolers and 73% of high schoolers said they should have access to these tools in school, while 61% of parents and 58% of teachers agreed.

Palla said she has used generative AI this year to help her understand linear algebra.

“Having [Google] Gemini or ChatGPT provide explanations behind those linear concepts is really useful because a lot of those conceptual explanations are not present whenever you do a Google search,” she said.

The top ways students want to use generative AI for school include brainstorming ideas about assignments, analyzing notes, getting feedback on writing, accessing tutoring outside of school and summarizing text, according to the report.

About two-thirds of students said AI use in the classroom exposes them to new ideas. Other benefits cited include preparing students for college and future careers, making learning more efficient and saving time. 

“For example, if I’m in a physics class and I just really don’t understand a concept, I could talk to ChatGPT,” Son said. “I could talk basically anything through generative AI, because it could imitate and it could role-play anyone. So just using it in those different ways has just been super helpful, because it’s almost like talking to any type of expert at any time during the day.”

Students are aware of concerns about incorporating AI in the classroom

The report found that when using AI at school, students are most concerned about misinformation, people using it to harm others, false accusations of cheating and data privacy.

“If I’m at school and I’m pulling out ChatGPT, for example, I’m automatically going to be accused of cheating or trying to cheat around my work or being lazy,” Son said. “But I think a lot of the time when I’m using AI, I’m using it to enhance my learning. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat, but we’re actually trying to use AI to help us.”

More than 40% of high school students and 80% of parents said the possibility of false cheating accusations was a serious concern for them, according to the survey. Nearly 90% of teachers are worried about their students cheating when using AI.

Hingorani said that when he tries to use AI for school, he’s cautious about the misinterpretations the tools can give when producing information. 

“AI will make up data. It’ll make up a math problem and how to do it,” he said. “I think [when] using AI all the time and seeing how it works, you start to get an idea of the right way to use artificial intelligence to enhance your learning rather than just getting an answer or perhaps even getting a wrong answer.”

One of Palla’s top concerns is overusing generative AI while doing schoolwork and losing key skills in the process.

“I’m scared that I’ll rely more on AI than my own thinking,” she said. “I feel like critical thinking is something that AI could replace. I feel like every single time I encounter a problem, I’ll just automatically go to AI and see if they have an answer, rather than thinking for myself.”

Schools are lagging with implementation and guidelines

Among schools that have adopted systemic AI use, most use it only for small, isolated tasks instead of expanding it to classroom activities or lessons, according to a July CRPE .

“Schools are focusing really narrowly on plagiarism detection or saving teachers a few minutes of grading time,” Lake said. “Not to diminish the importance of that, but what we’re seeing as a missed opportunity is that they’re not able to focus on the possibilities for using AI to truly transform learning.”

Project Tomorrow’s report found that teachers’ lack of familiarity with generative AI causes them to avoid using the tools in class.More than half of teachers said they haven’t had any discussions with their students about AI, and only 13% are very confident in using the tools for their own productivity or to advance student learning.

Hingorani said that in his school district, Scottsdale United, teachers don’t know how to address questions about AI because administrators and policymakers haven’t created guidelines around its use. 

“So many teachers are like, ‘I don’t know what the current policy is,’ ” he said. “I think that’s the fundamental issue a lot of districts are facing right now.”

Only 15% of teachers in the report said their school districts provide enough professional development for effective use of AI in the classroom. About 61% of students were unsure whether their school has AI policies.

“I think teachers are automatically compelled to have a stigma toward it,” Palla said. “I think providing resources to allow teachers to learn about it will make them more willing to integrate those tools into a classroom.”

These are among key findings of a new into ways to address the continuing turnover and shortage of special education and ESL teachers that has existed for more than three decades. 

The analysis showed that mentorship, teacher and principal preparation standards, tests of reading instruction knowledge, pay and professional development are key to retaining and recruiting these educators.

Students with disabilities and English learners face some of the most persistent academic challenges, partly because of a lack of access to high-quality teachers, said NCTQ President Heather Peske.

“Despite their potential, many of these students are not meeting even really basic thresholds in reading and math, and this is not for any fault of the students themselves,” she said. “It’s really because they don’t have access to the kinds of qualified and effective teachers that they need.”

The report recommends improved state policies to address attrition in these areas:

Teacher mentorship

The analysis found that half of states don’t require prospective educators to complete their student teaching under the supervision of an educator who is certified in the same subject area they are training to work in. Most are in the western United States, including states like Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and Nevada. 

Having a mentor certified in the same field allows the college students to see what teaching special ed will actually be like and increases their chances of staying in the subject area once they finish their degree, according to the report. The analysis highlighted a study of more than 250 people who completed special education teacher preparation in Massachusetts, which found that those with a supervisor licensed in special education were 12% less likely to leave the workforce.

Teacher preparation standards

Clear state standards for teacher preparation programs ensure that aspiring educators get the skills needed to serve students with disabilities, the report said. Ten states don’t have explicit special education standards for teacher colleges, while 16 lack defined English learner standards.

The analysis highlights Texas, which created for ESL and bilingual education in 2019. These include understanding the foundations of language acquisition and adapting instruction to meet student needs.

Principal preparation standards

Less than half of states require principal preparation programs to address special education in coursework, while only 13 do the same for English learners. Without an understanding of effective ways to serve students with disabilities or English learners, principals are less prepared to improve outcomes for them and retain the teachers who serve them, the report said. 

Research has that principals are a key factor in creating an inclusive environment for special education students. One said that many new school administrators “find themselves suddenly thrust into situations in which they must be the final arbiter on matters related to strange-sounding issues such as IEPs [individual education programs], 504 [disability discrimination] decisions, due-process hearings and IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] compliance.”

In Iowa, teacher colleges are to provide evidence that candidates are equipped to address the needs of English learners or students with disabilities, the report said. 

Reading instruction

The analysis found that 17 states require special education teacher candidates to demonstrate their knowledge of literacy instruction using a test the NCTQ deems effective. In 2023, the nonprofit reported that 29 states and the District of Columbia use weak reading instruction tests that aspiring elementary educators must pass to obtain a license. NCTQ studied 25 tests that states use and identified 15 as weak — with only four considered acceptable and six considered strong.

Just five states — California, Idaho, New Mexico, Louisiana and Maryland — require English learner teacher candidates to pass acceptable tests, the report said.

“Wisconsin, for example, uses a strong or acceptable reading licensure test, but they don’t presently require special education teachers to take that test and pass it,” Peske said. “We would say that this is an example of low-hanging fruit when it comes to policymaking.”

The NCTQ reported that 70% of fourth graders with disabilities and 67% who are English learners scored below the basic level in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

English learners are also at an increased risk of being identified for special education because of literacy-related struggles, the report said.

“With so many states right now focused on reading and implementing relatively new reading laws, it was surprising to us to find that states are also not requiring their teachers, especially of students with disabilities, and their English learner teachers to take and pass an acceptable reading licensure test,” Peske said.

Teacher pay

The report said that paying teachers in critical shortage areas more than those in general education can improve retention and recruitment in hard-to-staff areas. But has found that the additional compensation must be at least 7.5% of a teacher’s base salary — about $5,000 — to make a difference.

Only 18 states offer higher salaries or bonuses for special education educators, while eight states do so for English learner teachers.

An annual state-funded $10,000 incentive in Hawaii improved special education teacher shortages. The bonuses, which , reduced by 35% the number of teaching positions that were vacant or filled by an unlicensed teacher.

“Interestingly, it did little to improve retention among current special educators,” the report said. “Instead, the reduction in vacancies was driven almost entirely by general-education teachers — who were presumably dual-certified — transitioning into special education roles.”

The nonprofit said the policy was also successful because of its simplicity. All Hawaii special education teachers were automatically eligible, and there was no application process. 

Professional development

High-quality professional learning can improve retention for special education and English learner teachers, the report said. Currently, 40 states provide professional development for both fields. Oregon, Hawaii, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia are the only states that don’t offer professional learning for either position.

The report highlights Rhode Island, which recently adopted guidelines that require professional learning specifically for teachers of multilingual learners.

Peske said each of the above policy areas is equally important for lawmakers to consider. “If a state really wants to build a strong teacher workforce for students with disabilities and English learners, we would advise them to use these fixed [policy] levers together,” she said.

As education leaders, we cannot afford to limit our search for solutions to what we conventionally think of as “education interventions.” What if one of our most powerful tools for improving student outcomes has been overlooked because it doesn’t fit neatly into our current frameworks?

Early evidence that air filters could improve education outcomes started to emerge years before the COVID-19 pandemic and came from a surprising source: a natural gas leak in Aliso Canyon, California. In late 2015 the gas company, facing public pressure, installed commercial-grade air purifiers in every classroom within a five-mile radius. Michael Gilraine, an economist studying the incident, recognized a rare opportunity: Schools just inside the five-mile boundary received air filters, while demographically similar schools just outside the artificial boundary did not.

that students in schools with air filters saw their test scores jump: Math scores increased by about three months of learning, and English scores were close behind. The gains persisted and even grew over time. To put this effect size into context, students in the most prominent class-size study, the — who were randomly placed in much smaller classes averaging 15 students instead of 22 — experienced roughly similar gains.

That intervention cost about $7,000 per student in today’s dollars. The Aliso Canyon air purifiers, electricity costs, and replacement filters combined cost about $1000 per classroom, approximately $30 per student, less than 1% of what Tennessee spent to reduce class sizes by a third. With recent innovations in air purifiers, annual costs per classroom could be considerably less.

If these effect sizes replicate — and further research is needed — air cleaning would significantly outperform the highest-regarded interventions in the U.S. education world for its cost, including the Perry Preschool study, high-dosage tutoring, and Head Start.

The evidence base for the education benefits of portable air cleaners – on top of the health benefits – is growing:

• A found that air purifiers cut student absenteeism by 12.5%, with even larger effects for students with higher starting rates of absenteeism. The intervention was highly cost-effective,
• Illness-related absences plummeted by 55% when .
•  Improving ventilation and removing mold in schools led to in English and math scores as well as pass rates.
• Israeli students on high-stakes exams when air pollution spiked on test day. were found in China. 
• Even modest rises in air pollution in China. 
• Just two hours of breathing filtered air .

Air quality improvements appear to create cascading benefits across multiple systems: First, there are direct cognitive gains. Fine particulate matter that students and staff inhale doesn’t just irritate lungs, it crosses into the bloodstream, triggers systemic inflammation and can even breach the blood-brain barrier. Breathing cleaner air helps you think faster, remember more and make fewer errors.

Second, there are direct health improvements, which in turn affect both attendance and performance. Reducing respiratory infections, allergies and asthma triggers keeps students and staff healthier and in school. Fewer sick days means more instructional time, less reliance on substitutes and better instructional continuity. And fewer infections mean fewer sick days for parents, too. At a time when measles cases are on the rise nationally, tuberculosis is at its highest rates in decades in multiple states and are showing the H5N1 influenza virus is airborne, this is a particularly critical moment to make sure our students can breathe safe air.

Third, this intervention helps address inherent inequalities in our education systems. Schools serving low-income communities are more likely to be near highways, industrial facilities and other sources of air pollution that are known to negatively impact students. These students are also more likely to learn in older buildings with poor ventilation and decaying materials whose dust, often toxic, ends up in students’ lungs. Cleaning the air is likely to benefit all students, but especially those who are worst off economically.

Thankfully the administrative burden, which often makes or breaks even highly promising interventions, is minimal. Reducing class sizes requires hiring more teachers, building more classrooms and restructuring schedules. High-dosage tutoring entails recruiting, training, scheduling and coordination. Air purifiers? Order them online, plug them in, and quickly change filters once a year – no need for expensive retrofits.

We cannot afford to ignore air quality in education. Many school systems recognized this during the pandemic and purchased new equipment, but some have turned off or unplugged their devices, perhaps thinking that they were only necessary during the height of COVID-19 transmission to help keep schools open. As we begin the new school year, let’s reconnect these devices and install new filters, often as little as $50 to $100 a classroom.

For school systems that don’t yet have portable air cleaners, consider first piloting and then rolling out system-wide. These districts should install devices in every classroom and staff room, aiming for a Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) of at least 30 cubic feet per minute per student and quieter than 50 decibels. Schools should monitor not just test scores but also absenteeism, nurse visits and teacher satisfaction.

Philanthropy can add air cleaning interventions to its portfolios alongside more traditional education grantmaking. They can create programs that provide devices to under-resourced schools, fund larger trials to further evaluate the promising findings to date, underwrite R&D for even more effective and quiet air purifiers for classrooms and develop bulk purchasing agreements to reduce costs.

Advocates and activists can build coalitions for indoor air quality standards in schools and funding for air quality programs. Researchers can advance large-scale randomized controlled trials examining student, teacher and even parent outcomes across grade levels.

We’re living through a paradigm shift in our understanding of indoor air quality which has handed education an unexpected gift: a simple, affordable, and powerful tool for improving education. We’d be foolish not to use it.

As the department undertakes this effort, especially in light of deep cuts to IES and that took place earlier this year, it’s important to recognize and protect what’s working in our federal education research and development system, as well as what needs improvement. If department leaders are serious about revisiting their approach to IES, there are concrete steps they can take to protect and strengthen education research and development, making it even more effective and efficient in the long run.

, a coalition of leading education research and development organizations across the country, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon outlining actionable recommendations for the administration. These recommendations fall into three categories: prioritizing research that addresses pressing state and local needs; maximizing impact through coordination, scale, and infrastructure; and helping states and districts turn their knowledge into operational success through improved communication and support.

Education researchers, policymakers and educators should be part of the process of identifying the most urgent needs or research questions. To accomplish that, the department should establish learning agendas, which can help identify and align those priorities.

Once those needs are identified, the administration can create faster research tracks for high-need topics, using IES’s current grant program as a model for success. It can also streamline study approvals by decentralizing IES’s review processes and accelerating launch and response timelines. And it should lean on rapid-cycle tools like the School PULSE survey to deliver real-time data to states and districts.

To streamline the collection and use of data relevant to school communities across the country, the administration can pursue modernizations like the innovative 2024 creation of EDPass, which transformed the way states submit federal reports to EDfacts, reduced the burden of those submitting data and enabled faster public reporting. Programs like the Regional Education Laboratories and Comprehensive Centers (CCs) were already working in close partnership with states and districts; IES can restart these programs and build on their strengths by positioning RELs to identify key, local data and evidence needs, and using CCs to support the implementation of evidence-based policies and practices.

Building on ongoing efforts, the administration can act now to solve the “last mile” challenge: ensuring valuable data and evidence-based policies and programs make it into classrooms in ways that are clear and actionable. Harnessing new technologies such as artificial intelligence and social media, along with and approaches such as professional networks and coaching structures in school districts, can help reach teachers frequently and repeatedly to provide up-to-date, trustworthy information on what works, where and why.

The administration can require every applicable IES-funded research study on policy and practice to include a practitioner-facing implementation resource, and create a framework for recognizing states, districts, and even individual educators that are using research and evidence-based policy effectively to improve student achievement.  

At its best, the federal education research and development system generates valuable evidence on what works, supports states and districts in addressing their unique needs, collects and analyzes vital national data, and represents a critical cross-country link to share valuable insights and best practices across states and regions.

The recommendations outlined above – informed by researchers and educators on the front lines of supporting our nation’s students and families – will help ensure that every part of the system is more responsive to the needs of states and districts and can transform isolated success stories into scalable, sustained improvement. 

Our collective goal should be to build a federal education research and development system that is efficient, effective, and accountable. The administration can make progress toward that goal by working collaboratively with the researchers and educators, and by focusing on strategic updates to IES that will pave the way for stronger research and development now and, ultimately, better outcomes for students, educators and families across the country. 

The superintendent waits for her turn to step to the mic. She’s here to explain the district’s new artificial intelligence pilot: a tool teachers say will give them back an hour per day for one-on-one time with their students. She’s just two minutes into her explanation of how the tool will work, when the first parent stands up and approaches the mic. She’s followed by others, who form an increasingly long line. The first parent calls the tool “surveillance.” The second warns of “robots grading our kids,” and a third questions “what are we paying teachers for.” By the time the vote happens, the pilot is tabled. The tool hasn’t failed. The story has.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the 2000s, No Child Left Behind brought nationwide accountability; in the 2010s, Race to the Top accelerated standards and testing. But then Common Core arrived and, in too many places, the fight wasn’t about better learning but about who was in charge. A student data platform launched into a vacuum of trust. District tools that could lighten teacher workload get framed as replacements for teachers. In each case, a new idea walked into an old narrative, and the old narrative won.

This isn’t a communications problem at the end of the process. It’s a design problem at the beginning.

The education sector spends billions designing programs, products and policies but spends almost nothing designing the story that helps people understand what they are and what they do. When narrative is an afterthought, the public makes meaning on its own, using their most familiar, vivid and available shortcuts.

Those shortcuts are powerful:

• Top-down control: When reforms arrive without local authors, communities read them as done to them, not with them.
• Data equals danger: Years of breaches and sloppy practice have built a trust deficit with families.
• Tech replaces people: In schools, the default story about technology as substitution — a zero-sum trade against human connection and judgment.

The result is predictable: Good ideas stall not because they’re bad ideas, but because their stories arrive late, or not at all.

A Better Way to Build: Frame → Test → Iterate → Scale

Narratives can be built with the same rigor brought to product development. As researchers who’ve spent over two decades framing research across issues from health to early childhood, we’ve learned that meaning-making is designable — and testable — if we treat it like R&D. The key steps include:

Frame. Start by clarifying the story you want people to understand. That means articulating the core ideas — what you want people to know, feel connected to, use, and ask for — and mapping how your audiences currently make sense of the topic: their mental shortcuts, blind spots and sticking points.

Test. Turn those insights into values, metaphors and explanations that close gaps and avoid unproductive defaults. Pressure-test them: on-the-street interviews, small-group conversations, then survey studies that quantify “frame effects” on understanding, support and willingness to act.

Iterate. Use what you learn to refine and improve. Co-design with the people who will use the strategy — teachers, principals, parents, students — and embed short-cycle tests in real communications.

Scale. Package the strategy so others can pick it up: make-and-use toolkits, visuals, model language, and training sessions. Keep support alive with checklists, refreshers and coaching.

Done well, this cycle doesn’t just produce better talking points. It builds a shared narrative that prepares the ground so good ideas can take root.

A district hoping to reboot its approach to standards and testing, for instance, could map local mindsets and realize they were up against a consistent pattern of thinking: that standards are being read as a scoreboard for punishment, not a roadmap for instruction. 

The team could reframe the work around “clear signposts for students’ future success” and swap abstract promises for concrete examples: student work samples, teacher-led walkthroughs, and community nights where families tried out classroom tasks. Instead of a press release about new assessments, the launch could lead with a values statement: “We need to give every student a fair shot and clear feedback.” The debate wouldn’t disappear, but it would move forward. People would begin to argue about how to do the work well, not whether to do it at all.

The same approach could work for a district introducing an AI pilot. Before getting started, district leaders could put four words on the whiteboard: Frame. Test. Iterate. Scale. Early on-the-street interviews would reveal the dominant default understanding: AI will watch our kids and sideline our teachers. So the team could test a different narrative: AI as a teaching assistant that handles routine tasks and frees teachers to do what only humans can do: build relationships, diagnose misconceptions and motivate. 

What Works — and What Backfires

Through our work, we’ve distilled some key insights for education leaders trying to implement new approaches:

• Lead with widely shared values — like every student needs a fair shot and schools should equip young people to thrive. Start with why before what.
• Give the public a picture in their heads. Tested metaphors like “co-pilot,” “teaching assistant,” or “signposts” help people picture how a tool or policy works and what it changes.
• Explain the mechanism. Don’t just claim impact; show the steps from cause to effect (e.g., AI drafts feedback → teachers spend more time in 1:1 interactions → students revise more often).
• Show the humans. Center teachers and students explicitly; make technology the helper, not the hero.
• Name and neutralize risks. Address privacy, bias and misuse plainly and show your guardrails.
• Avoid traps. “Silver bullet,” “crisis-only” and “us vs. them” framing activates skepticism, scarcity and blame. They shrink your coalition and make backlash easier to trigger.

Public reaction to today’s ideas is shaped by yesterday’s scars. Communities remember when reforms felt like they arrived from far away, when data was used on them rather than for them, and when vendors treated schools like markets instead of partners. If we ignore that history, our messages will land as spin and we’ll just add to skepticism and doubt.

Trust is rebuilt through design choices: who authors the narrative, whose voices lead, what benefits arrive first and for whom, and how transparently we report what we learn. When communities that have shouldered the most underinvestment see themselves in the story — and see safeguards and benefits by design — support grows and sticks.

Innovation doesn’t lack for ideas. It lacks the narrative infrastructure that makes them legible, trustworthy and adoptable. The fix is straightforward: put narrative prototyping on the critical path. Fund it. Time-box it. Test it. Ship it alongside the product or policy.

If we do, school board nights will sound different. Less rumor, more reasoning. Fewer boogeymen, more “show me how.” More time on what matters most — students learning well, with adults they trust.

Let’s build the stories that give great ideas a chance to work.

Amid this flurry of activity, one major potential shift in federal education policy has received little attention: the $0 budget line for adult education programs in Trump’s proposal for FY 2026.

Many people may be unfamiliar with adult education programs and the services they provide. These programs serve adult learners who aren’t part of the traditional K-12 or higher education sectors. There are two main constituencies: adult dropouts and others with skills below the high school leve,l and adults who lack English language skills.

The roots of federally supported adult education stretch back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered chaplains to teach basic literacy to troops at Valley Forge. The modern system took shape under President Lyndon Johnson, whose 1964 Economic Opportunity Act established adult education as a pillar of his Great Society agenda.

Today, more than 1.2 million adults enroll in programs offered by libraries, school districts, community colleges, and nonprofits across all 50 states, D.C., and U.S. territories — at an average cost of just $2,000 a student, a fraction of K-12 or college education.

The Trump administration has already sought to withhold current funding for adult education, only to release the money along with other grants. It defends eliminating federal funding for adult education by claiming that K-12 improvements will make adult programs unnecessary and that existing efforts show “dismal results.” Neither claim holds up.

The idea that stronger K-12 outcomes will erase the need for adult education ignores the millions of adults already outside that system. And while research is still developing, the best studies show clear benefits. In our of an adult ESL program in Massachusetts, participants saw earnings gains that led to increased tax revenues when compared to similar adults who applied to the program but did not win an enrollment lottery. The increased tax revenue more than covered the cost of the program, yielding an estimated 6% return to taxpayers.

Public adult education programs, as we know them, are highly dependent on federal funds. Federal funding represents a much larger share — about one third — of funding for adult education than for K-12 (about 10%), meaning cuts to federal revenue will hit this sector particularly hard. 

Federal funding also provides incentives for investments in adult education by states, which are required to provide matching funds of at least 25%, a requirement most states substantially exceed. Moreover, the constituencies affected by these cuts will be geographically and politically broad: the target populations for these education services, low-skilled adults and immigrants,  are concentrated or growing most rapidly in red states. 

Trump’s proposed budget is now in the hands of Congress. As economists and researchers in the field, we envision a future where continued investment — and rigorous study — helps us better understand how adult education delivers value for individuals and society. But we already know enough to act. The evidence to date points clearly in one direction: Adult education works, especially for English learners. Congress should reject these proposed cuts and reaffirm its commitment to educational opportunity at every stage of life. 

Except education.

In 2025, most students still learn in a system designed a century ago. Despite pockets of innovation, public education remains largely standardized and slow to adapt — ill-equipped to meet the needs of every learner in a changing world. 

This lag isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s a threat to our global competitiveness and our young people’s futures. If we want to engage and prepare students for the opportunities and challenges ahead, states must prioritize education R&D to transform education systems: investing in new ideas, testing what works and scaling promising approaches. While the United States consistently on assessments, sitting idle isn’t an option. 

As states navigate a changing federal landscape where they are encouraged to take the reins of their education systems, now is the opportunity to adopt R&D as a top strategic priority. Fortunately, states don’t have to start from scratch. Across the country, leaders are leveraging communities, learning science, and holistic outcomes to lay the foundation for R&D conditions and infrastructure.

In Washington State, the is guiding future policy for high-quality mastery-based learning by transforming student experiences in almost 50 schools across the state. Through rigorous evaluation, Washington is collecting insight into the time and resources required to implement new teaching and learning systems.

Wyoming created the , uniting the governor’s office, education department, universities and school administrators around a shared vision for the future of education. The state’s aims to shift teaching and learning practices toward more student-centered approaches aligned with its Profile of a Graduate. State pilot programs have reached half of Wyoming’s students, and the state has been able to identify and address roadblocks that prevent schools from implementing these practices.

In Virginia, Old Dominion University’s Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity leads the state’s and collaborates with educators, researchers, and designers to advance Virginia’s mission of transforming education. This work was spurred by a $100 million state investment in developing lab schools to test innovative teaching methods. 

And in Massachusetts, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to examine how technology can be leveraged to support district priorities, including refining the use of specific technologies, centering digital equity and showcasing best practices around technology integration in alignment with district goals.

These efforts show that meaningful R&D in education is not only possible, it’s happening. This starts with a bold vision and an aligned public research agenda, informed by and responsive to communities’ needs. from Education Reimagined, Transcend, and the Alliance for Learning Innovation, outlines steps that states can take to build the infrastructure and conditions to enable system-wide education R&D. These include:

• Create dedicated capacity within SEAs or partner institutions/organizations with staff whose primary responsibility is shepherding this work across systems.
• Empower local leaders to test evidence-based solutions and develop innovative models that improve learner experiences and inform systems transformation.
• Build supporting infrastructure, including strong data systems to inform continuous improvement and innovation networks that connect and leverage the insights educators, researchers, and communities.

Most importantly, this work requires fundamental changes in how we approach educational transformation. State leaders can model critical mindset shifts and create cultures of trust and empowerment that embrace calculated risks, diverse evidence, and learner-centered design.

If we care about the future success of our young people, and our competitiveness as a nation, it’s past time to invest in the engine that powers other sectors to evolve and thrive. Learners deserve an education system that leverages R&D to enhance and continuously improve their experiences and outcomes. States must lead the way. 

Districts are asking the right questions. They want proof before investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials, subscriptions, training, and ongoing professional development. And they’re right to demand it. The conversation around literacy has shifted dramatically in recent years. We’ve moved away from a once-universally accepted balanced literacy approach that, frankly, didn’t deliver the results kids needed, toward a science of reading movement that is rooted in decades of research and evidence. 

Today, purchasing a curriculum without proven, evidence-based research is essentially taking someone’s word for it — and in a time where literacy outcomes matter more than ever, that’s a gamble no district can afford. The programs districts adopt must prove they actually work for their students — not just sound good in a sales pitch. Evidence is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It’s the foundation for trust and impact. 

And that’s fair. In fact, that’s what my whole job is about: building and sharing that evidence. But here’s the tricky part. 

The same school systems that request research often lack the capacity to participate in it. 

We’re living in the age of evidence-based everything. ESSA tiers. State-approved lists. Instructional audit checklists. Curriculum reviews. The pressure is real, and research has rightfully taken center stage. 

But here’s the rub. While districts want the receipts, most don’t have the bandwidth or resources to help create them. 

And it’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they’re stretched. Schools are still recovering from pandemic whiplash. Teachers are overloaded. Leaders are managing competing priorities. Just the thought of one more thing can feel like a nonstarter. 

So when we invite a district into a formal research study — even a light-lift, no-cost one — we usually hear some version of: We love the idea, but maybe next year.

When districts say “no” to participating in research, the entire field misses out. We lose opportunities to learn, measure, and improve — not just as curriculum publishing companies, but as an industry that’s trying to do right by students. 

It can seem like only the “big” curriculum companies end up with robust studies, but even they face the same roadblocks as the newcomers or the niche solutions. Getting real-world classrooms to open their doors for data collection is challenging for everyone. Unfortunately, the current landscape essentially creates a “rich get richer” cycle, where companies with existing evidence appear more attractive. At the same time, newer or evolving programs struggle to gather the data needed to prove their impact — regardless of how effective they might be. 

The result? We all end up with a shallow pool of evidence that doesn’t fully reflect what works best for students. And that’s not the kind of ecosystem any of us need. 

In my role at , I’m empathetic to the undeniable challenges across the education system. Administrators, curriculum directors, and educators are juggling more than ever, and participating in a research study can feel like one more ask on a pile of existing asks. 

And I don’t blame them. Traditional curriculum research models are often heavy lifts for districts. They require hours of teacher surveys, multiple layers of classroom observations, endless data pulls, and little to no ongoing support from the vendor. It’s no wonder districts hesitate — they simply don’t have the time, capacity, or trust that their effort will be worth it. 

The research model needs a seismic shift that’s more of a partnership and less of a researcher-subject relationship — a model that’s built to make research doable and beneficial for everyone involved. 

This model should prioritize: 

• A single point of contact to guide the process from start to finish
• Quick touchpoints to help define goals and stay aligned
• Light classroom observations that are short, purposeful, and unobtrusive 
• One short teacher survey that takes minutes, not hours
• Built-in coaching and check-ins so teachers feel confident and supported throughout
• Custom reports schools can actually use, with data that tells their stories 

It’s not just “do this for us.” It’s “let’s do this together.” If we want to raise the bar on curriculum quality, we all must work together — school districts, publishers, and researchers. We need each other to help weed out the ineffective solutions and elevate the proven ones. 

So here’s my ask to any superintendents, curriculum directors, principals, or other education leaders out there: Say yes to research.

Not just as a consumer of evidence, but as a co-creator. It’s an opportunity to tell your school’s story clearly and credibly— grounded in student outcomes. 

The next generation of evidence-based programs won’t come from ivory towers or glossy marketing decks. 

They’ll come from classrooms like yours. 

This system must be rebuilt, and it must be done thoughtfully, with student success as the guiding goal.

Data are among the most important tools available for understanding what’s working and what isn’t in education. For higher education especially, data are critical for identifying problems, spotlighting solutions and distinguishing colleges and universities that deliver strong student outcomes from those in need of improvement. IES has long provided trusted, rigorous data that inform decisionmaking and drive policy change. But the agency and the insights it supports are now in jeopardy.

The administration’s cuts have real consequences for students, families, states, policymakersand the country.

Every year, over 1 million peopleuse tools powered by federal data to make decisions about college and about higher education policy. The , for example, helps prospective applicants compare schools by cost, student loan debt, graduation rates and post-graduation earnings. However, colleges have reported system outages when trying to upload information to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which the scorecard relies upon. In addition, staffers responsible for verifying, approving and publishing the data have been terminated — along with 90% of all IES personnel. Equally troubling, the Department of Education canceled the contract that provided training to the professionals who report data to the system, risking the quality and integrity of the information. 

In February, IES did away with other vital data collections, including the and its longitudinal follow-up study about the outcomes of first-time college students, the . These data sources are essential to answering basic questions like: Who enrolls in college? Who transfers? Who completes their degree? How do students pay for college? How do graduates fare in the workforce? While the contract for the 2024 postsecondary student aid data collection was reinstated June 30, questions remain about the scope of that study and its future, as well its related longitudinal studies. These concerns are especially pertinent as IES remains severely understaffed and the Trump administration has proposed a 67% budget cut for fiscal year 2026.

IES’ outlook remains wholly unclear. The administration has not outlined a plan, nor has it sought any public input to determine its future. Some officials have advocated scattering the Education Department’s responsibilities across other agencies, but they have not explained how they would preserve researcher access and data quality under such a fragmented system. This creates uncertainty for students, families, state officials and researchers — and threatens to destroy a system that took decades to build, undermining the future of evidence-based policymaking.

A newly department senior adviser, Dr. Amber Northern, is reportedly focusing on IES reform. But without swift and transparent action, the damage risks becoming permanent. The nation doesn’t need a patchwork fix. It needs a clear, thoughtful and ambitious plan to rebuild its education data infrastructure. That starts with a few key principles: 

First, protect the principles that made IES so crucial in the first place: statistical rigor, public transparency, data security, privacy protections, data accessibility and responsiveness to stakeholder input. 

Second, recognize that no state or private entity can replace what the federal government is uniquely equipped to do: mandate consistent reporting across colleges, access administrative data across agencies and ensure national comparability.

Third, recognize that federal data are a public good, and that changes to them should be informed by stakeholders — states, colleges, education researchers, policy analysts, policymakers and, of course, students and families. Any reform must be conceived with their needs in mind.

Fourth, think bigger. Set an ambitious vision for the depth, breadth and scope of education data and research that the nation truly needs.

America’s future relies on the strength of its education system — and education decisions made by students, families, educators, states and policymakers ought to be informed by the best available data and research. If students are to succeed, the nation must commit to providing and learning from the data. As the Education Department and Congress consider their next steps, they face a pivotal choice: continue to erode critical data systems, replace what existed before or seize the moment to design something stronger — a system worthy of the students it’s meant to serve.

The renowned education professor at the University of California, Irvine, had spent years studying how the newest technologies can be used to improve English language instruction. His , funded through the National Science Foundation, aimed to create a series of bilingual Spanish-English e-books that would use artificial intelligence to guide young readers through each text and prompt them with questions. 

But in the last week of April, he learned that the supporting grant for the project had been cancelled, issued by NSF’s education division, at the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The of the cuts, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, targeted education studies like those conducted at Irvine’s , which Warschauer directs.

The professor grew more concerned as he considered the possible consequences of DOGE’s moves. He spent the last few years helping design programs that within families of English learners, even on a set of AI-powered videos that measurably improved students’ science knowledge. The results had been impressive. But without federal dollars, they couldn’t realistically be sustained, let alone expanded.

“I could go from having a well-funded research lab — one that supported a lot of graduate students and post-docs, and had a very ambitious research agenda — to pretty much drying up in a few years and needing to lay off everyone working for me,” Warschauer reflected.

His worries have echoed throughout the nation’s sprawling education research infrastructure since February, when the administration severed scores of contracts through the Institute of Education Sciences, the principal knowledge-gathering body within the U.S. Department of Education. Within weeks, further announcements were made of mass layoffs totalling half the department’s manpower, including roughly 90 percent of the IES staff. Questions even arose around the future of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the only coast-to-coast benchmark of student achievement.

Several experts told The 74 that the diminution of both staffing and resources leaves the core functions of K–12 research in doubt. Reduced support for the , an online library promoting evidence-based practices in education, could leave district leaders unequipped to navigate the billion-dollar world of school-based products and services. Deferred updates to long-running data sets to experts investigating key questions like school choice and early literacy. Uncertain employment conditions have already driven established professionals from the field, even while interrupting the early-career trajectories of the next generation of scholars. 

Among the motivations cited for the campaign is the charge that Washington has promoting “woke” ideological content. Warschauer said that while his professional interests resulted partially from his past service as an ESL teacher, he rejected the precepts of critical theory and simply wanted to pursue better learning outcomes for struggling kids.

“My research is about having high standards of education for our poor, our underserved, and those who are not succeeding, and helping them succeed better,” he said. “To me, that’s not a woke agenda; it’s something that, until the last five years, every Republican politician in the country has agreed with.”

The administration has tweaked some aspects of its strategy, bringing in to oversee the future of the department’s research efforts and reviving a portion of the contracts it had halted. But especially following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which formally authorized the widespread reductions in force while other litigation is being considered, many now believe the end is in sight. 

Cara Jackson served as president of the , one of the foremost professional organizations for education researchers, when the unwinding began. The consortium is now against the administration, alleging that its actions violate laws governing how federal agencies may behave. She fears that, whatever the outcome of that litigation, the attempt to sweep aside decades of systems and collaborations between government, universities, and private actors will severely limit America’s insights into what, and whether, its children are actually learning.

“The entire time IES has existed, it has done a lot to advance the field and the quality of research that is being produced,” she said. “It just feels like we’re going back into the dark ages.”

A retreat from ‘what works’

Jackson’s own life was upended by the events of the last few months. She was laid off in March when her employer, the research and consulting company , significantly scaled back its work in education evaluations. 

Abt is part of the archipelago of private firms that have long partnered with the federal government, many of which saw terminated by IES this winter. The commitments ranged widely in size and focus — from a $430,000 commitment to collect responses to a school crime survey to to implement programs preparing disabled students for success after high school.

Much of Jackson’s time was spent developing the What Works Clearinghouse’s line of , which distill the findings of complex social science into digestible recommendations for classroom teachers and district leaders. have been published since 2007, with several more in the pipeline earlier this year — including proposals for texts on chronic absenteeism and student behavior problems, two of the biggest issues facing schools in the post-COVID era.

Those projects may be indefinitely postponed, if not scuppered entirely, by both the reduction of the Institute’s contracts and harrowing of its workforce. 

“The biggest thing that frustrates me as a taxpayer is that we paid a lot of money for these practice guides to be created, and they’re not going to go into the world now because they got abruptly stopped,” Jackson said. 

Betsy Wolf, a research scientist who was among the throngs of departing IES employees, had been working on a project that attempted to apply the findings from cognitive science to inform STEM teachers. She said she was pessimistic about the prospects of reconstituting the work that had already been done into some future product, especially in the absence of so many staffers.

“We lost computer access, and we couldn’t even email people externally,” Wolf recalled. “As far as I’m aware, the department didn’t get back any of the stuff it paid for. And you couldn’t just get someone in to pick it back up because it may not even exist right now.”

The Clearinghouse is not without critics, including who have argued that its guides don’t offer suggestions in language that teachers can easily understand. that past publications have misinterpreted research findings or classified programs incorrectly. 

But the need for stronger evidence in teaching methods has been highlighted over the past few years by a series of controversies related to shoddy or questionable instruction. Families in San Francisco have a proposal that would delay the teaching of algebra I until the ninth grade to address achievement gaps — a move that , a later analysis found — while districts around the country on reading curricula derived from the discredited “whole language” theory of literacy.

Some observers fret that progress may be threatened in areas where K–12 leaders have used existing research to dramatically improve outcomes. In February, the department eliminated over $300 million in contracts with 10 Regional Education Labs, including one that partnered with Mississippi to lead a dramatic improvement in the state’s persistently low reading performance. [The Trump administration as part of a broader reversal, according to a June legal filing: Though not required by the court, the department announced that it would rehire several dozen employees and restart roughly one-fifth of the contracts that had previously been suspended.]

Elizabeth Tipton is a statistician at Northwestern University who also serves as the director of the , another professional organization the administration over its cuts. If anything, she said, Washington should endeavor to strengthen the powers of agencies like IES to more strictly regulate a marketplace for school materials and technology that often . Without an entity to function in the manner of the Food and Drug Administration, the world of K–12 products resembles that of herbal supplements, she argued.

“I don’t understand how it’s woke, I don’t understand why it’s inefficient, I don’t understand why DOGE would be against it, I just don’t understand the argument,” Tipton said. “It’s actually good for kids to understand what works and to invest in that science.”

Lost data 

As it evaluates various policies and classroom interventions, the government also collects huge troves of data on students’ backgrounds, the kinds of schooling they access, and their success both during and after their time as students. The progress of those long-running data sets, mostly housed within the 158-year-old National Center for Education Statistics, have also been stalled by the events of the last few months.

Rachel Dinkes is the president and CEO of the , the industry group representing private research organizations like Abt Global, the American Institutes for Research, and the Educational Testing Service. In an interview, she sketched out an uncertain future for some of the biggest education research undertakings of the last few decades

“We heard that her plan is to unwind the mission of the Department of Education,” Dinkes said. “That leads to serious questions about where these research programs will turn to.”

A career statistician and research analyst, she ticked off a laundry list of data collections affected by the Trump administration’s cuts. A pilot program to design new student assessments — part of states’ bargain with Washington to enjoy more autonomy after the end of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2015 — was at the center of that was scrapped after more than five years of work. Over $48 million in funding for the latest iteration of the , which examines how college students finance their education, was also tossed; the insights generated by the survey would have very likely informed future legislation on student borrowing and federal aid, Dinkes said.

But perhaps the biggest hit delivered to NCES data came with to the , which has conducted four major, ongoing studies of children from the earliest years of schooling. The latest addition to the initiative was designed to track the progress of the kindergarten class of 2022–23, a cohort that absorbed much of the social and academic stresses of the COVID era. 

“We were about to get a look at students in the first post-pandemic class of kindergartners and see what they can do,” Dinkes said. “You cannot have a story like that in the future if we don’t have that data.”

A spokesman for the department did not respond to a request for comment on the possible effects of Trump’s flurry of cuts. But McMahon has stated publicly that her agency’s dismantling was necessary, pointing to its time in existence as “an era of stagnation and decline in student achievement.” [In fact, long-term scores in math and literacy have been since the department’s creation in 1980, though the learning loss inflicted by COVID erased much of that progress.]

Mark Chin, a professor of education policy at Vanderbilt University, intended to use his school’s access to ECLS files to assess the impact of school choice programs. Much of the current empirical work on charter or voucher policies is built on information gathered by school districts or state education agencies, which typically identify student demographics, special education status, and socioeconomic status. But the federal data incorporates far richer observations on household structure and parent engagement, including live interviews and survey responses with caregivers. 

With the benefit of that perspective, Chin had hoped to offer a more detailed investigation of the possible differences between families who participate in choice schemes versus those who simply attend their district public schools.That work is currently stalled. 

So too, he added, are countless papers constructed through the use of federal resources, which are usually submitted to department staffers for a once-over before they are released in order to assure both quality control and protect student privacy. The mass layoffs in March could prevent some valuable discoveries from finding their way to the public square.

“In order for this research to become public, it needs to be reviewed by IES,” he said. “Given the state of IES’s staffing, that’s basically not feasible. If you’ve got results, but you can’t put them out there, it’s not being seen by policymakers who really need that information.”

‘They’re never coming back’

As spring has turned to summer, a few promising signs have emerged for scholars whose research was affected by the wave of cuts. 

At the end of June, UC Irvine’s Warschauer was notified that his grants from the National Science Foundation . The reversal was achieved filed by six UC professors who alleged that grants previously awarded through the NSF, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Environmental Protection Agency had been unlawfully slashed. A district judge issued an injunction requiring the funds to be restored, though the ruling can be appealed in a higher court.

In an email, Warschauer said he was “thrilled” with the result, while observing that it would almost certainly be harder to gain future support than it was to revive existing grants.

“This doesn’t make me any more optimistic about new grant opportunities — those are easier (and more justifiable) to control than cancelling grants that people already have,” he wrote. “So the bottom line is that the future of educational research is still very much in jeopardy.”

Under McMahon’s leadership, the Department of Education has taken some steps that have the potential to solidify its future support for research. In an interview with The 74’s Greg Toppo, the secretary vowed to keep in place the NAEP exam. A veteran IES staffer the acting commissioner of NCES, and respected researcher Amber Northern was tapped to serve as McMahon’s senior advisor. 

But even with the dust still settling after months of firings, the toll on the department has already been huge. IES’s headcount , while NCES has reportedly been reduced to just three. Last Monday’s Supreme Court ruling allowed the president to implement those layoffs, rejecting a lower court’s motion to block them.

Other legal challenges to prior cuts haven’t made headway yet. In June, a district court judge for an injunction that would have temporarily required the administration to bring back terminated employees and renew canceled contracts. It will take months, if not longer, for the various strands of litigation to be resolved.

In the meantime, human resources appear to be just as imperiled as financial ones. With federal subsidies still largely up in the air, and job prospects for graduates decidedly hazy, several major universities over the next semester. Some departments within Vanderbilt’s prestigious Peabody College of Education and Human Development are taking new doctoral candidates, but Chin’s academic bailiwick of . 

Chin described the PhD students as the “lifeblood” of his program, lamenting the potential damage to the future of the field.

“They support our research projects, they’re coming up with new ideas, they’re presenting their own work,” he said. “Right now, we have some junior scholars in our department who don’t have PhD advisees yet.”

Among current professionals, the outlook is no brighter. The job market is now glutted with laid off researchers from both the public and private sectors, and with little near-term optimism for more funding, many potential employers are leaning more toward cutting existing overhead rather than picking talent up off the sidelines. 

Northwestern’s Tipton said she was aware of multiple professional contacts who had already left the field for better-paying jobs in other industries where their technical skills are highly valued. Each one, she added, should be seen as a voided investment representing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in past doctoral scholarships and research grants. 

“You see someone get a job, and you’re happy that they’re no longer in this terrible situation,” she said. “But now they’re getting jobs in insurance, tech, or random other fields. And you realize that they’re going to get paid more, and they’re never coming back.”

Give a girl a drone, and she might see her future as a scientist.

But if her teacher doesn’t have the training or resources to turn cool tech into lessons that stick, she’s likely to crash it, get frustrated, and move on.

Take Flight, a research project backed by $1.5 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation, for rural middle schools. The drones could fly in classrooms — no big outdoor space needed. The lessons were developed with teachers and easy for newbies to pick up. And the program placed a particular emphasis on girls, who often get frustrated by the handheld controller while their male classmates, who tend to have more video game experience, whiz by.

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The lessons included real-world scenarios for using drones, like finding a lost child, that often appeal to young girls, and writing exercises to remind kids of what they’re good at before they try something hard.

At first, Laurie Prewandowski wrinkled her nose at Take Flight’s approach. It seemed “touchy feely” to the digital learning specialist who works in a rural New Hampshire middle school and is known as the “drone lady.” But then she saw kids enjoying the lessons and getting a STEM confidence boost.

“All those little things matter,” she said. “It’s really for any kid with a barrier.”

For decades, the federal government believed getting more students interested in science, math, and technology was a national security priority. But in April, the Trump administration cancelled funding for Take Flight . The agency said it, as well as environmental justice and combatting disinformation.

It’s yet another way the Trump administration has sought to undermine efforts specifically and . The administration has frequently claimed this work is, in fact, discriminatory, and has that don’t comply with its civil rights vision, .

Sixteen states sued to stop Trump’s NSF cuts, which represent a . NSF has long been a primary funder of this work, and one of the few institutions that helps researchers not only test new ideas in the classroom, but figure out what worked and why — which is key to replicating a successful program.

Researchers say these cancelled projects have broken trust, won’t be easy to revive, and left lots of data unanalyzed.

At the time Take Flight lost its National Science Foundation grant, its curriculum was being tested by 1,200 students and 30 rural middle school teachers across 10 states.

The research team had promising early data showing the program helped both boys and girls who weren’t interested in science or math before to envision working in a STEM field, said Amanda Bastoni, the lead researcher on the project.

That matters because . They often attend under-funded schools and have less access to high-tech industries than their peers in urban schools. But now researchers won’t be able to follow up with kids to see if Take Flight altered their trajectory in high school.

“The government spent all this money but didn’t get the results,” said Bastoni, who is the director of career technical and adult education at the nonprofit CAST. Without funding, her team has to “turn in a final report that says: We have no idea if this really works or not.”

Why the government funds STEM education research

President Harry S. Truman , in part to recognize the key role scientific research played in World War II.

are essential to the nation’s security, economy, and health. And, for decades, federal lawmakers have charged NSF with getting more people who are underrepresented in STEM into that pipeline to maintain a competitive workforce.

a “comprehensive and continuing program to increase substantially the contribution and advancement of women and minorities” in science and technology.

The law authorized NSF to create fellowships for women, minority recruitment programs, and K-12 programs to boost interest in STEM among girls.

The Trump administration’s approach runs counter to that. On April 18, any efforts by the agency to broaden participation in STEM “must aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere” and “should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

Sixteen attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, , arguing it does exactly the opposite of what Congress asked the agency to do. NSF has yet to file a response in court and a spokesperson for the agency declined to comment on the lawsuit.

It’s still unclear exactly how the Trump administration determined which grants to terminate.

In February, the Washington Post reported that like “cultural relevance,” “diverse backgrounds” and “women” to see if they violated Trump’s executive orders. Some projects previously appeared on , the Republican chair of the Senate science committee.

According to emails shared with Chalkbeat, Jamie French, a budget official with NSF, told researchers who lost their funding that their work no longer aligned with NSF priorities, but did not give more details. French told researchers the decision was final and they could not appeal.

In response to questions from Chalkbeat about why NSF cancelled Take Flight and other research projects, a spokesperson for NSF reiterated that rationale, and said the agency would still fund projects that “promote the progress of science, advance the national health, prosperity and welfare and secure the national defense.”

For Frances Harper, an assistant professor of mathematics education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the change was jarring.

She received a $700,000 grant from NSF in 2021 to work with 10 Black and Latina mothers with children in Knox County Schools. Together, they were studying and what teachers can learn from them.

Some of the Latina mothers in the study, for example, saw that English learners had a lot of anxiety about taking high-stakes tests, so they created a peer study group for them.

When Sethuraman Panchanathan, the NSF director selected during Trump’s first term who also served under President Joe Biden, visited her university in 2023, Harper said, “he asked me to convey to the mothers how much he valued families being involved in NSF projects.”

But after Harper’s research appeared on Cruz’s “woke” list, her university asked her to pause her work. She lost her funding the same day NSF announced changes to its priorities. And .

NSF cuts felt from elementary school to college

from private foundations to salvage what they can. But much of their planned work will no longer be possible.

The Chicago Children’s Museum was working with Latino families from McAuliffe Elementary School in Chicago on a program known as Somos Ingenieros, or We Are Engineers, to get kids interested in engineering early on.

The team ran two after-school programs for around 20 families, but , or to reach the museum and wider school community.

Parents and children met after school for six weeks to learn about building with various materials, including everyday items like sticks, pine cones, and rocks. That helped kids see engineering in their daily lives and it invited immigrant parents who played with those materials as kids to share their own experiences.

Families also got to put their building skills to the test. One group chose to create puppets and had to figure out how to get the intricate pieces to move correctly. Another picked piñatas and had to strategize how to make them hold heavy candy and survive lots of whacks.

Already, the research team was seeing evidence that the program had boosted parents’ confidence to do engineering activities with their children, said Kim Koin, the director of art and tinkering studios at the Chicago Children’s Museum, who was also the lead researcher on the project.

For Ryan Belville, the principal of McAuliffe, the loss of the program means his students will have fewer opportunities to imagine a college or career pathway in STEM and the arts.

“It may be that moment that they made that puppet that makes them want to be an engineer or a scientist,” Belville said.

And for Karletta Chief, much of the harm is in the lost talent and broken trust caused by the abrupt NSF cancellation.

Chief, a professor of environmental science at the University of Arizona, was a lead researcher with the , which received $10 million from NSF to address food, energy, and water crises in Indigenous communities, and to develop pathways for Native Americans and other underrepresented students to pursue environmental careers.

The Alliance had built a vast network of research and mentorship opportunities over six years, Chief said. It was involved in dozens of projects across the U.S., from creating K-12 school curriculum to mentoring Native students as they transitioned from tribal colleges to four-year universities.

“Our partnerships are built on trust and long commitment,” Chief said. “These are relationships that we have built over years, and it was just really unfortunate that we had to say, ‘sorry!’”

Now Chief and others are scrambling to find funding to cover graduate student researchers’ outstanding tuition and health care bills.

She worries even if the cuts were somehow reversed, it would be difficult to put the project back together. Many of the students and staff they had to let go have already taken other jobs.

“There’s a lot of knowledge and expertise that will be lost,” she said. “We were stopped when we were going full force. … Now we just went to zero.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

“Today is perfect for checking your Pace Report!”

“Keep Zearning!”

“By opening this email, you’ve earned another 100 digital raffle tickets in the Zearn Math Giveaway!”

In partnership with Zearn Math, a nonprofit online math instruction platform used by roughly 25% of U.S. elementary school students, Duckworth and a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavior Change for Good Initiative launched a megastudy that peppered 140,000 teachers with different types of email prompts to log into the platform’s dashboard each week and check their students’ progress.

Behavioral scientists like Duckworth, who popularized the “ about a decade ago, spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint what, exactly, it is that prompts an individual to sign a form, become an organ donor or click an ad that promises a secure and safe retirement now.

“In the case of education there’s the idea of nudging the students directly,” Duckworth said. “But there’s also the idea that’s less commonly studied, which is, what do you do to nudge the teachers, who are not in complete charge, but have a lot of authority about what is going to happen in the classroom that day? It was clear to us that if we could get the students onto the Zearn platform that their learning would progress. But are they actually going to log in?”

To that end, the team developed 15 different types of intervention emails featuring things like planning prompts, teaching tips, learning goals, digital swag and celebrity endorsements. The goal was to change behavior without mandates, bans or substantial financial incentives — though teachers were enrolled in a giveaway and earned digital raffle tickets every time they opened an email, increasing their chances of winning such prizes as autographed children’s books, stickers and gift cards. 

The researchers then compared the average number of lessons the teachers’ students completed on the Zearn Math platform over four weeks to a control group using Zearn that received only a simple weekly email.

So did it work? Did the emails prompt teachers to log in more regularly? And if so, did the number of lessons their students completed increase? To some degree, yes, it did work. But not at all to the extent that Duckworth and researchers had anticipated. 

The best-performing intervention, which encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math for an updated report on how their students were doing that week, produced a 5% increase in students’ math progress. Emails that referenced data specific to a teacher’s students — versus those without that information — boosted students’ progress by 2.3%. And teachers who received any of the behaviorally informed email nudge saw their students’ math progress increase by an overall average of 1.9%

Duckworth was sure that the emails featuring famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and literary rockstar Judy Blume would move the needle more than anything else. But teachers were virtually unaffected. 

“We had sexier treatment conditions,” she said. “But no, it turns out, a simple message that says, ‘Hey, your students’ data are here, remember to log in,’ that is what worked the best.”

Notably, the intervention effects were consistent across school socioeconomic status and school type, both public and private. Moreover, they persisted for eight weeks after the email intervention period ended. Collectively, the reminders resulted in students completing an estimated 80,424 additional lessons during the four weeks their teachers received emails, and an estimated 156,117 additional lessons during the following eight weeks.

Yet the limited impact of the email reminders surprised virtually everyone involved with the study: Students whose teachers received any type of behaviorally-informed email reminder only marginally outperformed students whose teachers received a simple email reminder. In fact, the effect was at least 30 times smaller than forecasted by the behavioral scientists who designed interventions, by Zearn Math staff and by a sample of elementary school teachers. 

“It’s a sober reminder that big effects are very rare,” said Duckworth. “In general, we’re finding in our megastudies and what’s emerging across the social sciences is that intervention effects tend to be very small.”

“One of the things that this megastudy has reinforced is a kind of humility about how complicated human beings are and how challenging it is to durably change behavior. A kid is a complicated organism. Teachers are complicated. Schools are complicated,” she continued. “It would be naive to think that you could radically change behavior with these like light touch interventions.”

The findings not only underscore the difficulty of changing behavior, but also the need, Duckworth said, for large-scale, rigorous, empirical research on how to drive impact in math, which is a high-priority subject for education policy experts at the moment. 

Indeed, the findings come at an inflection point for math in the U.S. 

The most recent release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that, nationally, average mathematics scores in 2024 were lower by 3 points among fourth-grade students and lower by 8 points among eighth-grade students compared to their scores in 2019 – the most significant drop since 1990. School districts have struggled to rebound after significant academic setbacks incurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. For math in particular, by the spring of 2022, the average public school student in grades three to eight had lost the equivalent of a half-year of learning.

Compared to students in other developed countries, Americans have ranked in the bottom 25% of students globally on standardized tests of mathematics for decades. U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in their 2022 math results when compared to the 2018 exam — “among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics” for the U.S., according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which administers the exam. 

As a result, a contentious debate has erupted surrounding whether educators are effectively teaching the subject — and whether they themselves are being effectively taught how to teach it. 

“There was a dawning realization that there’s a real urgency around math achievement in the United States,” Duckworth said when her team decided to design the megastudy. “This very light touch nudge was helpful, but it does underscore how hard behavior is to change. And if there are bigger levers to influence teacher behavior, I think we would have found a bigger downstream effect on student achievement.”

In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.

Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.

This would require a feasible restructuring of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to focus on the annual creation and implementation of the NAEP, in contrast to its previous biennial schedule. Additionally, states already have the infrastructure for standardized testing, as all 50 states administer various assessments. 

Some adjustments might be necessary for the reformed IES, which would need to collaborate with state offices responsible for test administration to successfully implement the NAEP on an annual basis for all eligible students, not just the current sample populations. However, there are still many advantages to this approach.

First, NAEP provides a consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance. Many states report higher proficiency rates on their own assessments than on NAEP, creating a false sense of achievement. If all fourth and eighth grade students in states that receive federal Title I funding were required to take the NAEP annually, the discrepancy between state and national standards would become harder to ignore. States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations.

States such as Mississippi have already shown what’s possible when NAEP results are taken seriously. Mississippi’s so-called “miracle” — its leap into the top half of state rankings in 2020 and 2022—demonstrates the value of using NAEP-aligned standards as a driver for systemic change. By contrast, allowing states to accept federal funding without comparable transparency has led to low expectations and weak accountability frameworks.

Second, expanding NAEP would provide parents with a more accurate picture of how their children are performing relative to peers nationwide. Calls for greater in education — amplified during and after the pandemic — have made clear that many families want more than vague reassurances from schools. A truly national assessment would offer objective, comparable data without increasing testing burdens year after year. In its current form, NAEP tests only samples of students, providing no real insight into how individual students or schools are doing.

Third, this proposal could significantly reduce unnecessary s. To receive Title I funding under the , states must administer annual assessments from grades 3 through 8, a requirement that consumes substantial classroom time, financial and instructional resources. 

If Congress eliminated this requirement and recommended that states administer only the NAEP in fourth and eighth grades, that could facilitate more targeted transparent evaluations and reduce assessment costs for states. Additionally, standardized tests administered from grades 3 to 8 may not be necessary for improving student outcomes. A study of test scores in showed that, on average, a student’s test scores in their first year correlated at a rate greater than 0.90 with their next year performance.

Finally, making NAEP universal would offer a balanced form of federal oversight: less intrusive than programmatic mandates, but more informative than current reporting requirements. If decentralization is the path forward for U.S. education, it must be accompanied by a shared yardstick to assess progress. A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.

Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results. The Obama-era effort to tie teacher evaluations to student performance had little impact at the national level, though districts like Dallas and Washington, D.C., saw promising gains. These cases suggest that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts. 

Designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria. It would offer the federal government a low-cost, high-impact mechanism for improving transparency and setting consistent expectations without dictating how states should teach or allocate resources —it would be left up to them.

In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.

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 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: 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 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 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.