Recent funding cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences are an opportunity to reimagine and rebuild the education R&D infrastructure America needs.
Recent funding cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences are an opportunity to reimagine and rebuild the education R&D infrastructure that America needs.
O n February 10, the Department of Government Efficiency chopped away at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), canceling at least 89 contracts worth more than $880 million. Big companies stand to lose lots of money from these terminations. The canceled contracts held by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) are valued at more than $180 million; those held by the Research Triangle Institute (RTI), more than $160 million; and Mathematica’s more than $100 million. Many smaller companies also lost funding. It’s not surprising that the profitable education research-and-development complex has gone ballistic.
Contractors across the nation view DOGE’s actions as catastrophic, and they are mobilizing to overturn the cancellations. That’s natural and reflects how they’ve done business for decades. But recipients of taxpayer dollars must embrace the new reality: Citizens want to see good returns — indeed, any returns — on their taxes; politicians now seem to agree.
The IES contract cancellations are not a “death blow to education studies,” as some have claimed. They are an opportunity for government and companies to reimagine and rebuild the education R&D infrastructure that America needs for the future. The new infrastructure must reflect modern data-collection methods and clean out the Augean stable of old, low-value data activities and the hodgepodge of unrelated research projects funded by the government.
The Institute of Education Sciences is not a household name, so, first, some background. IES is a nonpartisan data-collection and research agency housed in the U.S. Department of Education. Created in 2002, its fiscal year 2024 budget was around $800 million. It is one of the nation’s largest sources of federal funding for education research and statistics. (The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health also conduct education research.) A lot of IES’s work is done through contracts, DOGE’s target for its recent cancellations. Other work is funded through grants, which DOGE has left in place — for now.
IES houses four centers, and the biggest, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), relies mostly on contracts — so it has been hit the hardest. In addition to focusing on, well, statistics, it also houses the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as well as international assessments (such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA).
Rather than bemoan these cuts, we need to acknowledge that education R&D needs a “SpaceX moment.”
SpaceX has reduced the cost of putting a payload into orbit by around 90 percent in just a few years. In contrast to the bloated NASA space program that relies on established (and sometimes troubled) aerospace companies, such as Boeing, SpaceX gets payloads and people into space — and brings them back — at a fraction of the cost at which NASA does. The canceled IES contracts resemble NASA’s big money/old technology thinking rather than SpaceX’s faster, cheaper, better approach to space exploration.
Among the largest canceled IES contracts is one for $57 million to the research company Westat for “the design and conduct of the early childhood longitudinal study” — a multiyear collection of data to track participants’ progress through elementary school. Another, to RTI for $44 million, is for the 2020 High School and Beyond longitudinal study. Throw in another $27 million for postsecondary longitudinal studies and $13 million to AIR for “core support” for these, and that’s a total of around $141 million for longitudinal studies.
NCES has sponsored longitudinal studies since 1972, building on the findings of the 1966 Coleman Report on inequalities of educational opportunity. These studies are among the most expensive that NCES supports, but no one has systematically calculated the return on investment to this $141 million in taxpayer money or examined whether better, more efficient alternatives exist. Do these studies investigate the questions we need answers to in 2025? Is this kind of large-scale survey the best mechanism for gathering data to produce those findings? Can we substitute other data for all or part of these surveys to generate the findings at lower cost? Is there a SpaceX-like alternative that can do a better job for less money?
Another quick example: About $100 million is spent on international educational assessments, including $27 million to AIR to support “core” international activities. An additional $7 million is specifically targeted to support TALIS (the Teaching and Learning International Survey). This teacher survey for member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was designed to satisfy the demands of European teachers’ unions — but the larger, better-known, and more widely used PISA survey has a teacher component that overlaps with and duplicates much of the information sought through TALIS. Why support both?
DOGE, so far, has left IES’s grants alone — the $881 million cuts were all contracts. Most, if not all, contracts with the U.S. government have an escape clause that allows the government to terminate them at the government’s “convenience.” Indeed, the termination letters to the contractors used that language. In contrast, IES grants do not have such an ironclad escape clause — and the Department of Education’s Office of the General Counsel has historically been reluctant to let IES cancel grants, even when it has been clear that the grant projects were unlikely to succeed.
IES’s grant-making, like its contracts, needs to be rethought. Resistance to changing grant-making practices rests heavily on the culture of IES’s research centers. The authorizing legislation of IES calls for “field-initiated research.” The culture of IES’s National Center for Education Research (NCER) has used that vague term to spread its limited research dollars over many different topic areas.
Rather than coordinate research projects to accomplish a mission-critical goal, NCER has prioritized supporting individual research projects put forward by academic researchers. Its business model can be summarized by the three Fs: five years, five million dollars, failure. In 2024, IES spent over $100 million on more than 40 research projects. Far too many of these projects seem designed to advance the careers of academics who publish obscure findings in obscure journals, rather than support student achievement.
While IES spends hundreds of millions each year on data collection and research projects, America’s students are in crisis. The Covid lockdowns accelerated the decline of learning among our most vulnerable and lowest-achieving students. The latest NAEP results show that the system is simply failing them. Research could be key to turning things around. DOGE might have triggered the rethinking we badly need. Change is coming. We should welcome it.