Toward a new agenda for education research

Immediate priorities

The Biden administration should begin moving forward as soon as possible along three paths:

First, it should rebuild the National Board of Education Sciences with members who support rigorous, relevant, and nonpartisan research. The board approves the priorities of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research agency housed within the U.S. Department of Education. During President Donald Trump’s tenure, the board was left to wither on the vine, failing to meet even a single time. A little more than a month before leaving office, however, the president saw fit to appoint eight new members, none of whom has significant experience related to education research (Mervis, 2020). One of the new administration’s goals should be to ensure that the board’s membership reflects not only scientific expertise, but the interests of teachers, education leaders, parents, and community stakeholders in education.

Second, the new administration, along with allies in Congress, should make it a priority to improve the funding and organizational health of the Institute of Education Sciences. Even before the pandemic, education received the fewest dollars to support research and development of any cabinet-level agency (Sargent, 2020). Today, such support is all the more urgent, given the need for research-informed approaches to reopening schools safely and addressing the academic and socioemotional needs of students affected by the pandemic. Further, IES will need to replace staff who left in recent years and improve employee satisfaction, which has plummeted to the bottom 5% of federal offices (Partnership for Public Service & Boston Consulting Group, 2019).

Third, Congress should renew the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which aimed to improve the scientific rigor of education research but did too little to ensure that the research was useful and accessible to state and local education leaders, educators, and communities. Enacted with bipartisan support in 2002, under President George W. Bush, ESRA is now 12 years past due for reauthorization.

Long-term rebuilding

Over the longer term, the Biden administration should work not just to strengthen the quality, relevance, and usefulness of education research in general but, more specifically, to support research into how best to promote equitable learning opportunities and outcomes for all students. To democratize the work that researchers do, making it more responsive to the needs of marginalized students and families, the administration should be guided by four principles:

1. Bring practitioners and communities to the table when setting research priorities: Research agendas should be guided by input from those who will use and benefit from it. Federal policy makers must no longer shut communities, educators, and state and local education leaders out of conversations about research priorities. When rebuilding the National Board of Education Sciences and renewing the Education Sciences Reform Act, the new administration must take steps to ensure that these stakeholders are seated at the table where important decisions are made. In addition, IES should reinstate the Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships in Education program, which supports education leaders in creating joint research agendas with researchers and using the findings to improve schooling. In its next iteration, the program should expand to include community organizations as partners (as modeled by the Spencer Foundation’s Research-Practice Partnerships initiative).

2. Increase access to research and evaluation findings through partnerships: IES often supports high-quality research projects, but the findings too rarely reach the educators and decision makers who are best positioned to make use of them. It is not enough just to post research findings on a website. Rather, IES should work proactively with organizations that connect decision makers at the state, district, and school levels — such as the Council of Chief State School Officers, AASA The School Superintendents Association, the Council of Great City Schools, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers — to ensure that they have access to research and can put it into action. Similarly, IES should collaborate with the private philanthropic community on ways to help under-resourced community organizations draw on high-quality research and participate in evidence-informed decision making.

3. Build the infrastructure for evidence use: It is critically important that education research become more relevant and accessible, but that’s still not enough — state and local education agencies must also develop the capacity to use research for ongoing improvement in their programs and services. A new federal grant program could help local and state agencies create or strengthen their research departments, and the technical assistance provided by the Regional Education Laboratories and Comprehensive Centers could better assist agencies in sustaining that capacity over time. IES should also collaborate with the Office of Innovation and Improvement to support community organizations in using research to drive educational equity. And IES should partner with program offices in the U.S. Department of Education to improve their use of evidence in decision making.

4. Develop an evidence base that is fit for its purpose: The use of research evidence in education is not a one-size-fits-all enterprise. Yet existing federal policy gives priority to just one kind of evidence: data from randomized-controlled trials that answer “what works” questions about the causal impact of education interventions. During the reauthorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act, in particular, the administration should push Congress to adopt a more forward-thinking definition of “evidence-based” school improvement, one that allows for the wide range of research designs and methods needed to answer the varied questions that arise from policy makers, practitioners, and community members. Capable decision making depends not just on impact studies but also on improvement science and implementation research. And to understand how minoritized students and English learners experience their classrooms, researchers often rely on descriptive research, using qualitative as well as quantitative methods. In short, the administration should support a new evidence framework that incentivizes researchers to pursue important questions, using whichever research methods are most appropriate, rather than directing them to use particular research designs.

We can build a better education system, but to do so, we’ll need to reinvest in and rethink education research, making it more relevant, more useful, and more democratic.