Thank you, Amber! My colleague Amber Northern, Fordham’s longtime senior vice president for research, has done American education a great service by recommending a future for the Institute for Education Sciences that goes far beyond undoing the damage done by DOGE a year ago.
On sabbatical from Fordham for seven months and—at the invitation of Secretary McMahon—detailed to the U.S. Department of Education under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), Amber, with help from a solitary research assistant (plus beaucoup interested parties, some invited, some self-invited), produced a 95-page report, subtitled “a strategy for relevance and renewal,” which the powers-that-be, after some dithering, finally made public on Friday at mid-day. Endorsements from those powers were cordial but guarded, as you can see in the accompanying press release, though acting IES director Matthew Soldner separately issued a thoughtful and supportive message via blog.
That’s because, as best one can tell from outside, the administration itself has made no decisions about what actually to do with IES—as it gradually seeks to “eliminate” the Education Department itself, so far by cutting staff, attempting to cut budgets, and outsourcing various programs and duties to other agencies. This silence—or indecision, political wariness, whatever—serves, of course, to make the entire education field less trusting and confident regarding future developments. (Meanwhile, Congress keeps adding funds to various IES activities—and other Department programs—that the White House keeps trying to shrink or zero out.)
How to think about reconstructing IES’s central function within that unwanted department—especially with vast uncertainty as to whether Congress will ever update the aging (2002) Education Sciences Reform Act that created IES? Many of the reforms proposed by Amber could be undertaken under current law, but several major recommendations would require legislative action “should Congress choose to reauthorize ESRA.” These include building a lot more flexibility for states into the “regional labs” program and empowering IES to do direct procurements of cutting-edge projects rather than struggling through the department’s glacial grants-and-contracts unit.