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The parties met remotely, pursuant to notice, at 12:05 p.m.

Participants:
Andrea Miralia, DFO

NBES Board Members (voting:)
Carol Lee
Caroline Sullivan
Conchita De La Concepcion Hernandez Legoretta
Denisa Gandara
Derrick C. Scott
Doug Fuchs
Elmer Guy
Hiro Yoshikawa
James Anaya
Linda Darling Hammond
Dana Hilliard
Ruth Turley
Shaun Harper
Beth Green
Steve Klasko

Non-voting (Ex-officio) members in attendance:
Brett Miller (NIH/NICHD)
James L. Moore (National Science Foundation)

Non-voting members at IES:
Mark Schneider
Elizabeth Albro
Matthew Soldner
Peggy Carr
Nathan Jones

IES Staff:
Andrea Miralia (DFO)
Beth Green
Anne Ricciuti
Craig Stanton
Ellie Pelaez

Proceedings

(12:05 p.m.)

MS. MIRALIA: What I would like to do is mute everyone, and we will get started. I'm just doing this temporarily, but I'm going to get started, and I want to say good morning, everyone. Welcome to the first meeting of the National Board of Education Sciences. I would like to now call this meeting to order.

I'm the Designated Federal Officer, the DFO, for the National Board of Education Sciences. I'm going to begin by taking roll for the voting members and then the ex-officios immediately after.

When I say your name—and I will unmute you—when I say your name, please respond by saying your name and that you're here. This will help the court reporter transcribe the proceedings.

If you're not a member of the Board, I'm going to ask you to please keep your camera and microphone turned off, and that will help reduce some technical problems.

Okay. Let me unmute our Board members. I apologize. One moment.

MALE VOICE: Andrea, do you want us to just unmute ourselves?

MS. MIRALIA: We can do that. That would be wonderful, yes. I wanted to make sure that we don't have everyone in Presenter status. That's actually the problem I was having. But, okay, that would be great.

Carol, can you unmute yourself? Are you able? I'm going to start with first names alphabetically, and go. So that would be Carol Lee is who I'm going to call roll with first. There you are.

MS. LEE: Can you hear me?

MS. MIRALIA: Yes.

MS. LEE: Carol Lee here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Caroline Sullivan?

MS. SULLIVAN: Caroline here. This is going to be confusing. Caroline Sullivan.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you, Caroline. Conchita Hernandez?

MS. HERNANDEZ: Conchita Hernandez here.

MS. MIRALIA: And please do let me know if I mispronounce your name or you prefer to use a nickname, by all means.
Dana Hilliard?

MR. HILLIARD: Dana Hilliard here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Denisa Gandara?

MS. GANDARA: Denisa Gandara here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you very much.
Doug Fuchs?

MR. FUCHS: Doug Fuchs here.

MS. MIRALIA: Derrick Scott?

MR. SCOTT: Derrick Scott present.

MS. MIRALIA: Elmer Guy?

MR. GUY: Elmer Guy is present.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you.
Hiro Yoshikawa?

MR. YOSHIKAWA: Hiro Yoshikawa here.

MS. MIRALIA: Jim Anaya? Jim Anaya, are you here?

(No response.)

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. Linda Darling Hammond?

MS. HAMMOND: Linda Darling Hammond here.

MS. MIRALIA: Ruth Turley? There you go.

MS. TURLEY: Ruth Lopez Turley here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. And Shaun Harper?

MR. HARPER: Shaun Harper here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Steve Klasko?

MR. KLASKO: Steve Klasko is here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you very much, Steve.
Did I miss anybody, Members?

(No response.)

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. Mark Schneider?

MR. SCHNEIDER: Mark Schneider here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Anne Ricciuti?

MR. RICCIUTI: Anne Ricciuti here.

MS. MIRALIA: Craig Stanton?

MR. STANTON: Craig Stanton here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Beth Green?

MS. GREEN: Beth Green here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you, Beth. Matt Soldner?

MR. SOLDNER: Matt Soldner here.

MS. MIRALIA: Liz Albro?

MS. ALBRO: Elizabeth Albro here.

MS. MIRALIA: Peggy Carr?

MS. CARR: Peggy Carr here.

MS. MIRALIA: Nate Jones?

MR. JONES: Nate Jones here.

MS. MIRALIA: Dr. Moore from NSF? James Moore. Sorry.

DR. MOORE: I'm here.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Brett Miller?

MR. MILLER: Brett Miller here.

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. Now do we have any other ex-officios I did not mention?

(No response.)

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. Thank you, everyone. Today we do have several ex-officio nonvoting members in attendance, including the Director of IES, Mark Schneider, and the Directors, Deputy Directors, and Commissioners for the IES Centers, and we'll be hearing from them later.

In addition, we have the ex-officio members from other agencies, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Science Foundation, as well as the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development.

The Census is also an ex-officio member, but it sounds like they are not in attendance.

We do have a number of members of the public in attendance today also, and, again, I'm going to ask everyone who is not a member or ex-officio member to please keep yourself muted and your camera turned off. That will help save on some technical glitches, I believe.

Very briefly, again, I'm the DFO, the Designated Federal Officer, for the Board. A very brief review of housekeeping and ground rules so we can get moving.

Until you all, the voting members of the Board, until you choose your own rules and etiquette, I'm just going to suggest a few of the items, such as use your first names today so that the court reporter can have an accurate transcription, and use either the chat feature in Teams, or, actually, use your hand and raise your hand when you're going to speak or if you want to make a motion. Use the chat function and your actual hand on camera, whichever works better, but I believe the chat function might be easier with this many people in the meeting.

You, the members of the NBES, you are going to be the owners of these meetings, so once you select a chair, you will work with the chair to hire an executive director, and the executive director and the chair will be the ones who organize and run these meetings. Today, I am going to be the timekeeper primarily, and I'll do the majority of the talking until we get the chair elected.

Today's agenda was very skeletal because we want to give the Board the choice to design these agendas in the future. So you're going to work with—again, you're going to work with the executive director to flesh out these agendas and have a lot more to say once we get that chair elected.

I'm sorry, was someone—Mark, were you trying to say something?

Okay. For the sake of simplicity, we're basing today's meeting on Robert's Rules of Order, but this is not mandated, required. It's not a directive. It's just a suggestion really just to keep this meeting somewhat structured and moving.

Let's see. Moving on, I think, at this point, we can move to the ceremonial swearing in. Mark, if you wanted to make a quick welcome, that would be great, and then we can move right into the ceremonial swearing in.

MR. SCHNEIDER: So I want to welcome you all to the Board. We haven't had a functioning Board for some time, and I'm really happy to have one. There's both obligations and responsibilities, as well as, I hope, pleasure in serving on the Board.

When we start talking later on, I think there's a little envy among us that the National Board of Science, for example, has been a major force in trying to get NSF higher visibility and more money.

I need to be very careful about what I advise you with regard to those kinds of efforts, but you've been briefed by the ethics officials about what you can and cannot do. But we look at you both as a source of expertise and, quite frankly, a potential source of, what's the right word, political leverage to help IES continue its path forward.

So, with that, we will have plenty of time for Q&A later on. I hope this is our last virtual meeting because it's always much more fun to bump into people in hallways and talk to people and have, you know, real human interactions instead of looking at a bunch of boxes moving around.

So, hopefully, our next meeting will be in person, and it will probably be—if we're lucky, we won't get snowed on or rained on or whatever, and it would have been a beautiful day in D.C. for a meeting.

So my first official responsibility today is to administer the oath of office. So, actually, I forgot that we're doing it virtually, and I asked Andrea, I said, like, are we going to have a camera crew here to take pictures? Are we all going to stand up in a group photo or what? And she was very polite. She didn't say, hey, dummy, it's virtual, but she did remind me it was virtual. So I probably should take a screenshot or whatever.

Okay. So the oath is extremely simple. I'm sure you've done a variance of this many times. So please raise your right hand. You're sort of on the honesty—yeah. I think I see everybody has their hand up. Okay.

(Oath administered. Ceremonial swearing in.)

MR. SCHNEIDER: Thank you. So welcome to—welcome officially to the Board. Back to you, Andrea.

MS. MIRALIA: I feel like we should applaud there.

At this point in the agenda, we wanted to allow a couple of minutes to review your roles and responsibilities as members of the NBES, the National Board for Education Sciences, specifically, the rules that were spelled out in the Education Sciences Reform Act.

At this point, it would be best to just have clarifying questions, and then, if you have more substantive questions, we could certainly go back and consult with the Office of the General Counsel. But just a quick review. I just have a very brief summary of your roles and responsibilities. This is definitely by no means all inclusive or an exhaustive list that was spelled out in ESRA, the Education Sciences Reform Act.

Some of these duties include advising the Director, that being Mark Schneider, on policies and opportunities; considering the priorities proposed by the Director; approving procedures for peer review; advising on activities to be supported by the Institute; funding for grants; reviewing work of the Institute, including scientifically valid research; ensuring that activities are objective and nonpartisan; soliciting advice from those in the education field. Those are some but not all of the roles and responsibilities of this Advisory Board.

Now did any of you have any clarifying questions that you wanted to ask of Mark and the other members of IES, again, specifically about your roles and responsibilities? I'm looking to see if there are any hands.

(No response.)

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. Okay. Then, if you're ready, we can move towards the nomination process for chair. One of the items that is stated in the Board charter, as well as in ESRA, is that the Board shall elect a chair from among the members of this Board. So you were all emailed a link, those of you who are voting members were emailed a link, to the secret ballot.

Now, before we get to that point, we have to, of course, nominate our candidates.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Andrea, Linda has her hand up.

MS. MIRALIA: Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you.

MS. HAMMOND: That's all right. You can finish your introduction. I want to make a nomination when you finish introducing this.

MR. SCHNEIDER: You're jumping ahead. You're jumping ahead.

MS. HAMMOND: I thought we were ready.

MS. MIRALIA: I respect your enthusiasm, Linda. Thank you very much. Yeah, we're going to follow the standard procedure. I just wanted to make sure in case someone isn't familiar with Robert's Rules of Order and the procedure for nominating, we nominate, and then there needs to be a second. And you are allowed to nominate yourselves. In the past, the Board has discouraged self-nominations, but, again, that is not a requirement, a legal requirement or otherwise, so we will allow for self-nominations. We will be asking for a second as well.

I don't want to overstate it, so I think we can move into the motions for nomination. So do I have a motion to nominate someone for chair?

MS. HAMMOND: Can I?

MS. MIRALIA: Linda, go ahead.

MS. HAMMOND: I'd like to nominate Carol Lee, who is—you sent around all the bios. I'm sure everybody has a little sense of each other. Carol is a learning scientist. She is the current president of the National Academy of Education and past president of the American Educational Research Association and has been thinking about the issues of our research infrastructure for a long time. So I would like to nominate her as our chair.

MS. MIRALIA: Do I have a second?

MR. HARPER: Yeah, I second Linda's nomination of Carol.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. And that was Shaun Harper speaking?

MR. HARPER: Yes.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you, Shaun.
Okay. Carol Lee, do you accept that nomination?

MS. LEE: Yes, I accept.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Okay. Do I have another nomination for chair? I hear binking and beeps, but I'm not sure I see a hand up yet.
Elmer Guy, yes, I see your hand. Thank you.

MR. GUY: I make a motion to cease nomination.

MS. MIRALIA: You make a motion to cease nominations? Is that what you said?

MR. GUY: Yes.

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. Do I have a second?

MR. KLASKO: I'll second that. Steven Klasko.

MS. MIRALIA: Steven, okay. And I see, Dana Hilliard, you raised your hand. You were seconding also? Third? Oops. Dana, I'm sorry, you're muted.
One moment. I cannot unmute you. Are you able to unmute yourself, Dana?

MR. HILLIARD: Yes. That was the second, and then, once it closes, I'd like to make a motion also.

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. So we have a motion seconded and third to cease nominations. Just confirming there are no other nominations for chair.

(No response.)

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. I see no other motions, so we can accept that motion to move on. We do need to still have a vote. So, at this time, again, I just would love—I really want to make sure we have no—okay, Dana, I do see you. Go ahead.

MR. HILLIARD: Thank you. I'd like to make a motion that one ballot be cast and that the ballot reflect that the chair was elected unanimously.

MS. MIRALIA: Okay.

MR. SCOTT: Derrick Scott. Second.

MS. MIRALIA: Okay. Thank you, Derrick.
Thank you. Go ahead. I heard someone. I just don't see who that was.

MS. HAMMOND: So is this the point at which we go find our ballots in our inbox and cast them?

MS. MIRALIA: Yes, please. Yes, please. I just wanted to make sure there were no objections to that. Thank you, Linda.
Yes. If anyone did not receive that link to your ballot, please do let me know, but at this time, the voting members of the Board, you are welcome to go and submit your vote. You will need to type in the name. Then we can go and take five minutes, and I'm going to look for a majority vote, and I'll report in five minutes what our status is. So, if you have not received your link, please do let me know in whatever way you prefer. I'm going to go switch screens and look and see how the votes come in.
(Pause.)

MS. MIRALIA: We have 11 responses so far. Carol, if you would like to make some remarks in a few moments, that would be wonderful, but I'm going to wait for 14. I would love to see 14 votes.
(Pause.)

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you all for voting so quickly. I love being ahead of schedule.
Congratulations, Carol Lee. You are the chair of the National Board for Education Sciences. That was wonderful. That was a thing of beauty, that quick vote. That was certainly much easier than I anticipated, knock on wood. Quick.

MS. LEE: Well, first, let me thank everyone. I'm deeply honored. I didn't expect it to go quite like this, but I'm deeply appreciative.

I think that, you know, we're all here because the challenges that we face in the nation with regard to the education both of our young people and certainly adults are deeply challenging and very, very complicated, and so I take it as a sort of moral imperative, if you will, that we are active, you know, as a Board in supporting the efforts of the Institute and helping us all sort of push the boundaries of the spaces that we currently occupy.

I, in looking at the agenda, I'm hoping, as you all saw that I had sent when we received the agenda, that, hopefully, we will also have some time during this meeting to begin to articulate a meeting schedule for ourselves, an agenda of items we are all very anxious I can tell from the emails that we've had going back and forth to get working specifically on the task ahead of us.

And so, as we proceed through this meeting, we are looking forward to the introductions from the various officers who are here in terms of the presentation by Mark of the priorities that he and his staff have set.

I do think that there are some other working items that we need to address that I'm just going to mention here, so I want to try to make sure that we have time during this meeting to begin to set a timeline at least for this.

One is an opportunity to select our own priorities, and I would hope that we could have some time during this meeting for each Board member to say something briefly about the sort of vision and hopes and priorities that you have for the Board, that we need to address the process and timeline for selecting the executive director and what goals we have for that position. We need to propose a schedule of meetings. I think our meetings so far have been largely sort of procedural, but we need to create at least a beginning tentative schedule for how often we're going to meet.

As I understand from the charter, we have a minimum requirement to meet three times a year. But I think, based on the work ahead of us, we need to meet more often, but I'll just schedule that first face-to face meeting where we can work through some of the details of the topics that I'm just mentioning here.

We need a process, I think, for vetting agenda items for forthcoming meetings so that we have any information that we need to think about these issues individually before we come to actually voting in the meeting.

And we also have, as I read the charter, the opportunity to select and identify standing subcommittees, one of which are subcommittees that meet with the various centers. So we need to make a decision as to whether we wish to do that, whether we want to do this with subcommittees for each of the centers or particular committees.

We also have, I understand, the opportunity to recruit other persons from the public research community, practitioners, who can support the work of those subcommittees working with the various centers.

So, again, these are decisions, I don't expect you to be wrestling with some of these issues today, but I do think we need a meeting soon where these are the particular issues about how we're going to work as a committee that we will put forward.

We also have the opportunity to create additional subcommittees beyond those that support and work with the existing centers, and so I think, again, that's another area that we want to wrestle with and make some decisions.

And, also, I would like us to have on our agenda—again, these are items I think for the next—obviously, for the next meeting, but as I'm sure you all know, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine pulled together a committee to review IES at its 20th anniversary. That committee was headed by Adam Gamoran and Kenne Dibner. And I think that we should review that report, review the recommendations on that report, engage with Mark and the Institute about the uptake of those recommendations.

And then, finally, a question, and I guess this would be a question to—let me get everybody's name right. Miralia, am I saying your name correctly?

MS. MIRALIA: Hi, Carol. My first name is Andrea. But, yes, my last name is pronounced Miralia.

MS. LEE: I'm so sorry.

MS. MIRALIA: No worries.

MS. LEE: Right. It's also my understanding that by the charter, we are supposed to make evaluations, recommendations, with regard to the work of the Institute July 1 of every year. And so where w are in that process relative to what I understand is also something that's not clear, I'm sure many of us would like to get clarification, is I understand that the charter says that we have four-year appointments, and the beautiful certificates that we got say July of 20. So, again, I think many of us have some uncertainty about the length of these 10appointments.

So, as I understand it, the agenda now 12 involves the introduction of the IES offices and 13 centers, and then we'll have a statement from Mark regarding his vision and priorities, and based on this timeline, I think we should still have time to begin to at least minimally have an opportunity for each Board member to articulate what his or her vision is about what our priorities should be and tasks that you think we should be wrestling to address.

So any issues or challenges or problems with what I've articulated? If not–

MS. MIRALIA: In terms—I can answer just the procedural question about your terms and the term limits. There's three different groups of terms. Each of you are in different—three different appointment date groups, and there is one person who has their own date expiration, and I can't remember who that is right now.

But, in any event, everyone—each of the Board members, you do have a four-year appointment. Four of you were just reappointed last month, I believe. When you received your certificates, four of you received certificates that expired and then a new certificate that was just starting.

Reappointments, as I said in email, reappointments are routine, so if you have an appointment date that is expiring soon, within the next six months, that is on our radar, my radar, as well as the committee management officer and The White House as well. So it's a fairly routine process to request reappointment, so try not to worry too much about that particular process.

MS. LEE: Thank you. I think we all needed clarification basically.
All right. So can we start with the introductions of the offices? So the Office of Science. I'm following, Andrea, what you had sent.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. And, yes, Carol, you as the chair are certainly encouraged and welcome to control the durations. If you would like my help as timekeeper, I'm happy to continue doing that. But, yes, I think what was next on the agenda was Mark introducing the offices—

MS. LEE: Okay.

MS. MIRALIA:—with him, and, Anne, she would be in the Office of Science, is certainly in that office. I am scrolling down my agenda, but I'll hand it back.

MS. LEE: I'm happy for you to control the agenda just to try to make sure that we have hopefully at least maybe 45 minutes toward the end to allow time for the Board members to each individually articulate what their hopes and vision are specifically for this work.

MR. SCHNEIDER: All right. So I think I'm supposed to take over at this stage for the next few minutes.

So, Carol, just a point, and Board members, just a point of clarification. So you mentioned one of the three reports that were issued by the National Academies for our 20th anniversary. So you mentioned Adam Gamoran's one on The Future of Education Research, but there are two other ones. One was on NCES, and that was headed by Larry Hedges, and the other one was on the National Assessment of Education Progress.

So just in terms of the complexity of this, so education research is much more under the control of IES and the Board. NCES is a recognized statistical agency, so it has a whole bunch of other constraints, opportunities, built into that, and so there are things that are carved out as a federal statistical agency that the Board has minimal influence on. So just keep that in mind. But it is an important part. NCES is the largest single unit in IES, and guidance from the Board is always welcome.

But, again, there are carve-outs for NCES that don't exist for NCER, or the National Center for Special Education Research, on action for NCEE also. So just keep that in mind.

And as you know, NAEP is governed by the National Assessment Governing Board, so even there the Board is even more constrained.

But you should read all three of the reports if you haven't done it already because they do give a pretty comprehensive view of what's going on in the Institute and also present some scenarios of the future that you should be weighing in.

But, again, NCER and NCSER are more under your control. NCES, as a federal statistical agency, is somewhat different. And NAEP is driven by NAGB more than anything else. So that's to start.

So, in the org chart, in the organizational chart, there are several offices in the front office that we're going to handle right now. We're going to do the introductions.

So just a note. We did reorganize for a data science unit within the front office. For a variety of reasons, constraints, and opportunities, that part is now sitting empty, and, again, there are constraints in terms of HR and things like that. But, to the extent to which you weigh in on the data science position and a vision for data science, that would be much appreciated.

Some of the other offices are the Office of Science, Administration, Policy, and Communications, and those are all well-represented here. So we're going to start with Anne Ricciuti, the Deputy for Science. Anne, to you.

MS. RICCIUTI: Great. Thank you, Mark. And good afternoon to everyone. I'm Anne Ricciuti. Can you hear me?

MR. SCHNEIDER: You're very low, Anne.

MS. RICCIUTI: Okay. Can you hear me now?

MS. MIRALIA: Your microphone seems pretty quiet, Anne. I don't think I can improve your volume from my end.

MS. RICCIUTI: Okay. I am hearing an echo.
I'm hearing myself. (Pause.)

MS. LEE: You can go ahead. We can hear you.

MS. RICCIUTI: Okay. Great. I will go ahead. Let me know if you can't hear me.

So, again, I'm Anne Ricciuti, Deputy Director for Science and lead the Office of Science. And I know that some of you are very familiar with IES and some may be less so, so I'm going to just provide a very brief introduction to myself, my role, and my office today, and I'm sure we'll be talking more as the Board work ramps up.

Just a bit about my background. I'm a developmental psychologist by training. I came to IES in 2004, and I've been Deputy Director for the majority of that time. Prior to that, I spent a good number of years at a research firm conducting evaluations of programs focused on children and families.

I came to IES because I very much believed in the mission of the organization, especially as a nonpartisan arm of the Department, and I've stayed because I still very strongly believe in and am committed to the mission and work of IES and to the continued modernization and improvement of our work.

So, as Deputy Director for Science, I'm responsible for providing guidance and leadership related to cross-cutting scientific issues and the scientific quality of IES activities.

The Office of Science, which is housed, as Mark mentioned, within the Office of the Director, is responsible for IES's scientific peer review activities, including peer review of research grant competitions and many IES-produced or supported reports. We're purposely located outside of the centers that work with applicants, make funding decisions, and work with grantees and contractors, and that's so that we can have as objective a peer review process as possible.

In addition, on the research grant side of the house, this allows program officers to provide extensive technical assistance to applicants as they prepare their applications.

A few words about the Office of Science team. The office has broad responsibilities and a very small team. We currently have six staff members in addition to myself, with a seventh person coming on board in October.

Over the last year and a quarter, we've been fortunate enough to add three new staff, and we're very excited to have them on board. Unfortunately, we also lost two staff during that time, so we've not been able to expand as much as I had hoped over the last year, and we are in the process of trying to hire a couple more individuals to join the team.

Just to give you a very rough, very brief overview of the magnitude of the review activities supported by the Office, we typically receive, process, and review around a thousand applications per year. This varies, you know, over the years, but this includes dozens of review panels and hundreds of external reviewers.

Most of those applications are submitted to the grant competitions of NCER—I'm sorry, the Education Research Center and the Special Education Research Center, and we also manage the review for the statistic Center's statewide longitudinal data systems program.

In addition, we also typically have in the neighborhood of 70-ish reports at some stage of the review process each year, and all of these numbers fluctuate depending on the activities of the centers.

Review activities occur throughout the year. For example, for each of the last two years, we've had four different receipt dates for different grant competitions ranging from August to March a couple of years ago, August to June this past year.

We also receive reports for review throughout the year, so we are busy year-round.

One other thing I just want to briefly mention about the work that I have now responsibility for. In response to a January 2021 Executive Order on restoring trust in government, I was designated as the Department's Chief Science Officer, and Liz Albro, who you'll hear from shortly, was designated as the Department's Scientific Integrity Official.

I served as co-chair of the National Science and Technology Council's Scientific Integrity Fast Track Action Committee, which was put together in response to the Executive Order, and that committee issued a report in January of 20 on protecting the integrity of federal science.

I also served as co-chair of the subsequent interagency working group which was tasked with producing a framework for implementing and assessing federal agencies' scientific integrity policies, which was released earlier this year.

So, in response to all of those things, all federal agencies are revising their scientific integrity policies in response to the framework, and Liz Albro and I are working on that together.

So I'm going to stop there for now. I look forward to getting to know all of you and working with you all moving forward. Thank you.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you, Anne.
Oh, thanks, Mark. Go for it.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Okay. So I don't think we've actually gone through the run of show, so let me just tell you what we're living to, what we're doing.

Okay. So, right now, we're going to start with the introduction to the three components in the Office of the Director. So we already heard from Anne. Next, we'll go to the Administration Policy and then to Communications. That'll be followed by each of the four Commissioners, who will be presenting 10 minutes, 15 minutes about their individual centers, and we'll do the NCEE evaluation, NCER, then NCSER, and we'll end with NCES.

At that time, there will be a break, and when we come back, I think this is going to be—Carol will have to—I mean, this is all under Carol's control, but that's the biggest chunk of time in the afternoon. The balance between the kind of things that, Carol, you all need to discuss amongst yourselves and a few things that I need to present and talk about is all up to you, right?

But I think, everybody, every member of this Board, and Carol articulated this very clearly, wants a time to work together to start laying out the vision and the tasks for the Board, and that's the biggest chunk of time that is this afternoon. So we purposely set aside that chunk for you all to work together.

So back to this part of the introductions. So next, Craig Stanton is the Deputy for Administration and Policy. He'll give a brief overview and discussion about what that office does.

Craig.

MR. STANTON: Good afternoon, everyone.
Thanks, Mark. Appreciate the handoff.

Good afternoon, everyone. It's an honor to be here. As Mark indicated, my name is Craig Stanton. Unlike most other people at IES, my background is as a lawyer. I have spent the last years serving in various forms of service in the Department. I came to IES in 2019. I served for four years as a budget director, and I have also served as a principal advisor for two other Assistant Secretaries in the Department, first for the Office of Career and Technical Education.

And so my responsibilities in IES are mostly on the operational side. So think of all of the machinery that it takes to actually support the business of IES, hiring, budget, contracts, lease agreements, regular interactions with the Department of Education, interactions with appropriations committees on the Hill; if there are conversations about reauthorizations of ESRA, anything related to appropriations, it's in my wheelhouse. And also, if there are conversations with the Office of Management and Budget, my team is also usually involved. So think the operational machinery and then the policy. Those are the two big areas in my wheelhouse.

And I'll keep this short because you have much more important items to attend to today, but I thought it would be just a basic overview of the IES appropriations outlook heading into fiscal year 2004.

So a couple things on the budget side. Those of you who are familiar with the IES budget probably know that we have different appropriation accounts, and by that, I mean there are different categories of funding that Congress allocates to IES. Those include research, development, and dissemination, statistics, the regional ed labs, assessment, research in special education, and on and on.

One of the noteworthy things in the last two years that surfaced in the budget front is, in fiscal year '22, for the very first time in the history of IES, my team played an instrumental role in achieving a separate program administration account from the Department of Education. That's very advantageous to IES in multiple ways, one of which is that the Department's admin account is pressured on lots and lots of fronts. IT spending has increased. Hiring needs in the Department have increased. So, by virtue of the fact that we now have a totally separate appropriation account, we can support our own hiring, contracting, IT, all of the business-related needs out of our own standalone appropriation account.

A significant development. The appropriation level for that account in its first year, FY ', was $67 million, and headed into FY '23, we successfully lobbied for a significant increase of just over $6 million. So the IES program administration account went to $73,500,000 in FY '23, which takes me to one of my final points.

A big part of the priority of my team this past year has been supporting each of the centers in what is probably the single biggest year of hiring in IES maybe in its history. We're going on, as of last week's report, we have successfully hired 46 new staff in IES, taking our total staff to right around 200, which is the highest staffing level in IES in over a decade.

And I think that is really all you need to know for now, and with that, I will hand it back to Mark.

MR. SCHNEIDER: So, Craig, in the IES 101 you all got, there was a table of appropriations that we've gotten over the past years and the projected levels for the coming year. So I in my fondest dreams two years ago and last year had thought that we would be up to a billion dollars because we were on a good trajectory. I'll talk about NCADE later on, and now the—well, the outlook is not so rosy.

MR. STANTON: That's true.

MR. SCHNEIDER: If the House numbers stick, we could lose as much as $200 million in our budget. If the Senate, which is the higher number, we're still going to lose $100 million plus or minus next year. So you just need to keep that reality in mind, and one of the topics you may discuss is what you—what, if anything, you all are free to do to help us keep the trend going this way and not that way. So thank you on that one.

The last person that we're going to introduce from the front office is Beth Green. She's the Deputy for Communications.

Just a quick background on this. IES has had some other Directors of Communications, never a Deputy, and that has come and gone, and people sometimes paid attention, directors have sometimes paid attention to it, and sometimes they haven't.

So any of you that have been following what I've been trying to do the last few years is to increase the visibility and centrality of IES in the science community, number one, and in the education policy world, number two, and it seems to me that one of the most important ways we do this is by developing a good story and getting that story out there.

So it was for that reason that first Beth was hired as a Director of Communications. We did a reorg and created an Office of Communications in the front office, in the Office of the Director, and we had a competitive process, and Beth was selected.

Beth, to you.

MS. GREEN: Thanks, Mark. Thanks for taking my whole speech.

My name is Beth Green, and I am the Deputy Director for Communications Management for IES. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the history of my function and walk through one of our major initiatives.

So, as Mark was saying, for most of IES's history, communications has been an activity conducted almost entirely by each individual center. Even within those centers, individual staff members in charge of a product or a program are often responsible for the communications activities related to that product. This structure makes sense in some ways, but it also has some obvious limitations. In particular, it is very difficult to combine forces across products and showcase the way that IES tackles topics across different programs and centers.

I was hired about five years ago to be the communications manager within the central office with the goal of building a centralized communications structure essentially from scratch. That doesn't mean that I've taken over all of the communications responsibilities from the center but rather that I've supported a series of institute-wide projects that support communications infrastructure across all of the centers.

The biggest such project to date has been a full-scale digital modernization. This includes an overhaul of all of our digital properties from our website to the digital tools that we use to manage our workflows internally. We chose this project because we needed to address a few problems.

One, there is no consistent look and feel across our website. As different units have built out their materials, they have made independent decisions about design.

Two, if you don't already know what you're looking for and what center produces it, it is very difficult to track down anything specific on our website.

Three, we have tools that serve duplicative functions and that produce multiple different answers to the same questions.

Four, we can't make quick changes to our website as needed. Even changing a single word on the website requires that we go through a vendor.

And five, our internal tools don't talk to each other, so there's no easy way to see a product through its life cycle.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. And we knew that given the scale of the problems we were trying to address we had to be very deliberate in our approach. So beginning with a two-year planning phase, which included a detailed assessment of the current state of our digital properties, audience research, and consultation with staff at every level and in every unit, this was and continues to be a highly collaborative process as we make decisions about how best to meet our goals and minimize risks to our ongoing work.

At this point, we are about a year away from taking our new website live. Our new website will have universal search tools so that users don't have to know every hiding spot on our website in order to find what they're looking for. We're going to have a data portal with the goal of making our public-facing data sets more accessible. We're going to have a content management system that lets us make edits quickly rather than depending on vendors to make even small changes to what's on the website.

And, importantly, our new website, unlike our current website, will allow for detailed analytics. We'll be able to get more insight into who is using our products and how they are using them, and that's really where I see the future of our communications work, getting a better understanding of our audiences so that we can be proactive about meeting their needs.

Of course, our website is not the only communications tool at our disposal. To provide a quick overview about what we are doing over the last few years, we are actively building out our engagement with the media, including providing research and data to inform their coverage, participating in interviews, and writing editorials.

We issue e-newsletters that go out to large mailing lists to announce the release of every product. We are active on X and on LinkedIn. We work with our grantees to support dissemination activities, and we maintain a common visual identity across centers, including a shared logo, standard colors, and report templates.

At the end of the day, however, the Office of Communications Management is unique within IES in that it is an office of one, so you're looking at it. Hopefully, that will change soon, but in the meantime, we have learned that we are capable of coordinating on communications activities, and we are looking forward to a future where we are increasingly responsive to our audiences. And that's it from me.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Thank you, Beth.

So I hope the Board takes an implicit challenge that Beth laid down, or maybe it's my challenge, and that is one of the problems that I always found with IES is that someone called it one of the most important agencies that no one's ever heard of, and I think that that's a serious problem, right?

I think that we've all been working very hard to improve the visibility of IES. Improve the marketing, I think, is probably—it's not an evil word, but we need to market ourselves better. We need to get people to understand the unique challenges and the unique contributions that education sciences can make to many of the challenges that are facing us.

So, again, I think, for most of IES's history, the idea of communications and outreach were secondary. So, first, by getting Beth, the Director of Communications, in and now creating this whole office for a deputy for communications I think is an indicator of the seriousness with which we take our charge to make us better known and to affect decisions and discussions about education R&D.

So, I mean, this is your Board, but I think any insights or help you can give us in terms of amplifying the message that we have, the work that we have, I think that's an incredibly valuable role that NBES can play.

So that was the components of the front office. We're going to turn to quick overviews of each of the four centers. I'm going to begin with Matt Soldner and NCEE. Matt?

MR. SOLDNER: Excellent. Yeah. Thanks, Mark, and everyone, it's a privilege and a pleasure to be with you and to give you just a really brief introduction to the people and the work of NCEE.

So, first off, who are we? Well, so our team of 30 expert researchers and evaluators, which include former state-level education policymakers, K and post-secondary educators, and many more, are working towards a singular vision, an education system where every decision-maker has the resources they need to know what works for whom and under what conditions. So it really is this vision of an evidence-rich education system.

And to meet that vision, NCEE comprises two divisions with two really distinct strands of work. The first is our Knowledge Use Division, which focuses on supporting primarily state and local educators and policymakers in the generation and use of data and evidence to improve education outcomes.

Our second division is on federal program evaluation, which focuses on evaluating the implementation, outcomes, and impact of federal education programs authorized by laws we all know, such as the SEA, IDEA, HGA, Perkins, and more. And each of those divisions has a really exceptional leader at the helm with deep expertise in education policy. In our Knowledge Use Division, we have Liz Eisner, whom I'm sure you'll meet someday, and in Evaluation, we have Marsha Silverberg.

So what do those folks and their teams do? The 30 staff members I talked about who work across those two divisions oversee five large programs of work. I'd like to share just a bit about how three of our largest programs, the Regional Educational Labs, What Works Clearinghouse, and our portfolio of federal program evaluations, contribute to that vision of an evidence-rich education system, and I'll start with the RELs.

So the Regional Education Labs program predates the existence of IES and for more than 50 years has been one of the ways the Department has sought to ensure that education research is relevant to regional and state and local leaders in each of the 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, the outlying areas, the freely associated states. Each is covered by one of the 10 RELs. Each of those RELs in turn is then operated by a highly qualified education research firm or, in the case of the southeast, a university, Florida State, on a five-year cycle.

Importantly, these aren't just technical experts. They are entities that have demonstrated to us that they have built and will continue to build meaningful relationships with the communities inside the regions they serve.

The role of the IES REL team then is to help shape and guide and oversee the work of those individual RELs and of the program as a whole.

Now there are two important things to remember about the REL program. The first thing that's important to remember is that the work of each is done in partnership with the states, districts, and institutions of higher education with which they work.

Many of you may be familiar, some of you very deeply familiar, with the term Researcher Practitioner Partnership, or RPPs. The REL program is the largest single investment in RPPs in the nation. We currently support 70 nationwide at a cost of about $58 million a year. Each of those partnerships have been codesigned by state and local partners and experts at the REL to address a problem of policy or practice that the partners identify, and then together with the REL they develop a five-year plan of work that's meant to meaningfully move the needle on that problem, ultimately to produce student outcomes.

The RELs address issues that span pre-K to adult education ranging from boosting foundational and adolescent literacy, to strengthening and diversifying the shared workforce, to supporting transition for students with disabilities to life after high school.

The second thing that's important to know about the RELs is that to steal a phrase of Mark, who always has great phrases, the RELs are IES's "boots on the ground." And when Mark makes that point, it's often because he wants to highlight that RELs have a great capacity to disseminate what's learned here at IES.

I would extend that to say that the RELs aren't just emissaries of IES products but also the education sciences more broadly and what high-quality research and evaluation, whether it's in a design and execution of survey research; whether it's applied research and development or program evaluation, what high-quality research and evaluation done in partnership with local communities can look like.

The program is role modeling about how to build and use high-quality evidence not only to provide evidence about what works to meet the needs of a given partnership in a given moment but to better equip those states and local partners to make higher quality decisions about other challenges in the future.

Next, I'd like to spend a minute or two talking about the What Works Clearinghouse, or the WWC. The WWC is one of NCEE's most well-known programs, and it has one of the more ambitious missions of any program at IES. It's to evaluate the quality of education and research that purports to demonstrate what works and then, using only the best of that research, synthesize study findings into an accessible evidence base that can guide educator practice.

To do that, teams of WWC certified reviewers sift through thousands of studies per year to identify the much smaller number of them that meet our standards of quality; trying to find those studies where we could have strong confidence that where a researcher says a policy or a program or a practice worked, we can believe it.

We spend about $10 million a year in this effort. We then post the reviews of those studies to our website, but, more importantly, we use those reviews to create products that are designed to bring evidence of what works to classroom educators and the people who support them, including state and local education agency leaders who are shaping curriculum and professional development.

I'd like to focus on just one of those product types today, what we call practice guides. Currently, we have 29 practice guides focused on specific issues of pre-K to post-secondary education practice. To create these guides, we bring together panels of practitioners, researchers, and other experts to review the findings of dozens of the best and most recent research studies and topic area, and then together those panels invite practice recommendations that are rooted in high-quality evidence and then outline strategies how to implement those recommendations in the classroom and how to overcome obstacles in their implementation.

Our most recent guide outlined seven evidence-based recommendations for preparing young children for school. Our next set of guides are already in development, including those on teacher-delivered and school-based behavioral interventions in grade K–5, and in college and career readiness. And although I can't be specific due to procurement regulations and uncertainty in appropriations, it is fair to say that we hope to be able to announce development of several more in the year ahead.

You know, I mentioned that at NCEE I have a vision for an evidence-rich education system where decision-makers of all types have trustworthy information about what works to improve outcomes. Just like the RELs, the WWC are a critical part of that mission, and materials like practice guides are a critical tool in our toolbox for achieving that vision.

If I had a magic wand, which I do not, I would wave it over the WWC and make more practice guides. I say that not because they are perfect but because I think they are best in class and because we know they have traction in the field. We see that states are adopting them for their own purposes and using them as a basis for P.D. activities for teachers. We see preparation programs using them to strengthen the evidence-based repertoire of pre service educators.

And, finally, in a great collaboration between the WWC and the RELs, we see the RELs partnering with schools and districts to design and test implementation toolkits for 10 of our most recent practice guides to make more free, high-quality, evidence-based P.D. available to educators.

Finally, before I go, I want to talk quickly about our work in federal program evaluation. As I mentioned, our RELs and our WWC are largely focused on serving decision-makers at the state and local level. In contrast, our federal program evaluation work, we call it Eval for shorthand, is largely focused on serving federal policymakers in the executive and legislative branches of government. Eval is, of course, this notion of an evidence-rich education system by supporting evidence-based policymaking at the federal level.

This is a space where NCEE really was very much ahead of its time. In 2002, with ESRA, the responsibility to evaluate federal education programs was baked into our DNA through that authorizing legislation. It took another 15-plus years for that same sort of expectation to scale government-wide with the passage of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. I won't go into great detail about that law here today, but suffice it to say that Title 1 of the Evidence Act aspires to make the everyday work of Eval commonplace in other federal agencies.

I should note, as part of that law, every agency is required to identify someone responsible for evidence building in the service of policymaking, known as the Agency Evaluation Officer, and since the law's passage, I have served in that role.

So I mentioned that Eval has been doing this work well before the Evidence Act. To date, we have launched 97 rigorous evaluations of the implementation and/or impact of federal programs and the strategies those programs use to meet their mission. We should hit 100 before the end of my term, so it is truly an exciting milestone in the future. We spend about $45 million each year on program evaluation, and among the two dozen or so we currently have underway are some of the most complex and consequential of Eval's history.

You all should be very proud of the extent to which each of those evaluations exemplifies the principles of independence and relevance, rigor, transparency, and ethical practice that are so central to the IES mission. I want to mention just a few of the projects that are top of mind.

We're currently completing the second of two very large-scale effectiveness trials on Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, most recently in reading. The Department, in particular, its Office of Special Education Programs, is deeply invested in MTSS as a strategy to improve students' academic and behavioral outcomes. With the help of 150 schools nationwide, this study is specifically focused on evaluating two competing evidence-based approaches meant to support struggling readers in first and second grades.

Importantly, it isn't just about simply evaluating whether one of those strategies is better than the other or whether either is better than what schools are currently doing, although it would be great if that's all it did. It's also about whether these strategies can affect the identification of special education students with reading-related disabilities and their outcomes and whether these differences are sustained over time.

Elsewhere, with the help of 30 states enrolling 90 percent of English learners in the nation, we're evaluating how changes of the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 affect how students are entering and exiting EL status. This includes how states are implementing changes in the law, what services districts are offering EL students, the relationship between state implementation of EL policies and district services that they're offering to students, and students that access this opportunity and subsequent academic achievement.

And other great work we have underway touches in many other programs across the Department. Follow-ups to a recent study on the impact of short term Pell Grants, studies of transition supports for students with IEPs into post-secondary education, the workforce, independent living, and the implementation and impact study of full service community schools.

Each of these studies yield high-quality evidence about how federal education programs are playing out on the ground. This includes the extent to which they are being implemented as Congress and the Department intended, what supports and what hinders their implementation, and what outcomes are associated with and what impacts are caused by program participation. And the purpose of all this work again, all the activity across Eval, is to put information in the hands of federal policymakers about what works.

In the coming years, we are particularly focused now to accelerate the pace of this work, how we can make the best possible use of extant data collected across the Department but that might not be put to full use right now, and whether and how AI can make our work more efficient.

Before I close, I wanted to mention service NCEE does, like all the centers do, to contribute to the larger mission of IES and to the Department, one quick example of each.

First, an internally-facing example, NCEE serves as a steward of sorts to IES's SEER principles. You probably read about those as you prepared for today's meeting. Briefly, those principles outline a series of recommendations that researchers can consider in service of making their work more transformational. NCEE oversees the production of resources that help researchers implement the principles and support events like a recent convening of experts operating at the intersection of equity and education research to help us refine our principles through resources.

And then a quick external example. NCEE provides technical support for evaluation and evidence-based practice across the Department. You know, many Department grant programs expect their grantees to build evidence about the effectiveness of their work, but most programs done outside IES don't have the expertise to help them in doing that. So, to help, NCEE oversees an evaluation TA for undergrad programs you probably know, programs like EIR and FIPSE, to help guarantee that the evidence those non-IES investments generate is high-quality and can advance our knowledge about what works.

So thanks for giving me a few minutes to share more about NCEE. There is much more to be said about how we're working together towards an education system where every decision-maker has the resources they need to know what works for whom and in what conditions. And I look forward to Q&A after the break, I believe. And I will turn it back to Mark.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Well, thank you. So just a couple points. So Matt a couple times mentioned what works for whom under what conditions, which you probably know is the mantra that drives our work. And I think that as you reflect upon the work that we're doing, the direction, your role in this, I think the what works for whom under what conditions is the thing that you need to keep in mind. That's what we're trying to accomplish.

The second point is practice guides. So shame on me, quite frankly, for not knowing the centrality and the importance, of practice guides until probably after a year that I was the director, meaning there's 29 of them; there probably should be more. We try to push that forward. It's a long process, but the fact of the matter is that's where the intersection between rigorous evidence and the world in classrooms intersects the closest.

So we need to—I believe we need to put more resources. Matt mentioned that we're trying to get, in fact, more practice guides out, but if you don't know them, you should know them. To me, they're the exemplars of the kind of work that IES should be doing because we are an applied science agency. Our goal is to take research and turn it into changes on the ground that improve student learning. So practice guides to me are one of the ways we do this.

We've had various manifestations in the past about how to advertise the practice guides, how to turn them even from something that's a guide into something that's more usable. My practitioners and I think we would more than welcome input from you all about how better to do that.

And one of the things that I really do want you all to keep in mind is the need for timeliness, right, and this to me is a really serious issue. We need to figure out how to get rigorous work done faster and into the world faster.

And this is one of my commitments and one of the things that I've been pushing on as long as I've been here, but I think you all need to remember that timeliness really does matter and that we're committed to increasing the rapidity of which high-quality work comes out, and I think this is something you all should keep in mind as we go forward.

I'm sorry that this is a lot of stuff to dump on you, like push, push, push, push. And we have about—we have three more presentations. Then we'll take a break. And then there's an hour and 40 minutes for hopefully much more participation than just this necessary dumping of information on you.

So please sit with—stay with us for a few more minutes, three more presentations, and then we will—and then we'll have a break.

So, Andrea, are you waiting to say something?

MS. MIRALIA: Yeah. I'm only raising my hand because we didn't have an expected break when I was tallying votes, so if the Board members would rather take a short break now, we can do that just because we have been talking for—you know, on the call for an hour and 20 minutes, and folks might need an essentials break. So is there a motion to go ahead and take a quick break now, or should we plow through?

MR. SCHNEIDER: Isn't it Carol's call?

MS. MIRALIA: It is. It is.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Carol, you're muted.

MS. MIRALIA: Yeah.

MS. LEE: Yeah, that's fine. If people—if there's a motion, we can take a break. If not, we can keep going.

MS. MIRALIA: Okay.

(No response.)

MS. LEE: So it looks like we can keep going.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Okay. All right. So next up is Liz Albro, Commissioner of NCER.

MS. ALBRO: Hi, folks. I was going to say, if we were all in a room together, I would tell us all to stand up, but it comes from being a former preschool teacher. I can see when people are antsy and need to move.

Thank you, guys, so much for joining us today and for serving alongside IES as we all together work to improve education outcomes across the nation. We're happy to have you here and look forward to learning together with you.

So, as many of you all have already seen, NCER's mission is at least threefold, although, if you read the law, it has lots of other pieces. Our first and foremost responsibility is to fund rigorous and high-quality research to improve education outcomes. That is our first principle, and we're charged with building a sustained portfolio of work. The second way that we have upheld that is to build a research infrastructure for the education sciences. And, finally, as you'll see through our legislation and throughout the work that we're doing, we are charged with addressing the diverse needs of learners across our country.

So, as my colleagues ahead of me have done, I want to do a quick shout-out to my team because, to carry out NCER's mission, I do not do this alone. I rely on my dedicated staff, who bring their broad and deep expertise to their daily work.

As is true for many of us, we are a small team. We have 20 full-time staff, four of whom have joined us in the last year. So we were operating at 16, and we have two detailees who have been with us over the summer months who are sharing their expertise from other parts of the Department.

I'm supported in my work by two Associate Commissioners, Dr. Allen Ruby and Dr. Laura Namy, and without them, it would be really hard for me to get anything done, so I want to just thank them for all the work that they do.

So our program officers, our team lead, our research and research training programs, they are always willing to work together to solve problems, as I'm sure we will, and to celebrate solutions that we see as changing education outcomes across the nation.

In case you all don't know, FAFSA Simplification is happening, and I always like to think about that because one of the projects that we funded 15 years ago back when Hiro was on the Board is certainly contributing to that policy change that happened, and it will happen, hopefully, that will change access to post-secondary education for many learners in our nation.

So we were created in 2002, NCER, and since then, we've made more than 1,700 research and research training awards. We initially ran in 2002 three field-initiated competitions that were very narrow in their focus. But now we typically admit applications from the field for seven or more programs annually, and these programs tend to include—they're very broad and include lots of topics.

As Anne has already mentioned, in addition to serving as NCER Commissioner, I am responsible for serving as the Department's Scientific Integrity Official, and we can certainly share more with you about that.

What does NCER do that's unique, that's different, perhaps that's not in legislation that you all might not know about?

The first thing that you should know is that NCER is responsible for funding and managing the Department of Education's Small Business Innovation Research Program, SBIR, whose products we showcase annually in the ED Games Expo. For those of you who are here in D.C., I'd love to invite you to come and join the Expo. There's a public event next Wednesday evening at the Kennedy Center, so if you're here, please come by and see some of the cool stuff that we've been supporting over the years.

The second role that I have had the privilege of playing is serving as the Department's responsible person for public access and open science. So, for the past 10 years, we have been implementing and instantiating the Holdren memo from February 2013 which was titled "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research."

In August of 22', the Office of Science and Technology Policy released a second memo that we are currently working on responding to called "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research."

For those of you who are grantees or have been, you will notice because this is why we expect you to upload your publications to ERIC for the world to see and to share data so that the world—the rest of the research community and, as appropriate, the world, can have access to the work that you have done and can help think together about ways to solve new problems using the data you've already collected.

We were also recently directed by Congress to launch and manage future-looking competitions. Mark referenced NCADE, and I'm sure he will speak more about this later. But we have been charged with investing in quick-turnaround, high-reward, scalable solutions intended to significantly improve outcomes for all students. It's just a framework for some of the work that we do.

And we gave you a few facts and figures about what we do, what we manage on an annual basis. So, even though we have a small staff, we manage a sizable workload. We currently manage 507 research and research training grants, but as I think many of you know, we were unable to run our primary competitions in '23 due to funding limitations, so this number is smaller than we often see. Our active awards typically approach 600.

We also manage—our one SBIR primary program officer manages 25 to 30 SBIR contracts, and those contracts turn over on an annual basis.

And we are excited, and since Dr. Moore is with us, I wanted to make sure I shouted out that we're excited to collaborate with the National Science Foundation on two AI institutes that were awarded in the past year.

In the past year and a half, our grantees have published more than 1,300 scientific peer reviewed articles and released for the public at least 50 data sets. The public findings that our grantees—the research that our grantees are doing formed a strong component of the evidence that Matt referenced that undergirds the practice guides that we are immensely proud of and that have really had, I think, an influence on the work and practice of our state and local partners.

In terms of how much money did all this cost? So our current research and research training investments are $165 million this year. That is both continuing costs, as well as costs for new—and new awards.

I just want to talk a little bit about the research infrastructure that we've been supporting over the years. For the past 20 years, I would argue that we've played a key role in training the next generation of education scientists.

With 20 years of investment in field building, we've supported the training of more than 2,000 scholars. We're especially proud of our interdisciplinary pre-doctoral training programs that have trained more than 1,000 PhDs in the education sciences and of our newer Pathways program, which is focusing on broadening participation in the education sciences both through the fellows that are being trained and by including and inviting minority-serving institutions to provide the training. To date, more than 250 fellows have been supported through this program, and many of these fellows, who are undergraduates or in the Master's programs, are now currently enrolled in doctoral programs.

And we're excited to have made our very first early career award for faculty at minority-serving institutions. We are looking forward to continuing to increase the number of applicants and awards in that area, and for those of you who have been following the Federal Register notice, you may have seen that we noticed our intent to re-compete that program just today, this morning.

We also urge supporting the ongoing methodological development of active scholars in the education sciences. Our newest awards that were made this summer are focused on methods training in data science, and scholars can apply to participate in these programs that are being offered at the University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Pennsylvania. The programs will range from four months to one year in length, and at the conclusion of these programs, NCER will have supported the skill development and data science of at least 350 scholars.

We know that current education relies heavily on learning sciences, on digital learning platforms, and NCER has taken a leadership role in trying to make sure that we are supporting and learning more about how can we use these tools and technologies to support learning, about learning in education sciences, and to make sure that we have folks who are trained and who can be appropriate and who know how best to use those tools and technologies.

All right. So, for those of you who have been attending, I just wanted to say that this year, we, for the fiscal ' competitions—and so, for those of you who are new to IES, we release our announcements for next year's awards in the calendar year prior to the fiscal year that we intend to fund.

So this year, we have been running—are running a full competition season. We've invited and received applications for our transformative research in the Education Sciences Program; are using longitudinal data to support state policymaking. Those applications have been received, and we're looking forward to seeing what comes through. Our education research grants competition, which is our flagship competition, and applications for that competition are due later this month. And we just announced three more competitions for which we are inviting applications: our research training programs in the education sciences, our statistical and research methodology in education research competition, and our research networks competition.

And as required by law, we will be inviting applications for four R&D centers later this fall. So it's a busy year for us, and we're excited and glad to do that.

Finally, I just wanted to highlight a few things that we have been doing through our dedicated R&D centers that are addressing some of the diverse needs of learners across the nation.

As many of you know, we currently have active two R&D centers focused on English learners in secondary schools that are working together collaboratively to try and make sure that individuals who are still mastering the English language in secondary schools are not losing access to the content knowledge that they need in order to succeed. They're moving forward in mathematics, in science, in social studies, and in English literature. We had a convening of those folks I think just recently, and it was a wonderful event, and we had lots of good feedback from practitioners who attended the meeting.

We're focused on trying to understand how to support learners in rural settings. We're focused on our two centers. One are focused on mental health needs of individuals in rural settings, as well as issues of chronic absenteeism in other parts of our nation.

We also support work on adult skills, and I wanted to highlight the fact that we have a new research network, the CREATE Adult Skills Network, which is really focusing on trying to identify solutions for adults in our nation who don't have the literacy and numeracy skills that we would hope that they would so that they can succeed.

And then, finally, the last thing I wanted to showcase is that we're really excited about our using longitudinal data to support state education policymaking programs. This is another example of the ways that we are thinking collaboratively across IES to build on the data that we have available to address the needs of our nation.

So, in this competition, applicants come in and they are required to make use of the State Longitudinal Data Systems that are managed out of the National Center for Education Sciences in order to address problems that matter to the states and districts.

In our most recent awards, we've got three that I thought were particularly interesting and perhaps ones that you would not necessarily expect to see coming out through IES. So the first is that we have a program that's using SLDS data to understand and to figure out solutions to addressing food insecurity for post-secondary learners in Colorado. The second is working on trying to understand how to improve literacy outcomes of economically disadvantaged early learners in Louisiana. And we're also looking to see whether the implementation of the Language Opportunity for Our Kids, the LOOK Act, in Massachusetts is supporting equitable access to and participation in dual language education and the state seal of biliteracy programs for multilingual learners in Massachusetts.

Now any of those of you who know me know I could go on and on and on with our grants, but I want to just say thank you all for the opportunity to share just a little bit about the work that we're doing, and I look forward to working with you all closely as we think about next steps for the work that we are all collectively responsible for. So thank you.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Thank you, Liz.

So a couple things. So the numbers that Liz just dropped are actually impressive, they're large.IES is one of if not the largest single investor in education research certainly in the United States and maybe arguably on the planet. So this is actually a major responsibility that you are sharing with us or we are sharing with you, and we have to be—it's a wonderful program. You know, it needs to be even better than it is. It's really quite good. It needs to be better. We'll talk about how NCADE and the idea of NCADE and ARPA-ED may play into this work.

Just a few words that Liz—emphasize some of the things that Liz touched on. The SBIR program, if you don't know it, you should know it. It is actually, for me, it's one of the crown jewels in what we do. It's about $12 million a year, but it is—like, I think this program is amazingly good. Liz actually mentioned we have one program officer that runs it, Ed Metz. If you don't know Ed, hopefully, maybe we can drag him before you when we get to meet in person.

And Liz did mention the Education Expo that's going to be next week. This is almost entirely the creation of Ed's fertile mind. And I think, ED, if you are in D.C. and you have the opportunity, you should come and see that.

I mentioned timeliness as an issue that we really need to worry about in terms of getting our work done, and I think that NCER has been a full partner in a lot of this, but we really have to think about what's a reasonable timeline for education research and how do we speed that up.

And one of the things that's actually fundamentally important is we have to do much more in terms of replication. Some of you may know that we award an XPRIZE for rapid replication. We need to push on that. You know, if we find something that works, and you all know that finding anything that works is difficult enough, but if we don't replicate it and push and build on the things that we find that do work, shame on us. So that's also something that I think you all should think about.

And, finally, one word in Liz's presentation employed the word scalable, scalable, scalability, and this is really a challenge for all of us. If we find things that work and we don't scale them, shame on us, right? So, you know, we have studies that have 200 students, but our goal should be finding things that work for 200,000 students or 2 million students, and how do we scale up from these laboratory settings, I'll call them laboratory settings, to the marketplace. We've been working on this. We've been thinking about this for some time, but I think any input from you all is fundamentally important about how to address the scalability challenge.

So just laying those thoughts. Again, we'll come back after the break, and, hopefully, some of these issues will be discussed.

Next. So Nate Jones is the newest member of the executive team. He was appointed as the Commissioner for the National Center for Special Education Research, NCSER, just a couple weeks ago, two weeks ago. That's a couple. So I'm going to turn the floor over to Nate.

MR. JONES: All right. Thank you, Mark. And I will just start by just flagging for folks that if I'm a little foggy, I tested positive for COVID this morning, which is always an exciting way to kick off a Board meeting, but I'm going to do my best, and I might be a little more scripted than I otherwise would given that I've been doing this for two weeks and am really an outsider to IES.

Prior to two weeks ago, I was a faculty member in special education and education policy at Boston University. And I'm excited to learn about the work of NCSER and continue to advocate as its Commissioner.

Before I share my overview, I did just want to publicly acknowledge two folks. The first of these is Joan McLaughlin, who served as the NCSER Commissioner from 2013 until stepping down from the position in 20, December 20. Her recent retirement marks the end of a long and illustrious career in which her leadership and steady presence has allowed the center to flourish.

I also want to acknowledge Jackie Buckley, who, in addition to her existing program officer duties, stepped in for Joan in January 2023 as Acting Commissioner and provided a steady hand and helped the center through a time of some difficult decisions. And on a personal note, she was incredibly helpful to me as I transitioned into this role.

So the mission of NCSER. So our goal is tosponsor high-quality special education research designed to expand the knowledge and understanding of children and youth with or at risk for disabilities from infancy through post-secondary education. This includes support and interventions for students, their families, educators, and other school-based personnel. More than anything, from my perspective, the goal of NCSER is to provide national leadership for the special ed community, particularly as it relates to its research.

As has been shared, NCSER is newer than the other centers in IES. It began operation on July 1, 2005. It is also the smallest of the centers in IES. At present, we have eight staff members, including seven program officers and myself. This number has ranged a bit but has always been small, and I'm exceptionally grateful for the work of the program officers over our time.

It's also worth noting, though, that a key advantage of NCSER has been its stability in leadership and staff, with many of our members being onboard at NCSER for greater than five or 10 years.

So what kind of research does NCSER fund? We focus on a range of areas. First, we focus on specific academic subjects. This includes reading, writing, language, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We focus on specific student characteristics, including students with autism and those who benefit from social, emotional, and behavioral supports. We focus on key dynamics of special education, including the role of technology in science around cognition. We focus on the broader systems in which special education occurs, including the roles of educators and other school personnel, families, and special education policy and finance. And, finally, we focus on a wide range of age populations ranging from early childhood intervention to transitions to post-secondary education, career, and independent living.

Our flagship competition is our 3 special education research grants, which covers research from exploration to development and innovation, to impact and measurement.

We, in addition, focus on a range of research training opportunities that I'll come back to in a moment, and then more recently we had a special competition in financial year 20 focused on research to accelerate pandemic recovery in special education.

We also from time to time have research centers, including at least one that I will come back to at the very end here.

I wanted to share just a few key statistics that help define NCSER. I want to start with a quick discussion of our budget. NCSER's FY '23 funding was just over $64 million. Between 2006 and 2010, the budget was actually a bit higher at $71 million or thereabouts. That number was cut to $51 million in 2011 and hovered between 50 and $55 million for several years.

I bring up this cut because it's had an impact on NCSER's ability to consistently run the competitions. On more than one occasion, we have not had sufficient funds to support all of the projects that were deemed meritorious through our review process.

Now, despite this changing funding landscape, I think it's inarguable that NCSER has had a transformative impact on the field of special education research. This impact has been felt in at least two ways.

First, we've seen a rapid expansion of the number of highly trained special education researchers who have come through our training program. We have funded 20 postdoc grants, including 80 postdoc fellows. We have funded 33 early career investigators, and we have improved the methodological training of a much larger pool of researchers through our methods training practices.

The second source of NCSER's impact has been through the results of our research studies. Since 2006, we have funded over $1 billion in over 546 grants. We have developed foundational knowledge about how to support individuals with disabilities from birth to adulthood. We have funded 156 causal studies but an even larger number of development and exploration grants, suggesting that we are successfully identifying a pipeline of promising practices of the programs.

And just one final note about our impact. I come into this role as a teacher/educator, and I cannot say enough about the value of the practice guides that the What Works Clearinghouse has produced over the past several years.

In training our special education teachers at Boston University, for example, we routinely would turn to the math and reading practice guides that have been developed for students that are struggling or at risk for disabilities.

I'm limited in my time and new in my role, so I just want to provide a few updates on—not updates. Sorry. Highlights on recent and future NCSER projects that are hoping to expand the already strong tradition of NCSER research.

I want to start with two student populations where we've seen an increased emphasis in recent years: low incidence populations and English learners. Low incidence population research has always been challenging to get through the review process given the challenges of finding sufficiently large samples, but this has been something that we have focused on in recent years, and we've had a few really high-quality projects that are standouts.

I also want to focus on English learners, some who are at risk of developing disabilities. So we have had two special topics in 20 and 2023 that have resulted in new projects supporting English learners and the intersection between English learners and disability status.

A couple more. So, as I shared, in FY 20, we held a special competition focused on research to accelerate pandemic recovery. This resulted in nine projects that span the areas of math, literacy, social, behavioral, and emotional skills, and autism.

Just a couple more things. The one that I'm excited about, in 2023, NCSER co-funded an AI institute with the National Science Foundation. This was a big, ambitious project that was awarded to the State University of New York at Buffalo, focused on widening access to speech and language services for students who need them.

We've also included a couple of unsolicited projects that have been meant to beef up the special ed research infrastructure, so these both went to the University of Virginia, our first grant in 2019 and a second in 20, that were meant to support the crowd sourcing of information to support the education of students with disabilities.

I want to close with two centers, one which was recently funded and one which we put in the registry this past fall and that an RFI will be coming out on September 21.

The first of these is expanding our focus to post-secondary education to focus on individuals with disabilities and to promote persistence, degree completion, and entry into the workforce. This was awarded in 2023 to the University of Texas at Austin.

Finally, in February 2023, NCSER held a technical working group focused on strategies for improving the special education teacher workforce. It is clear to me at least that our ambitions for promising programs and practices in special education are always going to depend on having a stable, high-qualified workforce. We have seen persistent shortages in special education, and so we have announced via a Federal Register notice that we will be competing an R&D center focused on the special education teacher workforce in FY 2024.

I cannot say much about this at the moment. I will just say that I'm excited that we have the opportunity to establish national leadership on research surrounding the special ed teaching workforce.

I also acknowledge, lastly, that I'm new. I'm two weeks in. I am still learning about NCSER. But one thing that is going to be especially important to us is taking the opportunity to examine our center priorities moving forward. So I can imagine over the next year or two we are going to see some public-facing opportunities to hear from the community about where NCSER should go next. And so I'm excited about your ideas and working with you all in the future. Thank you very much.

MR. SCHNEIDER: So I guess I fall into this habit of commenting after I hear these presentations. So I'm just going to call out two things that I think are fundamentally important as you think about NCSER.

The first one is in it was either 2010 or 2011 the Department had to have a pay-for. It had to give up money to support something, maybe EIR. And this is actually a comment on the state of the field. It's also a comment on Joan's leadership. As Nate noted, Joan was an incredibly good Commissioner, and Nate's going to rise to this standard. But anyway, good luck.

So what happened was that the Department was looking around for money, and they took about a third of NCSER's budget back then, and part of what went on was we could not make a strong enough argument. I wasn't here, but I guess it was John Easton, could not or chose not to make a strong enough argument to protect that money, arguing that NCSER and the special education research field was not of the same robustness, shall we say, as NCER, and that money went away.

I don't think anybody could make that claim right now. I think that the field of special education research has gotten stronger, stronger, stronger, better, better, better, and I've been trying almost from the day I got here to try to increase the funding for NCSER because it's not a tag, right? It's not like, oh, my God, that's a little activity over there. It is fundamentally, it is fundamentally important. And I'm sorry that we lost that money 13 years—12, 13 years ago, but, again, I think you as a Board need to consider what positions you might want to take with regard to trying to get more money for that.

And, again, you've been to all the ethics briefings. There are roles that you can and cannot play, but I think, for me, increasing the funding for NCSER has been one of the most important things that I've tried to, without great success, tried to undertake.

The second one is Nate mentioned and, we could talk about this a little later, the AI institute that we co-funded with NSF. So we co-funded two AI institutes with NSF, but I'm particularly pleased with the speech and language pathology one that NCSER did with NSF. For me, in many ways, it's like the ideal of where we could or should be going.

So there's a persistent problem of not having enough special education teachers, special language pathologists in the schools relative to the population. So, I mean, everybody cares a lot about AI. It's not even clear to me that anybody really knows exactly what it is, but the fact of the matter is what's going to happen is that AI has to be applied to the solution of real problems, right? That to me is the biggest potential payoff.

So what we've done with AI, there are three things in this joint center that we've done with NSF that seemed to me to be fundamentally important in pointing towards the future.

One, there's a persistent problem, right, and that is we have too many students that need these services and not enough instructors, so how do we use AI to solve that persistent problem? So AI for universal screening is going to be part of what Buffalo, the University of Buffalo, is working on.

Second, how do you use AI to develop treatment plans for special education students? How do you monitor those treatments plans, and how do you improve them? So that's fundamentally important, and both of those are within the grasp of AI as we know it right now.

And the third one, the third one is actually extremely interesting, and that is anybody who—either children or grandchildren or relatives in special education, look at the burden on teachers, special education teachers, is unbearable, right? I mean, they work all the time and then they go home and then they have to do IEPs and a lot of these IEPs are pretty much forms, right? So one of the tasks for the center is to try to figure out how AI could help free up the time of teachers, special education speech and language pathologists, so that they could actually spend more time with students.

So the image in that sentence is that we're not taking teachers out of the loop. What we're doing is freeing up teachers to do the things that only they could do by taking the paperwork burden out of their hands and using AI to do this. I think it's incredibly ambitious. We're thinking about how to build on that insight in terms of AI in the classroom, right?

So I was at a conference, a high-tech conference, everybody's talking AI, AI, AI. And, like, I want to know what we're going to do with AI, right? AI is a tool. What are we trying to build with AI? That to me is our biggest challenge.

Okay. Last, Peggy, the Commissioner of NCES.

MS. CARR: Thank you, Mark.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Unmute yourself.

MS. CARR: Yes. Thank you, Mark, and a hearty welcome to the Board. As you can hear, we have been waiting with bated breath for this day, so we're very excited.

I want to start a little bit with NCES and our special roles. You've heard that we are a recognized statistical agency. It is the main thing that we do as a primary statistical agency, collecting education statistics for the country. Collecting, curating, and disseminating objective, accurate, and timely information is our mantra.

We are one of 13 recognized statistical agencies. There are a lot of other small units, but there are only 13 recognized units. NCES is the second oldest. Some semblance of NCES started back in 1867. The IRS, of course, is the oldest.

We're the third largest by way of budget. Census, of course, far exceeds anyone else. And then there is the Bureau of Labor Statistics; they are second, but we are third. I'll say a little bit more about it later, but we are ninth out of 13 when it comes to the size and big portfolio that we manage.

A little bit about the special role of the NCES Commissioner. The NCES Commissioner is appointed by the President. I was appointed a little—just over two years ago, so I'm in my third year. I have four years left starting in August. I also serve in this role as the co-chair of the Subcommittee on Equitable Data appointed by the Secretary.

As you might know, the first EO that President Biden signed was on equity. In fact, it is nicknamed the Equity EO. And I serve as one of the co-chairs for The White House on that subcommittee.

I also serve as—this role serves as the S.O., the Statistical Official, under the Evidence Act of 2013, and I would invite you to take a look at the trust regulations that are now out in their final stage for public comment because the trust regs, this particular trust reg, there are going to be three, but this particular one talks at depth about the role of the parent agency and the statistical agency and how the parent agency supports and enables the statistical agency.

The NCES Commissioner also serves on behalf of the Department as the senior agency official for geographic information. That role has been in place since the '80s, and it is an intergovernmental role. It's important.

A little bit about other unique roles. Some of this may be just a reiteration for you because you are already familiar with it. NCES also plays an important role in the distribution of federal determinations of distribution of funds, such as Title I, $17 billion to support economically disadvantaged students and schools.

Similarly, the work of NCES plays an important role in determining school and district grant eligibility for rural education. And the other big example that I would give would be the distribution, the support for the federal distribution of allocations for the EPA, $5 billion Clean School Bus Program.

I now want to turn to some stats that will help you visualize NCES and how we work and what we look like. We have 97 staff. That sounds like a lot, and I have to say we had a really good year this year because we hired 12 new full-time individuals to bring us to 97. But that is still small in comparison to where we were in 2011. For example, we had 119 staff, and I've been here long enough to know you can feel a difference between 97 and 119 staff. So we look forward to continuing to grow.

There are four major divisions in NCES. The administrative data division, it has our sampling frames for Common Core data, the private school sampling frame. EDFACS would be another major data collection where we coordinate the curation and dissemination of data for programs across the Department. And then, of course, there's IPES, the Integrated Post-Secondary Education System, and the State Longitudinal Data System, which you've heard about earlier.

The assessment division has NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and all of the international data collections, PESA, TEMS, PEAC, and more.

There is a Sample of Surveys and Longitudinal Studies Division. It has the longitudinal data sets that you've—data collections have been around for a while, such as the ECLSK, the high school longitudinal one, which really is taking over some of the older versions of the longitudinal data sets but, nonetheless, very important; NPSAS, which is the National Postsecondary Student Aid data collection, which is congressionally mandated. And then there are a lot of other sample surveys, such as the National Teacher and Principal Surveys, which has been around for decades.

There are two important units within NCES. The annual reports are a congressionally mandated condition of education. A report to Congress is done out of that unit, along with many other curations of data tables and disseminations, such as the digests of education.

We also have a Statistical Standards and Data Confidentiality Unit. Our Chief Statistician is located there, and they manage all of our restricted use data sets amongst other similar type of activities.

Despite our small size, we manage a sizable workload. We have over 30 data collection systems, most of which include multiple data collections, such as IPES, has about 12 survey data collections. NAEP has somewhere in the range of about 13 if you include our transcript data collections.

We also work collaboratively with many other agencies, as you've heard my colleagues. The other centers too; Census, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Treasury, Labor, CDC, and others.

We also work collaboratively, as everyone else does in IES, with the states and large urban districts, private groups, associations, but I want to make a particular note that we also work on the international organizational collaborative sometimes as Board members. I serve as the Vice Chair of the PESA governing board as an example.

We manage a lot of workload if you think about our contractors. In 20, we had 1,450 full time equivalent individuals working with us as part of our contract team, and when you think about a bigger year where we're actually collecting data, for example, through May, that number will approach tripling.

In 2022, the year after COVID, we were still at work getting ourselves back out with boots on the ground collecting major studies, including our latest vehicle, the school pulse panel, which is experimental, but it was very, very timely and useful for the country. We collected data once a month, 11 times to be precise, in the heat of COVID.

Last year, we were also very busy with our restricted use data set, data collections, that we managed and cross-curated and processed 110 requests, for example, of restricted use licenses, and we approved 95 of them to get them up and running. So, currently, we have 1,036 restricted use licenses that we oversee to make sure that things are going okay there.

We published 69 reports in just last year, and part of that included 18 data sets in addition to the condition of ed, as I mentioned earlier.

A little bit about our budget. Our combined budget is 345 million. That was in 2023. NAEP has the overwhelming majority of that at 185 million. The statistics budget line is 121.5 million, and the state longitudinal is 38.5. We would love for that to be much higher.

As I wrap up here, I want to say a little bit about the NCSER reports you heard earlier, that there were three. We were excited about the two that we have an opportunity to work with.

The one for NAEP was very, very confirming of the R&D activities that we are partaking in, and the vision and roadmap for education statistics was bold and thoughtful and gave us license to think big, and that's exactly what we're doing.

We recently released our new strategic plan. As suggested by that report, I invite you to go online and look at our four major goals, which range from developing and disseminating timely innovative products to improving our operations, fostering and leveraging mutually beneficial partnerships, and, very important to us all, embedding the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility into everything that we do.

As we prepare for this coming up year, I want to point out that we have the school pulse panel, which will be executed again. We have improved the methodology we believe, and we will continue to collect these data once a month, with many of the modules rotating in and out as we did last year.

We're also working hard to get a handle on a better measure of SES. As you know, the free and reduced price lunch indicator was not developed for the purpose, the primary purpose, for which we are using it, so we're going to be looking this year to continue to improve on some indices there.

And, finally, on the research and development side, you've heard a lot about AI, and I want to point out that we are using AI at NCES as well. I could give a few examples. Automated scoring, for example. In NAEP, we're also looking at automated item generation. We use it to write reports, and the main NAEP report that is online also has a AI engine underneath it.

And let me end by saying tomorrow we will have the start of our IES Math Summit. It has over 2,000 registered participants and over 120 speakers. As you know, math is that area that we are all most worried about. The impact on our student abilities was most noted in the math, in the area of math. Reading was a little bit more resilient, although we saw historic declines there as well.

So I just want to say welcome again, and I look forward to any questions that you might have. Thank you.

MS. LEE: So I'm going to suggest—and I saw, Steven, you had your hand up—that we take a break and come back at maybe 1:30 my time, like, take a 15-minute break and return at the half-hour.

Steven, you had your hand up. Did you want to say something before we break?

And then, when we come back, Mark, you can do, you know, your comments and the like.

Steven, I'm sorry.

MR. KLASKO: Did I have my hand up? I didn't meant to interrupt, so I apologize. I can get to it when it's my turn.

MS. LEE: Oh, okay. All right. Let's take a break until the half-hour and return at that point.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

MS. LEE: So, Mark, we're going to go ahead and transition into your comments.

MR. SCHNEIDER: So I have two places that I'm supposed to comment. There's a big chunk which I'm going to do minimal because this is the opportunity for you all to work together and work things out. And then, at 4:00, I'm supposed to give an overview of the status of ESRA and NCADE, and we'll talk about those. We'll come back.

So the charge, if you will, that I want to leave you with or that I want you to discuss has to do with one of your fundamental roles, and that is approving the Director's priorities.

So, as you all know, my last day in office is at the end of April. I published priorities in 2019, but, effectively, there was no Board. I mean, there were three people on the Board, which, by law, I could have convened, and if two people showed up, that would have been a quorum, and they could have voted to accept the priorities, but I actually chose not to do this because I thought having a three-person Board was not exactly—I'm not sure what the right word is, confidence-building or whatever.

So that leaves us in this odd position, leaves you in this odd position. So, in 2010, Don Easton did publish priorities, and the Board at that time accepted them. I did my priorities in 2019, but because of the structure of the Board, it's never been approved by any Board.

So, for me, the question is—I mean, look, the priorities are pretty—for me, they're pretty plain vanilla, quite frankly. There was some article, I can't remember where, I think in The New York Times this weekend, like, why do people keep saying plain vanilla when vanilla is, like, one of the best spices there is in the entire world. So I have to get rid of that plain vanilla thing. It's really good vanilla.

No. So my suggestion is that you can start with the priorities. From my perspective, I think you should accept them. In nine months or seven months, they'll be gone, or they're still there, but they won't be—a new director will come in hopefully in April and will work with you for that person's priorities and the Board to accept them and to work together to do that. So that essentially gives you seven months to work on your vision and then, when a new director is confirmed, then work with that new director to get a new set of priorities.

I think the cleanest thing, which is what I'm recommending, is that you vote to accept those priorities, the ones that were published in 2019, right, because they're better, they're more up to date than the ones from 2010, and that you spend the next several months working and anticipating working with the new director to set the next wave of priorities.

You, of course, are free to do whatever you want in terms of the existing priorities. I think you got a copy of the Federal Register, and there's a link in there to the SEER principles, which we could talk about if you want, and those SEER principles have been updated to include the third one, I think the third one on equity.

So that's my suggestion. And because the change—the only change that is the addition of this—I'm sorry. There are wording changes in the SEER principles and the addition of the equity principle, but we've been advised those are nonsubstantive, so we don't have to repost them. We could just change them sort of on the fly, if you will. And we could take those and replace the 2010 ones, and then, again, sometime later in the spring, when there's a new director, you all can work with that person to get a new set of priorities.

MS. LEE: Okay. Thank you.

So, as I'm thinking about the use of the rest of our time, I'd like to start with an opportunity for each Board member to articulate their vision of what our priorities should be, how we should organize ourselves, et cetera.

And then I'd like to propose a plan for preparing the agenda for the next meeting and to talk about our meeting schedule. To me, that's the sort of practical work to get done at this meeting. And then we can close with your comments around ESRA and NCADE.

So let's start. And I'm going to suggest that Linda go first and then Doug because I know they both have to step out for a short period of time and will be returning because of prior commitments. So, Linda, you want to start?

MS. HAMMOND: Sure. And I hope to be able to stay on and hear lots of my colleagues' views as well for a little while. I have a State Board thing I have to step out to and come back.

First of all, I want to thank all the folks at IES for all of the briefing this morning, and there's clearly a lot of really important and wonderful work going on, and I appreciate the way in which people have been framing it up.

I want to just reinforce a couple of those points and then add a few more. Some of these are in the National Academy of Sciences piece on the future of education research; some of them are already going on in various ways at IES.

But I think one of the things that is really clear right now is that, you know, we're at a moment where there are many ways in which our existing public schools system is struggling, and there are needs to understand both kind of what works in the narrow sense of is there a program that when you implement it well, and that's a big question, right, produces certain outcomes, but also what is it about school organizational designs and the ways in which we have orchestrated the process of doing school that may need rethinking, particularly since we're sort of still dealing with the factory model design of a hundred years ago, and there's a lot of efforts to redesign schools to be more relationally supportive and to be able to engage in deeper kinds of learning and to be able to, frankly, recruit and retain and orchestrate the work of staff in ways that may be both more effective and in the long run more sustainable.

So I want to just raise some of those broader organizational issues as things that should be on the docket, I believe. Just to speak a moment about the implementation questions that have been raised, you know, that has to do with both the way in which we've organized the work of districts and schools to do implementation; it has to do with the preparation of teachers and school leaders, which should be, I think, a more prominent part of the agenda. Right now, it also clearly has to do with being able to recruit and retain those educators.

We have a need for more—and I know some of this is money-related, and Mark has brought up the funding issue, as have others. But, for example, we haven't had data on teacher attrition rates or principal attrition rates since 2012, and, you know, we need to be able to regularly have information that is going to be available to help us, you know, inform the work of the system in those ways, and part of that is about to come out, but, you know, it's like kind of waiting for Godot sometimes to get to the data sets.

The other thing I'd just like to note is that I think it's important while we're also looking at things like programs and which programs appear to be successful to also look at the issue of sort of learning principles. There's been, you know, great advances in synthesizing the sciences of learning and development, and those are the important fundamental science on which we build sort of our assumptions about how to support learning beyond a given program, which, you know, is built on some set of assumptions or principles, is important, I think, and to deepen that.

In the special education arena, how we can get to sort of principled research that is physiological also. There is a great deal going on in NIH, for example, with centers looking at things like why we have such an increase in autism in the student population having to do with the environmental implications. I hope we can be putting together, you know, the medical and the educational elements and principles that are helping us figure out both how to reduce the incidence of disabilities but also to support improvements for students.

The last thing I'd just note is I really appreciate, while we're exploring this, I really appreciate the practice guides that have been referenced several times. I will note that they are sometimes out of sync with what's being described in the field as the science. For example, in the science of reading conversation that's going on right now, the programs that have met the standard of the What Works Clearinghouse because they've had large randomized control trials and sort of gold standard studies are the ones that the advocates for the science of reading are critical of. The ones that they're supportive of don't have that evidence in the What Works Clearinghouse.

So we have a disjunct sometimes between the way in which the work is getting is done, represented, and taken up. Sometimes it's because the studies some people are relying on are smaller. They're using different methodologies. We do need a range of methodologies. We need to be able to aggregate those studies in ways that are nuanced and thoughtful, which I think the Clearinghouse practices work does try to do, but I would just frame up that we need to give that some additional attention. Thanks, Carol.

MS. LEE: All right. Doug?

MR. FUCHS: Yeah. I appreciated Linda's broad-sweeping comments. Mine are going to be a little bit more narrow.

First, I'd like to say—well, I could say a lot about my vision for American schools and for IES, but let me back up one step further. Let me say that I'm very glad for my Board membership. I've got great respect for IES as someone whose work has been supported by it for many years. Liz Albro was my project officer on one of my first research grants, and she was exemplary in terms of her support and encouragement.

Lynn Fuchs and I consider Sarah Brasiel at NCSER to be a genuine partner in our work on one of NCSER's large multi-year initiatives to improve the education for children with very serious learning problems.

As I started to say, I can say a lot about my vision for American schools and for IES, but I want to share just one issue that I currently think and write about quite a bit. It's that students with disabilities are generally performing abysmally. This is true across the 13 or 14 traditional categories of exceptionality. It has been documented in myriad ways, including by the NAEP. The proverbial man or woman in the street might say, well, of course, they're disabled, but there is no explanation or excuse for how poorly many of these children and youth are doing.

This poor performance is not largely because we have little scientific knowledge. NCSER and OSEP before NCSER have supported and nurtured the development of many successful programs, curricula, and materials.

Rather, a more important reason for students with disabilities abysmal performance is the gap between research and practice. This gap, as many of you know, is multiply determined, too many reasons to enumerate, let alone discuss here.

A major impediment inadequately recognized is a 30-year special education policy that reflects a belief that general education teachers and instruction can accommodate all students with disabilities all the time. This policy has failed many students with disabilities. In my view, it requires thoughtful review, a review that must be inclusive of all stakeholders, and it must be constructive, with an aim of improving the education and lives of all students with disabilities.

MS. LEE: Thank you, Doug.

If there are no objections, I'm just going to call on members individually from the list here. So James Anaya? Yes.

MR. ANAYA: Yeah. Hello, everybody. Yes. Sorry I was about 25 minutes late to the meeting. I apologize for that.

I'm right now above the Arctic Circle at the University of Tromsø Norway doing a series of lectures, and it took me a while to figure out how to get on my computer here and connect it up with our meeting, so I apologize about that. But I'm very grateful for the briefings that we were just provided. Very informative.

I have to just lay out up front that I do not have a background in education like most or all of the others on the Board. I was recently the Dean of the University of Colorado Law School, so, of course, my interest in education has been of late primarily through that lens and, of course, as someone who's been part of education as a law professor for most of my professional career.

And then my mother was a schoolteacher. She was a bilingual teacher in the El Paso area for a number of years. So, of course, I had many, many discussions with her about the challenges and some successes that she and her colleagues had in the Rio Grande Valley with that very diverse and complex set of people and circumstances.

But, you know, as far as priorities, first of all, I guess I really want to learn more how the Board and I in particular can help the IES and its various programs.

The communications work that was mentioned, I believe, is extremely important. You know, without that, the public is really not sufficiently aware, made aware, of the important work, and I think that's extremely important not just for educators and those in the field to learn about the work of and to benefit from the work of the IES but also the larger public to also be aware of it. And I think that that also feeds into the political environment and how it may be more or less supportive of the IES and its various programs.

I'm also thinking about learning more about how the Board and I in particular can help with the imperative of, as Mark referenced it, scaling up and better disseminating knowledge about What Works and the programs and research that have shown to translate into programming that actually does work. How can we better contribute to that scaling up and dissemination.

And, of course, on a substantive level, I could mention, you know, a few issues that I'm concerned about with regard to how education is working in the country. I guess I'm a little hesitant because I don't really know exactly how my expression of those translates into the role of the Board and what we're supposed to be doing given that there are already research programs that are directed in substantial part by parameters set by Congress.

But, nonetheless, just to mention one of those. Of course, you know, equity and access to education is a deep concern. You know, we see that in higher education, the disparities in equity and access to education from K–12, and they are quite pronounced throughout the country. There's a great need, I think, to understand more about, you know, the dimensions of that issue, what are its drivers and what are its consequences and what might the solutions be.

So that's just one of the many substantive issues in terms of education that I'm interested in in pursuing in this role. But, again, I'm not quite sure how I would do that as a Board member or how the Board would do it, but I'm interested in learning more about that. So thanks.

MS. LEE: All right. Well, again, I think the diversity of experiences on this Board is what will contribute to substantive and creative work. We all have the experience of education, and, certainly, your work in the law and the whole issue of the sort of legal and policy arena that we have to navigate in terms of the uptake of knowledge from research is a huge issue and a huge challenge.

Denisa Gandara?

MS. GANDARA: Hi, yes. Denisa Gandara.

First, I'm honored to be here to be part of this Board. I'm also thrilled, Professor Lee, that you're our chair. I'm really excited to serve under your leadership. So congratulations on being elected.

There are a couple of items that I'd love for us to engage with. One is from the consensus study report from the National Academies that has already come up, and that is having greater transparency in reporting in different areas of the work within IES, including demographics of applicants, grantees but also reviewers, and as well as characteristics of the institutions of applicants, grantees, reviewers, and trainings also.

The other item that I'd love to engage with is related to AI, and I'll just note that I was struck by the number of times that AI was mentioned throughout the briefings today, which is really exciting and also, I think, underscores the importance of having conversations about ethics in AI and issues related to data privacy, related to surveillance, consent, and data collection and usage.

That also brings to mind concerns with sensitive populations, particularly in certain political climates, so protecting data, especially for sensitive populations.

My own work touches on bias and algorithmic bias and algorithmic fairness, which is also something that I'd love to hear more about, as well as just issues—and I think this comes up a lot more—issues of accessibility, so access to the technologies and inequitable access to technology and how that might exacerbate inequities.

And I was also sort of inspired by the comments of Dr. Darling Hammond about being more relationally supportive, and so that brought to mind the idea that AI could actually reduce human interaction, which could lead to issues of reducing the relational aspects of education that are so important for student success. So those are some of the topics that I'd like to touch on.

MS. LEE: Great. I think the AI issue is huge, and one of the things I think we would be interested in finding out more about over time are how the work that IES is doing in that arena now is connecting with so many other initiatives that are going on really across fields.

Elmer Guy?

MR. GUY: Yes. Thank you for this opportunity. I really like what Carol shared and the items that she talked about.

The one that I particularly am interested in is addressing the role in underdeveloped communities, in particular some of the areas mentioned about how special education teachers are needed in these communities, as well as mental health professionals, speech pathologists. I think those are very crucial.

And in terms of testing, it would be nice to have more schools like colleges that understand the different languages or the different cultures outside of the mainstream society. I think it's good to have those support systems as well.

I really was interested to hear also about autism. I'm a big supporter of hearing about that more in depth to see what the causes are, what the numbers are looking like today, is it really increasing. I would be interested to learn more about that area.

And as mentioned about access to technology, I think that is very important. Many communities don't have broadband, basic internet, not available in rural communities. And if we are going to get the parents involved or if we're going to reach out to schools, communities so they have access to research data, that is very limiting, and I really support that work as well.

But I really appreciate the presentations that we received this morning and this afternoon. There's a lot of resources and a lot to learn, so I'm going to take time to learn more about some of the goals that have been put in place. But those are the areas I just wanted to mention this morning. Thank you for this opportunity.

MS. LEE: Thank you.
Shaun Harper?

MALE VOICE: I think Shaun had to step out for a meeting. I'm not sure if he's back yet.

MS. LEE: Okay. We'll come back to Shaun.
Maria?

MS. LEGORRETA: I'm not sure if Maria refers to me because my name is Maria but also Conchita, so I'm not sure, but I will go ahead.

So thank you, everyone, on the great presentations so we understand the inner workings of the organization. And also congrats, Carol, on your nomination. I'm looking forward to working with you.

I have kind of three points and then one little point. So the first one is kind of the importance of communication. I agree with what was said earlier about how important it is for educators to know that these resources exist.

MS. LEE: Can you pause for a minute. Could you pause for a minute?

MS. LEGORRETA: Yeah.

MS. LEE: Could everyone mute if you're not speaking. There's something in somebody's background. All right, dear. Go ahead.

MS. LEGORRETA: Thank you. So just the important works of communication and how we make sure that research gets translated into practice as opposed to just staying in the research bubble.

The other thing is accessibility in making sure that all of everything we do is accessible.

And then I really enjoyed the presentation on the National Center for Special Education Research. And I think that special education needs to be included in all of the centers in all of the work and not just siloed in that area. And so I want to see this incorporated kind of in all the areas, and then how do we as a Board support the work for the National Center for Special Education Research to help include increased funding in the area, because students with disabilities are the most impacted by a lot of these areas, especially when it converges with students of color and students of marginalized groups, especially when we look at areas of disproportionality with race and disability, and many, many of our states right now are disproportionate on their statewide data on disability and identification and suspension.

So, likewise, I would like everyone on the Committee to please become familiar with how to create accessible documents under Section 508 as set by the U.S. Access Board. So including more documents, .pdfs, PowerPoints, et cetera. So I myself am a blind Board member, and this will allow me to have access, but it's likewise a federal requirement for us to follow. So I would ask that all documents moving forward through this Board and all the work that we do keep that mind. And if anyone needs any help and support with this, you can feel free to reach out to me.

MS. LEE: Great.
Dana?

MR. HILLIARD: Like all of you, I'm very excited to join such a distinguished Board here. You know, this is just great. A lot of things have already been talked about just by us sharing, and these are big priorities with me. This makes year for me in public education, and a lot of these discussion points are just so imperative and are alive, alive and well with the problems and alive and well with the solutions within our public schools system.

You know, one of my big priorities is not only the design that Linda mentioned but the climate and culture, and the climate and culture of public schools and what our students are walking into are so imperative. And Matthew touched upon that briefly with mentioning the success of MTSS and MTSSB, formerly known as PBIS.

I firsthand was able to experience as an administrator flipping two schools, both a high school, which was one of the first high schools in the country to use the PBIS model. We actually are part of a nationwide film on that. And then moving onto a failing middle school and doing the exact same.

So these are practices that when we embrace have real results and they have real results on teachers and real results on students, and we need to continue to push in this day and age of how James talked about the politics in education, and we all know that our—you know, I'm a Mayor. I'm a sitting Mayor right now. We all know that our public schools are under assault, and the equity and the inequity that exists within our public schools system of how students that are attending Somersworth, right up the road 15 miles from us that students have just an abundance of opportunities that ours don't. And those type of things are hard to control with the school funding base at local levels and state of what we can control.

Again, getting back to a lot what—Matthew, I'm really excited that you brought these things up—what Matthew talked about, what we can control are those practices of climate and culture, of what our schools look like when students walk into them and showing that each student is accepted, ensuring that each student has access, ensuring that those teachers are able to build those partnerships because all of us sitting on this panel, I'm sure, can name the teacher that had the biggest impact on our life right now. I know I can.

But we can probably also name the teacher that probably turned us off from a subject area or still in our brain to this day just did not inspire us and maybe even started turning us a little away from public education itself.

So these are the things that I'm excited to work on; these are the things that I'm excited to help share with my experiences still within public education and to help guide the Board a little bit on the political side because I'm living it. I'm sitting in my office right now. So thank you. I'm so excited to join you all and become part of this great team.

MS. LEE: We're very honored to have a Mayor in our presence, somebody who is, like, living in the complexities of what it means to take all this stuff up in real-world practice.

I will say, Dana, that I'm 78 years old, and I remember two teachers, my high school literature teacher, who is the reason I studied English, and then, in eighth grade, having an elementary school teacher who, if somebody did something they weren't supposed to do in the class, he would have us all write "I will not do" something so many times, and he would take the papers and he would tear them up and put them in the garbage. So, yes, we do remember teachers as being very impactful.

Shaun? You're muted.

MR. HARPER: Yeah. Thank you. I am most looking forward to learning from the previous iterations of this group. I'm a person who really appreciates history, and I want to acknowledge that we're not starting from nothing. I realize that it's been a few years since the group has been active, but I really want to learn from and build upon the incredible foundation that, you know, previous versions of this group laid.

I am also, like James and so many others, I'm interested in having this group be really responsive to these times. Inasmuch as I appreciate the previous times and the previous groups and the agendas that they had to set, we are in new times right now. So I want us to really think about how, as an active civic responsibility, how we might advance and protect our democracy through the agenda that gets set by this group.

MS. LEE: Great. I think that this fits in part under a big topic that many people keep coming back to, and that is the complexities of the uptake of knowledge that's produced, and I have a few things to say about that, but I'll wait until later.
Steven?

MR. KLASKO: Hi. Thanks. And, Carol, I'm incredibly excited to be part of this group and work under you. As a president of a university, I've followed all the work you've done or some of the work you've done on underachieving students, so thank you.

And, Dana, the one thing I'd say you want to try out teachers that can turn you off, try going to medical school and dealing with—and those kind of folks.

So I just have one process question and maybe three quick issues. One is it would be good at some point before the end of this meeting, I mean, because just listening to everything, this is a bit of changing the world, and one of the questions that I put in chat is—and maybe it's through subcommittee work or whatever, but it would be important to understand what kind and how much work we can do outside of these meetings and how we can really, really make a difference because, obviously, quarterly meetings—you know, everything I've heard that I just wrote down would be a very different society, which would be great, but it's going to take the employed people at IES, as well as us.

The three things that I would bring up briefly. So I'm somebody that spent 45 years in academic medicine and universities, and now I spent the last two years totally in generative AI and large language models. And, you know, a lot of people have brought up AI as it relates to disabilities, et cetera, but I think we need to think more expansively, and it would be great to sort of look at research projects that are looking at not the end of the world or the beginning of a new world, but what does generative AI really change, and what's going to be important to train folks starting at an elementary school and going through college, right?

So the whole issue of STEM, for example, while it's important, those kind of things are going to be more impacted by AI, the things that involve human interactions, et cetera. So it would be good to get some real data on that because everything to this point has been, you know, sort of a bit emotional on the positive and negative side.

The second thing that I'd like to at least be included in the agenda is I don't think we have even touched the surface of the epidemic of what's happened to adolescents and students in that area as it relates to the pandemic and absenteeism and those kind of things, especially in folks that were already underserved. So it would be great, again, to start to look at some of the data that's already out. I know IES has done some of that, but, you know, what are going to be some of the solutions.

And then the third one is, and this one is a tad selfish, but I think it would be under our mantra. I spent 35 years trying to understand why we don't have more people of color, especially African American males, in medical school, and, by the way, some of it is just, you know, who applies, and some of it starts at, like, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. It was something that Colin Powell felt very strongly about. And it's not just selection mechanisms. It's, you know, what starts to happen; how do we get people excited. And, again, we're not a policy organization, but getting the data of why that is and what could be done about it would be very exciting to me. So those are the three things I'd bring up.

MS. LEE: It's great to have a medical doctor on the Board.

MR. KLASKO: I'm an obstetrician, Carol, so I probably can't help you very much, but enough said.

MS. LEE: Well, you have an M.D., so you got training there in that area, but I do think that in terms of the comment that Linda had started out with about the sort of holistic understanding of human learning and development that their attention to physiological processes in health are very, very relevant.
Okay. Let's see. Ruth?

MS. TURLEY: Thank you, Carol. I have to say, and it's already been said lots of times, but I'm honored to be a part of this amazing group. I'm honored to learn from you all, and I'm excited to get to work.

So some of the priories that I see as being really important in addition to—I should start off by saying, you know, that this upcoming transition to a new IES director, I hope that we make that a priority in terms of our role in that in preparing for that transition since that's just around the corner. So that's the first thing I'll mention.

The second thing is, as has already been mentioned by a few people, responding to the recommendations that were listed in the consensus report. You know, there's a lot of really good stuff in there that I think is worth responding to as a Board, and in particular, I just want to highlight the impact, the increase in impact, the engagement of partners, increasing responsive research, and, of course, that's connected to focusing on impact, and how to help with that translation and making that happen is something that I'm personally very interested in and I've been working on for quite a few years, and I'm still trying to get better at that, and I think that there's a lot that we can do at the national level.

And then the last thing, of course, we must also do everything we can to help to bring about an increase in the budget. The budget is so ridiculously small, especially relative to other funding agencies, and we as a nation keep saying education is important, education is important, and yet look at these budgets. That's a huge problem, and so I hope that this Board takes that up as one of our priorities.

And I look forward to working with you, especially Carol. Thank you for your leadership.

MS. LEE: Thank you. I do think that one of the interesting targets that we're going to want to have on the agenda at some point is how we conceptualize our work in relationship to advocating for support for IES, you know, with the Congress and figuring out how we fulfill that role.
Derrick?

MR. SCOTT: Good afternoon, everyone. Derrick Scott. And I'm really excited. Madam Chair, congratulations, and I'm really excited to be a part of this group and all the presentations from this this morning.

And what I really—the frame of which I approach things really comes from growing up as a black male down in a rural part of South Carolina and being at an HBCU, matriculating at Virginia State University, a Historically Black College and University, and also being an administrator here and really looking at how all these different challenges exist. Some of our research has involved pharmaceuticals, but it's kind of like a mold. To address science education is really what we use it for. And so, you know, being in rooms where you're in grant meetings and you have to speak up when there's a project that is not going to get discussed because it's doing a lot of diversity work and really just kind of saying, well these are important, it definitely merits discussion.

Also, you look at the differences in terms of, you know, what school districts have more money kind of tells you who will do the best down the line in terms of the student populations. And then you look at just racial disparities in funding period. Just really figuring out ways that underrepresented groups of people have a voice, have a seat at the table, and really have a lot of their issues addressed in terms of not being stuffed under the rug. That's something I look forward to working with the Board to address, in addition to, as Steven and Shaun said, in these new times, if you look at medical school, for instance, something that we're trying to address here at the university and make any type of pipelines and really just working with the Board.

So that's kind of my passion, is always having that voice for how is this going to affect, you know, underrepresented groups of people to make sure they have also equitable opportunities.

MS. LEE: Great. Well, again, I'm very excited about this common theme across all the Board members around how do we address the complexities of issues of equity in terms of opportunity, processes, and outcomes, and I've heard attention to this already in the important work that IES has been doing.
Caroline?

MS. SULLIVAN: I will not replay a lot of your fantastic comments. I agree with everything.

A couple things. I think the focus on workforce is a bit of a theme that goes through this all. You know, Nate had talked about the workforce in the special ed educator population, but also, you know, every time we talk about we need more school counselors and we need more speech therapists, even if the funding's there, and in North Carolina, we had the funding from the pandemic resources, but you can't find anybody, or you certainly can't find anybody in the rural districts. So I think looking at workforce, what's working, what's not, what do alternate pathways look like, sort of looking at it in a different way because just like schools are based on something from a hundred years ago, a lot of ed prep schools are living in that world as well, and as well as then how do you use that pipeline for ed prep to diversify the teacher workforce.

On special ed, I feel like we just need to have a special ed subcommittee too. I've seen lots of good subcommittees here, which makes me very happy that there is so much interest in it. But the one thing that hasn't been mentioned is that transition piece, and I think research on what is effective for EC students across disability to help make them more successful in their post-secondary journeys is really important and would be informative for everyone.

On Comms, I'm super excited that the website's getting redone and making it easy for users. I think how can we also make it easy to get teachers and superintendents and administrators to be able to see this data because it's not just I have a website. Here, you, Teacher, go read this really long report even though you're tearing your hair out because you're so overworked. It's how do we support educator professional development to be able to learn—to be able to change the practices being informed by this good data, right, because, you know, on the ground, you know, very few states support educator PD, educator professional development. Some districts have to, but it is not where it needs to be.

So, you know, there's a bit of a mismatch of you've got all this good data that could help teachers, but they can't get to it because they're overworked. We got to figure out how do we help themtake advantage of this great data.

MS. LEE: Great. I think another theme that I'm hearing also that I think fits into the equity focus too is the attention to rural communities and particularly infrastructure. We tend to have a lot of attention and public discussion about issues in urban areas but much less attention to rural areas.

And Hiro?

MR. YOSHIKAWA: Thanks, Carol. Let me just also pile on in terms of the enthusiasm and thank Mark and the Office and the center directors. Very exciting to hear the updates the first time after a very long time. And just can't overstate how terrible it was for this body not to be meeting for so many years, and that it's reconstituted and re-energized, I'm really excited to work with you, Carol, and everyone else.

So just a few kind of content points which are variations on the equity theme and then maybe a process suggestion. Before the NASEM reports, I think it might be useful, and maybe it's for the next meeting, to get updates from all of the center directors, but also perhaps the office, relevant office directors on actions that have been taken relative to the recommendations. I know it's been a while since they were released, so there may also be data from the centers that's relevant to the different areas of recommendations that it would be great for us to know about.

Another relating to the kind of current times that Shaun mentioned is some effort to update and define what are the current urgent priorities in equity in education and what are the kinds of research that are missing.

So just to give a couple examples, since there is, I believe, kind of a relatively more rapid research mechanism that I think Liz mentioned, what might that look like if it were focused on equity.

Another is policies are not just about what works and what might have positive effects, but, of course, policies that might have negative effects, right, on teachers or students or systems. And so what does that mean for education research and particularly, you know, policy impacts that are going on that may not just be positive but negative.

Another is just to highlight the content of the NASEM report on the review and funding process and whether a review of that process might be something that—and perhaps this is a forward-thinking thing since it would take quite a while, but, like, around the next director's work, with an emphasis on what are some of the additional indicators that can be monitored and reported around the review process, not just the demographics, but I think also the experiences along the way, particularly for underrepresented scholars or those from MSIs and those kinds of things.

And then the process point I had was that I think, Carol, you mentioned committees that might be center-specific, but I wonder whether it makes just as much sense or more sense to think about cross-cutting topics since many cut across not just centers but also offices not just related to centers, right? So something like—these are just examples, and I'm not just saying—I'm not saying that these should be the subcommittees, but big topics like equity, review processes that are not just at NCER or NCSER but related to things like the RELs and research practice partnerships.

A subcommittee on outcomes and methods would clearly be cross-cutting. So anyhow, that idea but process point to kind of topical subcommittees and perhaps not just kind of like center-based since we've heard so much exciting work that is cross-cutting and potentially thematic across centers and offices.

MS. LEE: Great. So, Hiro, you have connected with some things that I've been thinking about that I think we need to figure out a process for addressing. So I'm going to say first just some general reactions to what I've heard and then share a bit about my own thinking around vision and priorities.

So we have the capacity to create subcommittees, and it seems to me we could do them along one of two paths or multiple paths, one being what was in the charter, as I understood it, about whether we wanted to have subcommittees for different centers versus whether we want to have subcommittees on what we feel are pressing topics, which is what you're suggesting that I think makes a lot of sense, Hiro, and then being able to determine what elements of IES are doing work relative to that topic area and then thinking about the work that those subcommittees would do.

And what I sort of think I've been hearing have been as big cross-cutting topics of interest, one around the whole issue of AI. Another on issues of equity. Another around diverse learners. Another around the issue of dissimilation, and the other I think just around new areas of potential interest.

So one of the areas that I am interested in is there's so much work that IES is doing, and it goes across so many areas, and the pressing need that we've all articulated about what role can IES play in supporting the uptake of both rigorous research but rigorous research that wrestles with the complexity of the work being taken up in the world.

And Linda had mentioned in her discussion, and, Hiro, you may want to add something, thinking about the piece that you and Mary Helen and Nyla and Pam are doing for this new issue of Research and Review of Education, and that is that we've argued that we are at a consequential moment in the study of human learning and development with a lot of emerging consensus and big ideas from across disciplines, disciplines that typically don't even speak to one another.

So there's work again that might be interested in having medical people, you know, attached to this Board, and Jim Knorr, you know, who worked at NSF—and that is that—and even around the notion of diverse learners, and the fields would be various fields of psychology, cover psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, the various fields of the neurosciences, learning sciences, that are emerging around the idea, one, that diversity is normative. So, Nathan, the notion that what we think of as diverse learners as some sort of special deficit group of human beings versus people who have different pathways, different ways of expressing and being in the world, right?

The idea that cognition is not a single driver of human beings rendering decision-making, but rather both cognition perceptions that people have of themselves, of settings, and what they're doing and the emotional salience that we attribute to experience all interact just in terms of how the brain operates. They don't operate as sort of separate regions but regions that co-activate in response to people's participation in cultural practices, that learning and development unfold within and across ecological settings.

So where you are in cultural and historical time. I always use the illustration my mother was born in 1920. She's a child of the Great Depression. She always had money hidden in drawers, in books, and the like, and I could never figure out if it was because of the historical moment in which she was coming of age, the experiences you were talking, Dana, about school culture and climate. The nature of relationships and settings all matter. And it's a complex dynamic system that when we talk about it in theory sounds so complex that people get overwhelmed with thinking how do you get a traction on it.

But one of the things I've done, I'd given a distinguished lecture at AERA back in April, and I titled it "Through a Grandma's Lens." And so what I've been doing now is I use my camera cell phone watching my little grandchildren when they do these extraordinary things that no adult instructed them or supported them in doing in any way, and I just capture it on the phone.

So I think that figuring out, one, that I think that this would be an interesting paradigm for IES to begin to explore is what does it mean to try to understand these ideas, to get traction on them, to help make them logistical, and that it could serve as a lens for thinking about the issues of dissemination and uptake that if we think that if we have one strand—the one report I saw focused on academic language as a support for reading development and something about kids' behavior in school, and they found there was no impact, no impact on the control group, no impact on the experimental group, and it doesn't say that attention to academic language is not important, but there are all these multiple dimensions that are impacting literal uptake and building infrastructure and all of that sort of thing; that if we could develop a kind of period of change that was rooted in basic assumptions and knowledge about human learning and diversity, to figure out not only our investments and what designs are likely to have, you know, the most impact.

The second big piece, I think, has to do with how do we communicate particularly with policy audiences in terms of the uptake and that all of this work and goals that we're talking about is particularly complex. Dana got it right because this work is happening at the district level, it's happening at the city level, it's happening at the state level, it's happening at the federal level, and all of those working pieces are very complicated to sort of get traction on, but how do we think about that kind of work.

Hiro, do you want to add anything to what I'm saying?

MR. YOSHIKAWA: No. Those are great points. I hand it over to you.

MS. LEE: So it seems to me that a practical question in terms of moving forward for our next meeting is—and I'm thinking completely off the top of my head right now and would be interested in your feedback—is that if we could create several planning groups in preparation for the next meeting, one of which I think has to do with—if we think about it, it's a subcommittee question. So a group of people who would be willing to work between now and the next meeting to come to the Board with a set of recommendations.

And will we be able, Andrea, to get—do we have a transcript of this meeting being recorded or just notes or what?

MS. MIRALIA: Hi. Yes. We should have a court reporter who is on the call and is transcribing everything, but we will also have minutes within, I believe, 30 days, but I certainly think it will be faster than that.

MS. LEE: So I'm just thinking that if people could identify I'm going to suggest several planning groups that could be organized, but I think if those groups could get access to the minutes or transcription of this, so all the comments that have been made. I have some notes, and I'll type those up and share them. But, if that group could come with a recommendation in terms of the focus of subcommittees and, you know, the rationale for that and particularly the proposed relationship between the work of these subcommittees, however they're organized, and the various entities within IES.

The other is a group I think that could work on the question of IES priorities and how the Board chooses to address that question, one of which would be reviewing the documents that Mark created that have been shared with us.

I think also reviewing the National Academy of Sciences report, as well as the other two reports that Mark had mentioned, and to those, again, making recommendations about how should the Board address looking at the various priorities from those reports, what we've received so far and what we've heard so far in terms of how we would want to proceed in wrestling with that. I have so many notes here.

MR. FUCHS: Carol, could I interrupt just for a second?

MS. LEE: Sure. Go ahead.

MR. FUCHS: We also need to at some point talk about the Executive Director.

MS. LEE: Right. That was the other piece. And, again, I'm thinking that maybe we could get a group of a couple of people who could look at the history of that position, the work that's been done, make recommendations on process for us to take, and time line for that work.

And I'm also imagining, as I would in the materials that we received, that that person might potentially be a liaison between the Board and various congressional committees that are doing relevant work.

So what the scope of responsibilities we would imagine, what's the timeline, you know, what's the process, and that perhaps they would have an ad hoc member to that group, maybe Andrea or someone they support, that could just give us sort inside, you know what I mean, information about the possibilities of that work.

MS. MIRALIA: I believe, historically, the Chair does the majority—has someone in mind for Executive Director, and the Board appoints that person, and then the Office, the Executive Office within IES, does all the paperwork for actually hiring that Executive Director. So a very different process than voting for the Chair.

MR. FUCHS: Andrea, if I could just quickly. I think that that has depended—the process has depended on the Board and the Chair. There have been different processes at different points in time. Some Chairs have appointed a subgroup of the Board to help him or her with the identification and recruitment. So it depends. So I think, Carol, we have a lot of—potentially, we've got options in front of us. We can do what we want to do.

MS. LEE: Yeah, I would not want to take that on by myself as Chair. I would rather have a subcommittee of people who bring various kind of expertise to make both a recommendation for the skill set, the tasks and goals that we want that person to accomplish, as well as the process. They may come up with some recommendations themselves, but I'd rather go through that than as Chair trying to identify someone myself.

MR. HARPER: Carol, I'd be happy to serve alongside you in that task.

MS. LEE: So what I think I'm going to do is to send out after this meeting a list of maybe we'll call them Task Force and recommend a Chair. In listening to the discussion, if there's an area in which you would be particularly interested in, you can indicate that, but we could create a kind of document where Board members can sign up for these groups who will prepare essentially for the next Board meeting so that we have information, we have data, we have an articulated vision about how we want to act on these areas. Does that make sense?

(No response.)

MS. LEE: Any other ideas about particular—oh, the other is I would like to get a general sense from the Board about how you're thinking about our meeting schedule. So I'm hoping, Andrea, that our next meeting can be a face-to-face meeting presumably in D.C. where we'll have enough time to really get through and try to really set a structure and an agenda for how we're going to work. We could make that decision about how often we want to meet later, but I would be kind of curious as to how people are thinking about that at this present time.

MR. KLASKO: Carol, this is Steve Klasko. I think that—well, first of all, I think, yes, in-person meeting, please. Sitting for hours on a Zoom is really tough at least for me. But it would be great to figure out ways that we can really have enough pre-work

MS. LEE: Right.

MR. KLASKO:—and be in one subcommittee, so we're really going into the in-person meeting hitting the ground running with some work that's already been done between the Board members and the executives, et cetera. So, you know, like, we're getting 16 hours of work done in four hours.

MS. LEE: So one practical question and, Andrea, I guess a legal question at this point is, as a public entity, if we create these—I'm going to call them for the time being this Task Force who will prepare the background information and recommendations for the Board to consider when we have our face-to-face meeting, can I presume that there's not a problem for these committees to be able to meet via Zoom without those Zoom meetings having to be public, or would they have to be public?

MS. MIRALIA: First of all, I'm not an attorney, so I'm just the federal officer. So my understanding of the FACA regulations is, when you have a subcommittee, it still needs to have a delegated financial officer to note everything, and it should still be public.

If the work is all preparation and administrative and preparing to present to the full Board, that does not have to be public. And, again, I would want the attorney, Margaret Bounty, to confirm me on this. But if it's preparatory work for a subcommittee, then it does not have to be public, but if you're going to be delegating making recommendations, it has to be—you have to be making recommendations to the entire Board, and those meetings with deliberation have to be—those have to be public.

MS. LEE: Well, the deliberations would be public in the meeting in preparation for decision making. Recommendations I would think that the Task Force makes in planning—

MS. MIRALIA: Right.

MS. LEE:—isn't decision-making. It's just presenting options for the Board to consider.

MS. MIRALIA: Right. I need to find out at what point it needs to be public when it's a subcommittee.

MS. LEE: So, if you could get clarification on that, that would be helpful.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you. Yes, I will.

MS. LEE: I'm chairman of a charter school network in Illinois, so I know about these challenges.

Okay. Then so what I'm going to do is what we're going to seek to try to do is get as quickly as we can the minutes from this meeting. I will send out to all the Board members and the IES leadership the recommendations for—at this point, I'm going to call them Task Force—to prepare the information and recommendations about how as a Board we should proceed relative to these areas.

And then just some sense of timing for the next Board meeting. No thumbs down?

MR. HARPER: I think sooner is better than later for sure. If it's going to be in person, and I'm strongly in favor of an in-person meeting, at this point, realistically, my sense is November is probably the earliest we could get together. I'm down to try for October, but it feels to me like November is most realistic.

MS. LEE: If we tried for something—we can send out a Doodle poll and maybe look for times between the last two weeks of October and then the second week of November. The first week is kind of—

MR. KLASKO: So it would be October 15 and November 15, that kind of thing?

MS. LEE: Yeah. But the first week of November I have National Academy of Education—we have our annual meeting, and that won't work. So that's why I say the last two weeks of October and then maybe the second and third week of November where ideally we try to find the first date that works.

And to the extent that the preparation with the Task Force would do in terms of supports that may be needed from staff or information from staff, I'm assuming, Andrea, you would be the person that we could go through as we may need, as the Task Force may need information or supports?

MS. MIRALIA: Yes. But that actually will eventually be part of the duties of the Executive Director. The Executive Director really will have a lot of the support duties, and I think that will greatly speed up and make everything a lot more efficient because, you know, the meeting—the Board needs that, someone dedicated to just the Board business.

With that in mind, I did send out that request for your travel information two months ago, I believe, and I will now have to go check, and I'll send reminders to those of you who may have forgotten to send it back to me. I know I don't have it from everyone, but once we have that travel information, then nothing will delay an in-person meeting for those of you who would be flying in, for instance. We'd be able to submit travel requests and help you book tickets and that kind of thing.

MR. FUCHS: Andrea, do you have and have you shared a budget for the Board's work?

MS. MIRALIA: The budget, as listed in the charter, Carol probably can bring this up too, is 350,000, and that includes everything, including the salary for the Executive Director.

MS. LEE: And so I think as the Task Force meet, the question of whether or not there might be items or issues that we want to pick up that include financial obligations, to just consider the whole question of how we manage this budget.

Shaun, you had your hand up?

MR. HARPER: I did. It was back to an in-person meeting. Were we thinking a day-long meeting, two days, three days?

MS. MIRALIA: In the past, they have ranged everywhere from, well, four hours for a virtual meeting, and then, for in-person, they've had the meetings stretch up to three days. So that would be your call.

MS. LEE: I'm thinking maybe two days. I don't know that I want to do three days. You think we could plan on a two-day meeting?

MR. HARPER: Two days feels right to me.

MS. LEE: Yeah, especially since you have to come from California, right?

All right. Does that sound like a workable plan for moving forward? I will send out information with recommendations for Task Force and sort of goals for the Task Force. People can then self-select in terms of what Task Force they would want to work on, with the idea that the Task Force will come to the next Board meeting with detailed data that's relevant for consideration and recommendations about how we should proceed on each of those issues for that Board meeting. Ruth?

MS. TURLEY: Thank you. I think Denisa had her hand up first, but I will just say I just wanted to recommend that maybe since we're all here right now and since we want to try to have the next meeting as soon as possible, maybe we could nail down the dates or possible dates right now.

MS. MIRALIA: You don't have all of the—you don't have—you have all of the voting members or just about all of the voting members, but you don't have all of the IES members present that would need to, you know, have a voice in—well, you know, when you're talking about the different priorities for the centers and that sort of thing. You need to have their calendars in mind as well.

MS. LEE: So just a general comment on that, and then Denisa will go ahead.

I think that this is why after this next Board meeting I would like for us to set an agenda for the year. Not an agenda, I'm sorry, but a timeline for the year because we're all volunteers doing this, and we understand that staff have a variety of responsibilities. But I think that our consensus of availability for Board meetings should take precedence.

In other words, if a staff member, unless you're presenting at a conference or talking to the Secretary of Education, it would seem to me that there should be some flexibility to be able to accommodate, especially if we can set the dates more or less for the year ahead of time. Say we wanted to meet in August, but we couldn't meet in August because there was several, you know, staff persons or Commissioners, I'm not sure who, who were not able to attend.

Denisa?

MS. GANDARA: I was just going to say I really like Hiro's recommendation to get updates from—well, I liked all of his recommendations, but in particular, I'm referring to the one about getting updates from the NCER and NCSER on their recommendations from the NASEM report, and I was wondering if I could put a motion on the table so we can just request some updates from these two centers at our next Board meeting.

MS. LEE: Absolutely. Go ahead. You make your motion, dear.

MS. GANDARA: Could I move to request updates from NCER and NCSER on their recommendations from the NASEM report at our next Board meeting?

MS. LEE: Is there a second?

FEMALE VOICE: I second that.

MS. LEE: Any discussion?

(No response.)

MS. LEE: Can we use our—what is this, the raise your hand to vote? All in favor raise your hand. This is sure hard to follow. I shouldn't have said that yet.

All right. The motion passes. Great.

Okay. Steven, you had a comment?

MR. KLASKO: Yeah. I just wanted to amplify because I think it's going to be probably the single most important thing about essentially getting things done is, one, if we could get even a 12-or 12-month schedule type thing.

The key is going to be getting 90 to a hundred percent of these people here, you know, and that's where the work is going to be done. So, you know, I think I'm probably speaking for many of us. You know, I will put this in ink, you know, for March and May and whatever, but it's harder when it's a month or two ahead.

The second thing, you know, that I think I couldn't agree more is that, yes, we need somebody from each of the agencies, but if for some reason the Director can't make it, then that shouldn't change our whole schedule, and let him or her bring a Deputy Director or somebody like that; they should feel that they have to overturn everything to come to this important Board meeting and, if not, delegate it to somebody.

So I just wanted to add I really very much agree with both of those, those pieces.

MS. LEE: I agree. And can I suggest, and, again, we'll put it in writing, that when the Task Force meet when you're making recommendations, if those recommendations involve, such as Denisa's motion, that one of the centers or officers have some kind of data available for the meeting that in terms of the timeline that the Task Force would give sufficient advance notice for that request so that that's not a last-minute request for any of the staff.

There's someone here with a hand up that I don't see a name attached to.

(No response.)

MS. LEE: All right. If not, then I think we can switch over to Mark's update for us.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Okay. So, if we were in person, I would say, well, I'm going to be short because I'm the last thing standing between you and drinks. So I don't know if you—

MS. LEE: That still may be the case, Mark, but anyhow.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Well, I'm not sure on the West Coast if, let's see, it's 1:00 in the afternoon. Anyway, I will be brief, and I've already not been brief by telling you what I was going to do.

Okay. Look, I'm going to bring you up to date on ESRA, NCADE is part of that, the National Center for Advanced Design in Education, and the NEED Act, and SLDS. Those are the things I'm going to touch on, all of those things, SLDS being State Longitudinal Data Systems.

Okay. So, first of all, IES, as you all know, was authorized in 2002. The original legislation, ESRA, the Education Sciences and Reform Act, was supposed to be reauthorized in 2008. We're in 2023, it's never been reauthorized.

There have been periodic attempts to get the politics right to do the reauthorization. Right now, the Senate HELP Committee is actually working on language to reauthorize ESRA. We are expecting sometime in the near future to get a draft from the HELP Committee, and the Department will be asked to provide technical assistance on the language. So we're looking forward to that.

The HELP Committee has been working on this for several months. They put out an RFI several months ago, a Request For Information several months ago. They've been working pretty assiduously on trying to get a draft done.

I have not seen the draft. It's been pretty closely held, but we've been told that we should expect to get it in the near future, sometime this month. That is the most positive news about the possibility of ESRA being reauthorized.

The down side of this is the House has expressed no interest in attending to this. So this has happened in the past where one chamber in the legislature passes it and the other doesn't. This happened twice already in the past, and I'm afraid that we may see that one more time.

I would suggest, again, in your role as NBES, it's probably too late to affect the HELP Committee because they're very far down in the deliberations. But remember it'll go to the House, and whether or not we could—you can talk to people in the House of Representatives about this and try to get them to pay more attention to it is something that, again, subject to ethics concerns and guidance, you may want to consider doing.

So there's a lot of cleanup in language in ESRA, a lot of specificity in ESRA that was fine for 2002, but, you know, we're over 20 years later, and some of the things that were really critically important, including language and terms, in 2002 seem outdated, quaint, like what were you thinking, right?

So we need to—so part of—a lot of the work on the reauthorization has been modernizing terminology, even getting rid of some of the very specific points in ESRA from 2002 and trying to update them. That's number one.

So the Department has been talking about ARPA-ED for many, many years, right? So, when I was Commissioner of NCES in 2003, 2004, we started bringing in people from DARPA. We kept talking about DARPA for Ed, and it never went anyplace. We never were able to get it over the finish line.

Many of you know Jim Shelton. He was working during the Obama era. He was trying very hard to get ARPA-ED established. So I-3 and then EIR are examples of the closest we previously came to having something like ARPA-ED.

During the Trump Administration, this was never on the agenda, and then, in the last two years, the Biden Administration has been actually pushing ARPAs in many different agencies.

So there's a widespread ARPA NV, so ARPA Energy, ARPA Labor, ARPA Health. There's ARPA showing up every place. The Department wanted to have ARPA-ED, and there was some discussions whether or not it should be a standalone agency within the Department of Education, and the decision was made by the Department to create a fifth center in IES, the National Center for Advanced Development in Education, NCADE, and that was part of the Department's recommendations to the Senate HELP Committee.

I do not know whether or not it's included or not. Anyway, we will find out shortly whether or not NCADE is in the language for ESRA reauthorization, but even if it gets through the Senate, it's not clear what will happen to it in the House.

On the other hand, in the House, the—so Representatives Bonamici and Fitzpatrick have proposed the NEED Act, the National Education—I'm sorry, the New Essential Education Discoveries Act, the NEED Act, and that has two titles to it.

So the first one is "Creating NCADE." So that would be specific legislation, so there's two bites at this apple. One is NCADE and ESRA, and one is NCADE and NEED. The House may pass this, and whether or not—how the Senate deals with it is, of course, unknown.

So we have two paths forward for NCADE, one in ESRA, and the other one is in the NEED Act. Whether or not either of them get across the finish line is a different question. Both in ESRA but especially in the NEED Act, there's a very specific concern for the State Longitudinal Data Systems.

So SLDS was created in 2005, and between 2005 and the current time, the nation has spent about $1 billion building out SLDS. Every state but New Mexico has had money for an SLDS, and there's another round going on right now, and, hopefully, we could fix that problem with New Mexico, but anyway.

So $1 billion has been spent on it, but almost all the big goal list of money was done by 2011. So a lot of money, about half of the billion dollars came out during ARRA, the response of the Obama Administration to the fiscal crisis in 2008 and '09. And, I mean, if you think about this, the biggest chunk of money for State Longitudinal Data Systems was 13 years ago, and this is a tech system, right?

So, I mean, just think about what's going on. I mean, we need a total rebuild of the SLDS. We need it to be modern. We need it to be more functional than it is now. So there's a lot of taste for updating SLDS. It's probably going to cost somewhere between 500 million and a billion dollars to build the new system. There's going to be interesting discussions with regard to protecting student privacy.

So, as you know—well, okay. So the SLDS is an education system, right, primarily an education system, but in any modern conception of what that SLDS is going to be, it's going to be a backbone where you plug in other pieces of information. So you can plug in information from social justice systems, from health, from, you know, anything, and the goal, which is in federal law also, is that the goal of a new modern SLDS is to integrate more pieces of information from different data sources into this one backbone, the SLDS.

So, for example, I mean, we have a crisis in absenteeism. Nobody's talked about this yet during today, but absenteeism is a major problem. So how do we identify what are the causes of absenteeism? So someone could have lost their housing. Someone could have lost their food security. Someone could not show up because they can't do their laundry, right? They have no food; they have no laundry; they have no roof. All of these things are contributing factors in absenteeism. All we have is a count of you're here or you're not here.

So, I mean, we could begin to envision what our new systems could look like by integrating more data sources into creating a more wraparound, holistic view of what's going on with our students in our schools.

So this is the view, the image, that people now have. There will be, as you all know, the more data you put into a system like this, the need or the risks to, you know, disclosing student information have grown and grows enormously.

So, to some extent, we've been stuck in a FERPA discussion, you know from 1974, I think, but there are new methods and modern techniques for preserving student privacy. We have to take the lead in terms of making sure that the evolution in student privacy protection is built into SLDS. So that to me is an incredible opportunity.

So we've been pushing to get NCADE, which is our name for ARPA-ED, for some time. We've gotten a lot of support from the Department, from the Administration. We've had some pretty good receptions on the Hill, but, ultimately, it's not clear that we're going to get across the finish line.

But, in the omnibus last year, we ended up with $30 million with very specific language in the omnibus that said you must spend this—must is no. You should spend this, and if the Congress says you should, it's pretty much you must. They said you should spend this on ARPA-like activities.

So this is not a lot of money, but it's enough to launch us down the path of NCADE, and part of what we need to do is we need to show that we know how to launch something that looks like ARPA-ED and that, therefore, we should get more appropriations and more money.

So Liz mentioned in passing the transformative research RFA. So what we've done with that is this is the second time we've run this, and it calls for, as it says, transformative research. You know, what big problem are you tackling, and in what way are you thinking about how you can solve major problems. So we did this two years ago. We got 129 applications. Most of them were disqualified because they really were not transformative. We ended up sending 42 or something like that to panels, and we funded four, which for me is perfectly fine.

You know, I mean, if they're transformative, we don't—you know, not half, not everybody is going to get this money, so we would expect to have a win win process that excludes most people.

This year, we have about 40 applications, and we're doing some responsiveness screening, so maybe 30, 35 will go to panel reviews. And, again, if we get two, three, four, that will be great. That will be absolutely great. So the transformative RFA is one of our big pushes in this NCADE/ARPA-ED world.

MS. LEE: Mark, could I ask a quick question?

MR. SCHNEIDER: Go ahead. Yes. Sure.

MS. LEE: And that is can either you or maybe Liz tell us what was the focus of the four transformative research projects that were funded?

MS. ALBRO: I'll plop the link in the chat, Carol, so then you guys will have access to where they are.

MS. LEE: Okay. Thank you.

MS. ALBRO: Mm-hmm. Sure. Go ahead.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Thank you. So anyway, so we've run that. We've identified several priority areas that we think are going to be essential for NCADE. So, for example, someone mentioned earlier, I think maybe it was Carol, that said the importance of jobs of the future, right? So we're trying to figure out what skills, how do we develop those kinds of skills for future employment. I think that's a big, big issue. AI is involved in this. All kinds of things are involved in this.

So my longstanding view about what education is about is creating good citizens and, you know, a workforce that contributes to the well-being of the nation and to families. So we need to start thinking about the employment outcomes and job training and things like that because education systems is like part of the deal of training. So that's one area.

The second one, again, someone mentioned this earlier in passing, is neurodiversity. So we're thinking about how under the NCADE world we could encourage work in neurodiversity, and what we're thinking about especially in that domain is something that all the ARPAs have, which are seedling programs.

So I mentioned the SBIR program earlier, and that's a model of what we could do with seedlings. So the SBIR program, you get a round one funding of about $250,000 for a year, and then, if you hit your metrics and you have promising prototypes, you can get a $900,000 year round two investment. It's a great program.

So the seedling program is like that. So we're thinking, for example, in the neurodiversity, we might have a dozen year one prizes, awards, grants, cooperative agreements. We're still working on the contracting mechanisms, and they would all be in the field of neurodiversity. They might deal with dyslexia, autism, ADHD. And what we would try to do is to fund a few clusters within that 12.

So let's say we have four—so let's say we have three clusters, and we fund four people in four companies in each of these clusters, and the object would be to see if—since they're all going to be in neurodiversity, they work together in regard to dyslexia, for example, but also across the board with the other seedlings that we've invested in.

So that would be year one funding, and then many won't make it, but others will, and then there will be a year two round, and then the innovation that makes it different than SBIR is, if we get enough money, maybe a round three which is focused specifically on scaling up.

So, if you think about this as a cohort model, let's say year one we have 12, right, some fall out. So then there would be six, seven in year two, but then we would have a new cohort in year one, and then, essentially, if we have enough money, we do the scaling up in year three. So we would have this production process the whole way through. This is a standard model within other ARPAs, and, again, we have a lot of experience with regard to SBIR.

So just to summarize, ESRA may be reauthorized; the HELP Committee is working on it. There's still opportunities for comment and for involvement. Maybe not so much with the HELP Committee, but, certainly, if it gets out of the HELP Committee, there will be plenty of discussion on the Senate floor, and if it goes to the House, there's plenty of opportunities there.

The NEED Act is the second opportunity for creating transformational, rapid ARPA-like activities. SLDS, there's some discussion about whether or not SLDS gets pulled out of the NEED Act and gets put forward as a separate piece of legislation. You should keep your eye on that. We'll keep you up to date on that. So those are the big legislative pushes that are going on at the current time.

MS. LEE: Great. So I'm thinking that one of the Task Force might be a group who specifically is looking at legislative policies that are in the process of consideration to share with us, and they have to make recommendations of how as a Board we might seek to communicate in some way with the stakeholders who are making those decisions.

Andrea? You're on mute.

MS. MIRALIA: Sorry about that. I was only raising my hand as a way of calling attention to the time.

MS. LEE: Yeah. We're good.

All right. Is there anything additional that you wanted to add, Mark, or any other sort of big sort of tasks, challenges, or opportunities you want to bring to the Board?

MR. SCHNEIDER: No. I think we're many hours—as someone said earlier, sitting around in a Zoom meeting for four-and-a-half-hours, four hours and 57 minutes, is a stretch for everyone. Actually, it's the absence of a stretch for everyone that's the problem.

Okay. So I just want to, you know, thank you all for volunteering. As someone also noted, there's a lot of work, and there's no monetary reward for it. But you could see that this is incredibly important for our schools, for colleges, universities, learners, throughout the life span. And I just welcome you, and I thank you.

MS. LEE: Well, I want to thank Mark, all the Commissioners, and staff, who have shared so much information to get some sense of the broad scope of what it is that you all do. And I think that I can speak on behalf of the Board members that we're all excited and committed to supporting you in that effort and trying to sort of work together collaboratively to kind of push the boundaries because the challenges that we're facing, as everyone has pointed out, are grave, with deep consequences for learners of all ages, and I think that we need to be able to kind of wrestle with the impact of what it is that we have been doing, but also figure out how to imagine new paradigms, new processes that can try to tackle the complexity of education, but, certainly, education in the United States.

So, with that, are there any closing comments that anyone would like to make?

(No response.)

MS. LEE: So, if not, I'm going to call the meeting to a close, and I will send out some recommendations for Task Force and the foci and goals for those groups, with the anticipation that each Task Force will present relevant data and recommendations for how the Board should try to address or involve itself in that issue at our next Board meeting.

And then I'm assuming, Andrea, until we get an Executive Director that you can send out or some staff a Doodle to set the date for the next Board meeting and anything that you think may be relevant for the staff in coordinating the Zoom meetings for these Task Force that we're going to form.

MS. MIRALIA: And I need to find out about what you can and cannot deliberate as subcommittees too, and I'll talk with Margaret and her team quickly in the next few days and we'll figure out the details about that.

Mark, am I assuming correctly in that you don't want to do a quick up/down vote about your priorities and you want to save that for the next meeting?

MR. SCHNEIDER: Yeah, I think they should discuss it before.

MS. MIRALIA: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then the only other thing I need to do is just officially adjourn the meeting when you all decide to do so.

MS. LEE: So, if I could just add, Andrea, that when you're checking in with the legal staff, it seems to me the question is in part whether or not the Zoom meetings that the Task Force have need to be public or not.

MS. MIRALIA: Right.

MS. LEE: They will not be making any decisions. So I don't think that's—that's not a relevant issue. But the question, I think, is whether or not they can hold these meetings internally or whether those meetings have to also be made public and open for the public to listen in on.

MS. MIRALIA: Right. Go ahead.

MR. KLASKO: And I would like to emphatically move that we adjourn and stand up, not necessarily in that order.

FEMALE VOICE: Second.

MR. KLASKO: Good.

MS. LEE: All right, I think everyone's in favor, and so, Andrea, you can formally close this meeting. Thank you.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you all. We're calling this meeting to a close. I appreciate all your work.

Take care.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Thank you all. Very well led, Carol.

MS. LEE: Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

MS. MIRALIA: Thank you.

(Whereupon, at 4:20 p.m., the meeting in the above-entitled matter adjourned.)

REPORTER'S CERTIFICATE

CASE TITLE: National Board of Education Sciences Open Public Virtual Meeting
HEARING DATE: September 11, 2023 LOCATION: Washington, D.C.

I hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence are contained fully and accurately on the tapes and notes reported by me at the hearing in the above case before the U.S. Department of Education, National Board for Education Sciences, Institute of Education Sciences.

Date: September 11, 2023
David Jones Official Reporter Heritage Reporting Corporation Suite 206 10 L Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20005-4018
Heritage Reporting Corporation
(202) 628-4888

The National Board for Education Sciences is a Federal advisory committee chartered by Congress, operating under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA); 5 U.S.C., App. 2). The Board provides advice to the Director on the policies of the Institute of Education Sciences. The findings and recommendations of the Board do not represent the views of the Agency, and this document does not represent information approved or disseminated by the Department of Education.