In this blog, Acting IES Director Matthew Soldner reflects on the release of Dr. Amber Northern's "Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences: A Strategy for Relevance and Renewal."
Today marks the release of Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences: A Strategy for Relevance and Renewal, my colleague Amber Northern’s much-anticipated report on the future of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). In it, Dr. Northern outlines a series of “big shifts” that are meant to improve the use and usefulness of IES’s work by more explicitly focusing it on the concerns of state and local policymakers, classroom educators, and the many others who work daily to improve teaching and learning nationwide. I join the Secretary in thanking Dr. Northern for her report and am looking forward to considering its recommendations.
The report is a call for change. At the same time, it is a call to hold fast to that which has motivated the Institute’s work since its earliest days: the conviction that the rigorous practice of the education sciences—in statistics, research, and evaluation—is necessary for transforming education and education systems for the better. The challenge that lies ahead is operationalizing elements of Reimagining while ensuring that IES’s unique role in the education sciences isn’t just continued, but elevated. In the year ahead, all of us at IES are eager to take that challenge on.
But what does that involve?
Prioritizing Needs Sensing
As the report’s title suggests, much of Reimagining highlights the importance of ensuring that IES’s work is relevant to states’ and districts’ greatest needs. I wholeheartedly agree. Effective needs sensing is the first step in any effort to improve relevance. And although there are many ways IES might (and should) undertake needs sensing, one of its most foundational approaches to doing so is leveraging the work of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
NCES, with its statutory charge to report on the “condition of education,” is a central player in any IES effort to ensure that its work is grounded in high-quality data about the strengths—and weaknesses—of education nationwide. Perhaps the most well-known way NCES does so is via the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. With its regular looks at students’ proficiency in literacy, mathematics, and other core academic subjects, NAEP provides a critical barometer of what students know and can do. NAEP has long been known as the gold standard in student assessment; however, for it to remain so, Dr. Northern is right to point out that NAEP must continue to invest in innovation. It’s for this reason I was so pleased to join Lesley Muldoon, Executive Director of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), in announcing Next Gen NAEP, a year-long project dedicated to the program’s modernization.
Less well-known but no less important, another way in which NCES contributes to our shared understanding of national needs is through its many surveys and administrative data collections. Covering topics from early childhood education to adult learning, the NCES portfolio offers something to virtually everyone seeking to learn more about education in the United States. Whether that something is the right thing though is, for Dr. Northern, an open question. Her prescription? A “thorough review of current ... data collections to ensure they are relevant today.” It’s right to think conducting the kind of review Dr. Northern envisions—and leveraging the latest technology at each step along the way—could better position NCES to collect, report, and disseminate data that speaks to the needs of today’s students and families, schools and institutions, and educators and policymakers.
The needs sensing work that could be done by NCES (and other parts of IES, to be sure) to understand national priorities for research should, in Dr. Northern’s vision, be used to better focus the work of its two National Research Centers: the National Center for Education Research (NCER) and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). The logic here is simple. If NAEP shows that the nation desperately needs additional research on improving science instruction (which it does), NCES data shows that teacher shortages in critical subject areas plague many districts (which they do), or we learn through ongoing engagement with States that they need help preparing the future workforce (which we’ve heard), then NCER and NCSER should incorporate those needs as central foci of their research grantmaking. With the caveat that there will always be types and areas of work that aren’t likely to be surfaced by needs sensing but are nonetheless important—innovations in research methods, for example, or work on high-quality measures—the notion of tighter alignment between state needs and IES programs of research is hard to argue with!
Supporting Rapid Research and Data Collection
Reimagining also places a premium on more rapid research, including speedier data collection and release. This has long been a priority at IES, and there have been notable successes in this area. Examples include the adoption of new NCES data collection tools, such as the EDPass system, which dramatically improved the quality and timeliness of our Common Core of Data (CCD), and new approaches to grantmaking in IES’s Accelerate, Transform, and Scale (ATS) Initiative.
ATS speaks directly to Dr. Northern’s recommendation that IES support practical, rapid-cycle research and development (R&D) and then take steps to learn “what works, for whom, and under what conditions” and scale those products, programs, and policies that are most effective. Other IES investments already seek to identify what works and replicate effective solutions. IES’s Seedlings to Scale program, for example, is intended to move an idea from inception to minimally viable product in a year or less. Our SEERNet investment leverages widely used digital learning platforms (think: Canvas, OpenStax, and the like) to rapidly deploy, test, and iterate on new technologies to improve teaching and learning. And our LEARN Network, originally motivated by the need to rapidly scale effective practices associated with mitigating COVID-related learning loss, has developed a series of techniques and models that enhance product teams’ ability to get “what works” in the hands of ever-greater numbers of educators. In Reimagining, Dr. Northern encourages IES to expand this work, creating opportunities for networks of states to come together to do many of these same activities. We welcome this idea and look forward to exploring recommendations for future grant competitions.
Focusing on Practices that Work
Finally, I was heartened to see Dr. Northern emphasize the importance of IES continuing to take steps to ensure classroom educators were provided not only effective, evidence-based products and programs, but practices that they could instantiate in their day-to-day work with learners. This is the territory of What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guides, which summarize high-quality evidence about “what works” in early childhood, K-12, and postsecondary settings and then provides concrete guidance to educators on how to implement them. Among IES’s most widely used products, Reimagining is clear that Practice Guides should continue to be a focus of our work in the years ahead. I agree, and have been excited to see the many resources released this past year that make Guides even easier for teachers, school leaders, and districts to incorporate into their daily routines and professional development activities.
Those who have already read Dr. Northern’s report know there’s much more to be found about Reimagining IES. Along with my IES colleagues, I look forward to considering her recommendations. We’re interested in your feedback, too. As always, your thoughts, concerns, and questions can be sent my way at matthew.soldner@ed.gov.
