December 2023
On December 12, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee advanced S. 3392, the Advancing Research in Education Act (AREA), on a 20-to-1 vote. AREA would reauthorize the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which created the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in 2002. In April, the leadership of the Senate HELP Committee, Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ranking Member Bill Cassidy (R-LA), released a bipartisan request for input to solicit stakeholder feedback on questions to inform ESRA reauthorization.
The legislation expands upon IES’s current activities to support research, statistics, assessment, and technical assistance. Overall, the bill emphasizes increasing the timeliness, accessibility, and use of research and data produced by IES and its application to education policy and practice. Some of these provisions include codifying research-practice partnerships as a component of IES activities, new State Capacity Research & Development Grants to build research infrastructure in states, and data innovation grants to encourage data-driven decision-making in states.
In addition, AREA would bolster current efforts IES is undertaking to broaden participation in education research, particularly for funding projects developed by researchers at historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and additional minority-serving institutions. The legislation also includes provisions to encourage data sharing under protections of privacy and confidentiality for secondary analyses and replication studies, and to develop training for IES grantees and peer reviewers on data management places. In addition, the legislation includes language that would enable further work from NCES to develop an alternative poverty measure and to modernize the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems program.
As with prior efforts to reauthorize ESRA, S. 3392 would remove the authority to appoint the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics from the U.S. president to the IES director. AERA and the American Statistical Association led a letter (see related story in this issue) signed by 20 organizations and 53 individuals, including former leaders of federal statistical agencies and leadership of colleges of education, that urged Senate HELP committee leadership to retain the presidential level appointment and explicitly grant NCES control of its statistical and professional operations so that it can provide timely, relevant, objective, and trustworthy statistics.
Also of concern in comments submitted by AERA, the bill also would reduce the number of members of the National Board for Education Sciences from 15 to 9, extend the terms from four to six years, and remove the appointment of board members from the president to the education secretary.
Urged by AERA and many other groups that have an interest in education research, an amended version of the original bill included a revised definition of “evidence-based” that expands the types of research classified as evidence in the original bill to encompass programs based on scientifically valid research without proscribing a specific methodology. Technical assistance programs supported by IES would align with an already-established definition of “evidence-based” in the Every Student Succeeds Act.
“We appreciate the efforts and work of the Senate HELP Committee leadership to reach a bipartisan agreement to reauthorize IES,” said AERA Executive Director Felice Levine. “As the process moves forward, we remain concerned about removing the NCES Commissioner as a Presidential-level appointment and related constraints on NCES’s independence and delegated duties necessary for NCES to carry out the four fundamental responsibilities of a federal statistical agency. AERA remains committed to working with Congress to address these issues in an ESRA reauthorization. We also believe that any changes to the size or appointment structure of the NBES Board would be premature just as the board is starting up as an effective body after years of lying fallow.”
During the bill markup, two amendments from Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) were advanced. The first would prohibit IES funding for institutions that promote antisemitism, and the second would prohibit IES funding for institutions that receive funding from “covered nations,” including China. Two additional approved amendments from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) would authorize the National Center for Education Research (NCER) to include research on student smartphone use and policies around smartphones as a topic included in NCER’s activities. It would also allow NCES to collect data on school, district, and state policies regarding student smartphone use.
Related: