March 2026

In February, the Department of Education released Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences (IES): A Strategy for Relevance and Renewal. The report, developed by Amber Northern during her temporary appointment as senior advisor to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, reflects the Department’s efforts to reimagine IES. Its recommendations were informed by a Request for Information that garnered 230 public comments, including from AERA, and conversations with more than 400 stakeholders.

Northern emphasized the importance of preserving several core principles for IES: “Some of the bedrocks of IES revitalization that must carry forward include its independence, scientific integrity, statistics infrastructure, and rigorous research across diverse settings.”

Six Major Shifts for IES

The report identifies six key directions for IES:

• Focus on priority challenges: Concentrate resources on 3–5 high-need areas identified with input from state and district leaders.
• Streamline data collection: Direct the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to coordinate and optimize data collection while maintaining core functions, including the Nation’s Report Card.
• Scale promising interventions: Prioritize multi-state awards over individual, localized grants.
• Emphasize practical and innovative research: Ensure research addresses real-world needs.
• Enhance Regional Educational Labs’ (RELs) responsiveness: Improve how RELs deliver applied research and technical assistance, sharing lessons nationwide.
• Refine the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC): Focus on practice guides and tools, ensuring the evidence base is widely applied.

Center-Specific Recommendations

The report also included recommendations specific to each of the IES centers:

• National Center for Education Research (NCER): Introduce rapid-cycle, mid-range, and long-range grant cycles; support co-developed research with state education agencies and school districts; streamline peer-review processes; and release research findings in user-friendly formats.
   
• NCES: Review data collections and the types of information collected, reflecting recommendations from the 2022 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, A Vision and Roadmap for Education Statistics, which emphasizes NCES’s role in core data collections like EdFacts, the Common Core of Data, and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, while recommending efficiencies in longitudinal surveys.
   
• The National Center for Special Education Research: Build on NCER guidance with additional focus on research aligned with high-need areas, reducing emphasis on interventions, and strengthening cross-agency connections with education, health, and social services.
   
• RELs and WWC: Clarify REL roles and encourage flexibility in service delivery and focus WWC efforts on practice guides, including potential use of AI to enhance efficiency.

Next Steps and Discussion

It is unclear what the next steps will be, if any, for implementing the recommendations. Matthew Soldner, acting IES director and acting NCES commissioner, welcomed Northern’s report and recommendations in a blog post. However, the report has been developed as IES has experienced a large reduction in staff and contract cancellations that have affected ongoing work that had been meeting several of these recommendations and have otherwise paused important activities for grantmaking and data collection.

The report will be discussed at the 2026 AERA Annual Meeting during the session “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences: Reflections and Perspectives from the Field,” on Friday, April 10, 3:45–5:15 p.m. PT in Room 406AB on Level Two of the Los Angeles Convention Center. Chaired by AERA Government Relations Committee member Michal Kurlaender (University of California, Davis), the session will feature:

• Adam Gamoran, William T. Grant Foundation
• Michelle Crosby, American Statistical Association
• Nicole Patton Terry, Florida State University
• Kristabel Stark, University of Vermont