The US Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES) plays a crucial role in raising the performance of America’s public schools. Launched by Congress in 2002, IES’s mission is to provide national leadership to advance the quality, integrity, and accuracy of notoriously weak research in education, aiming to provide a stronger knowledge base for improving education across the lifespan, from birth through adulthood.

IES’s founding legislation established the National Center for Education Research (NCER) — one of IES’s several research centers — as a cornerstone of the agency’s work. NCER is charged with funding high-quality research (currently totaling around $160 million annually) that advances core education goals: ensuring that all children have access to a high-quality education; improving student academic achievement; and closing the achievement gap through the improvement of teaching and learning.

Almost two decades after IES was launched, however, education outcomes remain dismally low. On the last National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests for high school seniors in 2015, for example, 29 percent scored below NAEP’S lowest level of Basic in reading and 40 percent scored below Basic in math. Less than a third of the students entering the K–12 school system complete either a two- or four-year college degree by age 25.

A large proportion of the US population is
still not being effectively educated in the K–12 schools. Despite billions of
dollars spent on decades of research, though, we still don’t understand why or
what to do about it.

NCER is intended to address exactly these questions. But the agency is not adequately targeting funds at research that will answer them. Instead, NCER funds a hodgepodge of 13 “topics,” laid out in an annual Request for Applications, including some pedagogical theory, several curricular areas, two age levels, one student subgroup, the “social and behavioral context for academic learning,” and a couple of others. This incoherent assortment has accumulated over time, driven largely by the interests of academics and contract researchers, not a logic model for improving student outcomes.

Indeed, NCER has evolved into more of a
funding source for academic research than an applied science agency improving
on-the-ground practice in districts, schools, and classrooms. NCER’s core
purpose isn’t to fund academic work, though; it’s to improve education outcomes
across the lifespan. So, what research should the agency fund instead?

To begin answering that question, I recently convened
a working group with IES leadership and a select group of top education
researchers to evaluate NCER’s current topics and define research priorities
going forward. Two overarching themes emerged from the discussion, as follows.

First, the most critical research gaps today aren’t in basic knowledge of teaching and learning — they’re in understanding how to get that knowledge applied. While years of rigorous research have yielded much more robust understanding about what “works,” we still know very little about how to get effective practices actually implemented in schools and districts. “We describe education as an applied science, but we have no science of application,” as one researcher put it.

This problem is nowhere more evident than in the ongoing failure to teach children to read. Despite rock-solid research on how to teach reading, over one third of fourth graders can’t read at even a basic level and most students still aren’t proficient readers by the time they finish high school. The cause of this crisis isn’t insufficient knowledge on how to teach reading, though. It’s the failure to implement the methods long known to be effective.

As Emily Hanford has shown, classroom teachers are still widely using a teaching approach known as “three cueing” — teaching children how to guess words rather than how to read them — even though it’s been debunked by cognitive scientists for decades. In other words, changing what teachers do — not increasing what researchers know — is the key to improving student outcomes.

The urgent priority for education research is thus not exploring, developing, and testing new “interventions.” The urgent priority is understanding how to influence the human- and system-level factors that enable or constrain implementation of what we already know works to improve outcomes — in scaled-up, real-world conditions, and especially focused on teacher behavior as a crucial driver of student achievement.

Second, academics and “contract shops” have long defined both research topics and questions, largely excluding the school system stakeholders directly involved in teaching children. IES has established a solid infrastructure for advancing researchers’ knowledge of what, at least in theory, “works.” What’s badly needed, however, is an equally solid infrastructure to ensure that knowledge generated will influence the actual behavior of decision-makers and practitioners in districts, schools, and classrooms, given an inevitable resistance to change — in particular, when proposed by outsiders.

Seventeen years of IES-funded research has yielded an impressive foundation of knowledge about teaching and learning. But to improve student outcomes, what’s essential now is getting that knowledge implemented in the real world of schools and classrooms. That means that research funding going forward must aim to advance the work of K-12 stakeholders, not academic researchers, aiming to boost the capacity of schools and districts to test different approaches, gather evidence, and use it, in the local contexts where they are charged with carrying education out.

Shifting focus from building knowledge to figuring out how to implement it will prompt predictable push-back from those who produced the current system, benefit from it, or both. Nonetheless, the stakes are too high to maintain the status quo. To accomplish its publicly funded mission of improving education outcomes, IES has to stop discovering “what works” and start accelerating “what happens.”

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