On July 30, Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act. This is the companion to the House bill introduced last December by Representatives Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA).

The NEED Act would establish a new center, the National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE), within the Institute of Education Science (IES), which is itself housed within the Education Department. NCADE would be modeled on the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA), a division of the Defense Department that focuses on breakthrough national-security technologies but that has also advanced many civilian breakthroughs, including the internet, GPS, advanced microprocessors, and Covid-19 vaccines. There are now ARPA-inspired agencies throughout the government (in departments such as Energy, Transportation, and Health), all aimed at harnessing modern research methods to produce more breakthroughs in their respective policy domains. Education should be next.

Here are some changes that NCADE will enable.

Strong program managers

Central to the success of ARPA models is the role of program managers (PMs). ARPAs rely on entrepreneurial PMs to identify, craft, and execute projects. Critically, these PMs are not career employees in the ARPA agency. Rather, they have defined terms, usually five years, to ensure they are connected to the latest developments in their area of expertise.

NCADE must also hire broadly, recruiting professionals from, for example, engineering, the learning sciences, and artificial intelligence. This contrasts with the model in IES (and its existing research centers such as the National Center for Education Research), which rewards doctoral degrees in a narrow set of academic disciplines and expects project officers to stay at IES for a long time.

More focused research

Most research funded by IES is spread too thin, in part because it’s oriented around “topic” areas that have evolved over the 22-year history of IES. These mostly reflect the existing topics that form the core of today’s education research. Further, IES’s funded research is mostly “field initiated”—which means most IES grants are responsive to what researchers propose to study. This model produces research that tends to be anchored in current topics, rather than future ones. IES’s recent announcement of $100 million of supported projects confirms a grab bag of different research projects—most of which are “one-offs”.

What’s needed are sustained, focused IES efforts along the lines of the Reading for Understanding research program. This project, which launched in 2009, was a concentrated $120 million multiple-year multiple-research team program that contributed to the science of reading—a science that is now so well established that 38 states plus the District of Columbia require reading pedagogy based in part on the Reading for Understanding evidence.

The DARPA-like structure of NCADE will move toward more concentrated, large-scale efforts that focus on the big problems in education today. These new large-scale research projects will also need a streamlined review process. The current process, which takes many months and is dominated by academic researchers, will not meet the NCADE mandate. Strong program managers will be able to help make these required changes. The current process, which takes many months and is dominated by academic researchers, will need to be modified to meet the NCADE mandate.

Scaled-up research

Most interventions supported by IES fail—I estimate that only about 15 percent generate statistically significant effects—and fewer generate substantively important ones. In itself, that’s not a surprise: This “hit rate” is not much different from hit rates found across different fields (for example, 90 percent of drug candidates fail clinical trials).

But the few interventions that are supported by evidence are usually neither replicated across different groups of students nor scaled up. NCADE’s modus operandi should be to move from, say, 500 students in a research study to 5,000 students in replication studies to 5 million students in classrooms across the country.

Scaling requires different skills than those possessed by most academic researchers, whose careers are built on publishing lots of “original” research articles rather replicating studies to identify “what works for whom under what conditions”—the very raison d’etre of IES and an essential foundation of scaling. NCADE, on the other hand, will be built to emphasize the importance of getting successful interventions scaled up to improve student performance.

The Need for the NEED Act

IES is a high-quality science organization, but too much of what it does is anchored in old models of research and hiring. The NEED act is an opportunity to create a modern research organization focused on high-risk–high-reward work with the potential to dramatically change education R&D. Just as important, as NCADE succeeds, it will act as a “skunk works” that can lead to change across IES and in the nation’s education R&D infrastructure.

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