The Regional Educational Labs (RELs) were created as part of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Over the six decades since then, their mission and impact have been frequently questioned. Over the years, including in 2025, efforts have emerged to eliminate them stemming from a variety of challenges related to their goals and from a perception of limited impact. Some REL partnerships have led to successes in education; perhaps most notably, supporting state superintendent Dr. Carey Wright to improve reading outcomes dramatically in Mississippi. But most REL work has been unremarkable and RELs are often unknown among the very state leaders they are supposed to be supporting.
Despite this checkered past, I believe that RELs have the potential to provide necessary capacity and technical expertise in service of state and local education leaders. The goal of modernizing the REL program is to learn from prior successes and attempt to build upon those successful elements in states and regions across the country.
Challenge & Opportunity
Throughout their history, there has been little agreement on the purpose of the RELs. This can be seen by the different approaches across the three confirmed Directors of the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), the organization that oversees the RELs.
Russ Whitehurst, the first Director, saw RELs as research centers for randomized controlled trials (RCTs). John Easton sought to model the RELs after Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs), influenced by his time in Chicago. Later, I tried to make RELs IES’s outreach agents, disseminating evidence-based interventions to boost student achievement. Across these distinct visions, widespread success has been elusive.
This year, the Trump Administration canceled all REL contracts, effectively shutting them down. As with previous efforts to close them, the RELs have demonstrated a resilience comparable to the mythological Phoenix. Indeed, in August 2025, the REL phoenix rose again, when a federal court required the U.S. Department of Education to reinstate contracts for the ten existing RELs. This ruling ensures their continuation for at least the one year remainder of their five-year contracts. Looking ahead, when these contracts expire, the Department of Education should redesign and recompete REL contracts, building on prior successes and mitigating some of the challenges of the approximately $60 million annual allocation.
Recommended Updates
Below are several core principles to guide changes to the RELs, with the goal of making them more responsive to both state and national interests. Current legislation does not prohibit most of these changes, but further legal and political work will be necessary for full implementation of these needed reforms.
Empower State and Local Innovation
RELs require better tools and processes to support state and local educational innovation. A crucial step is shifting REL contracts toward performance-based contracting. Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) identify three main components for such contracts:
- A performance work statement (PWS)
- Measurable performance standards (covering quality, timeliness, quantity, etc.) and a method for assessing contractor performance
- Performance incentives tied to the established standards
To implement this shift in contracts, the Department of Education must articulate clear goals for RELs in partnership with state leaders—a challenge that has not been met over the previous decades.
Modernize Payment Structures
Consistent with the FAR, IES should build milestone payments into REL contracts, rewarding contractors for reaching specific progress points. This approach draws inspiration from NASA’s “Other Transaction” (OT) authority, granted in 1958 for advanced research projects. OT authority offers flexible payment mechanisms, such as milestone payments, which differ from standard contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements. While the Department of Education currently lacks OT authority, obtaining it could promote innovation by allowing modern funding approaches for research and knowledge dissemination. The Department of Education should work with Congress to give IES OT authority for the RELs (and more broadly for its other contracts).
Increase Competition and Improve Quality
The pool of firms competing for REL contracts is small. This concentration limits competition, potentially raising costs and reducing quality, depriving American students of the full benefits from REL funding. While the anticompetitiveness of REL contracts has not been studied, similar anticompetitive issues affect the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), some of which are slowly being addressed. The Education Department should modernize its REL solicitation process, for example, by using “industry days” to let state education leaders communicate their priorities and desired partnerships to potential contractors. Further, the costs of REL products and services must be made transparent and easily accessible as a foundation for competitive bids.
Modernize Federal-State Partnerships
RELs are designed as partnerships between the federal government and state education agencies. The Education Department must update these relationships. Among the most important changes is to recognize that RELs need staff who know how to implement change in schools, not just study it. That means hiring more implementation specialists and communicators who can translate evidence into action and measure what works. During contract negotiations, bidders for REL contracts should clarify how they plan to support districts, including leveraging AI, classroom technologies, and implementation expertise.
Feasibility and Legislative Opportunities
These recommended steps align with current laws and acquisition regulations and would modernize REL contracting. More ambitious reforms may require legislative changes but could further enhance REL services. By law, ten RELs serve specific geographic areas, creating monopolies and limiting competition. While service quality varies among RELs, some have focused efforts on specific topics, like developing actionable toolkits from IES Practice Guides (e.g., REL Appalachia’s toolkit for math instruction).
The Department of Education should explore ways to enable states to select REL services and content expertise that better match their needs compared to what their “local” REL might provide. For example, Oregon should be able to contract with, e.g., REL Appalachia, which would shift money from Oregon’s geographically defined REL to a REL that is doing the quality work that Oregon needs. In this alternate model, the states would have more control over the REL money and the services they need from RELs, breaking the regional monopolies that limit competition. This in turn would empower states to use RELs as they see best and the inter-REL competition for state contracts would improve responsiveness and efficiency.
As always, designing a more competitive market for federally supported activities is complicated—but I believe that by giving states more control over REL money could empower competition between the RELs that would have many benefits.
If the REL phoenix is going to continue to rise from the ashes, the reforms outlined above are needed to ensure taxpayers get value for their investment and American students have greater opportunities for academic success. This moment presents an opportunity to design RELs in a way that best serves states, practitioners, and students; let’s seize it.
