The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is at a critical juncture. After decades of operating under an outdated research model characterized by five-year grants, $5 million budgets, and limited results, IES must fundamentally transform its approach to education R&D. This article outlines the principles, structures, and practices that should define a modern education research agency. It draws on successful models from across the federal government and lessons from IES’s own experience. Note that this piece is focused on modernizing IES’s approach to research. This is just one of IES’s functions, which include gathering statistics, running assessments, and evaluating government programs.
1. Focus on National Priorities, Not Individual Interests
For too long, IES has relied on individual researchers to define what gets studied. This field-initiated approach, while academically productive, has failed to deliver a coherent or cumulative body of knowledge to address the nation’s most pressing education problems.
In FY2023, IES’s National Center for Education Research awarded more than $100 million to over 40 projects spanning 12 topic areas. These grants were often well-designed, but collectively did not add up to an actionable research agenda and did not always have clear applications to practice or policy. Too few projects targeted known gaps in the evidence base or aligned with national goals like improving early literacy, reducing absenteeism, or closing postsecondary attainment gaps.
A modern system must:
Establish national R&D priorities. These should be defined by IES leadership, in partnership with educators, state and district leaders, policymakers, and researchers. Priorities should be grounded in persistent challenges that research can help solve, such as effective strategies for math acceleration, evidence-based reading instruction, chronic absenteeism, postsecondary transitions, or career-connected learning.
Invest in thematic portfolios that build cumulative evidence. IES should stop funding disconnected studies under a common topic header and instead fund integrated portfolios with a shared objective: building a coherent, cumulative body of knowledge on critical national challenges. Within each portfolio, grants should be structured to study important questions and explicitly contribute to a broader evidence base through aligned research designs, shared outcome measures, replication requirements, and collective reporting. The goal isn’t a collection of projects that happen to fall under the same topic, but to create a coordinated body of work that answers “what works, for whom, and under what conditions.”
De-emphasize academic novelty. Current peer review norms reward methodological complexity and publication potential over practical value. Instead, IES should prioritize studies with a clear pathway to application—those that inform programs, policies, or products that can realistically improve student outcomes.
Address IES’s aversion to scale. There is a long-standing cultural discomfort with interventions that succeed commercially. Yet commercialization is often the fastest and most effective route to scale. IES must shift its orientation from discovering ideas to delivering them. A recent report entitled From Seed Funding to Scale studied the return on the investments made by the Department of Education/Institute of Education Sciences Small Business Innovation Research program (ED/IES SBIR). It demonstrates that commercialization of ed tech products can be a highly efficient avenue for reaching large numbers of students and teachers, far more efficient than “traditional” IES-funded research.
Terminate underperforming projects. Legal and bureaucratic barriers have made it difficult for IES to end projects that aren’t delivering results. A new system must include real performance management. Projects that miss benchmarks or fail to produce usable findings should not continue to receive funding.
The bottom line: research dollars should flow toward persistent problems of national significance, as defined by states, districts, and educators.
2. Build Teams and Structures That Can Deliver
A mission-driven R&D strategy requires structural reform. IES must move beyond individual grant projects and toward coordinated, team-based efforts built around clear goals, shared metrics, and cross-functional expertise.
DARPA-Inspired Project Management
A modern education R&D infrastructure requires more than better topics—it requires better structures. IES must move from passive grantmaking to active portfolio management, with staff empowered to guide research toward real-world outcomes. DARPA provides a model for how this can work. While DARPA operates in a different policy arena, many of its design principles are directly applicable to education research.
IES’s current phased grant structures are limited in their impact. Funding is often obligated upfront, and continuation is based on procedural compliance, not demonstrated progress. By contrast, DARPA uses stage-gated, milestone-driven investments, where each phase of work is contingent on meaningful, measurable results. Projects that succeed move forward. Projects that underperform are stopped or re-scoped. This model is faster, leaner, and more accountable than IES’s.
Borrowing from DARPA, IES should adopt the following structural principles:
Empowered program managers. IES staff should lead research portfolios, not just manage grant compliance. Program officers should be able to define research challenges, identify gaps, solicit proposals, reallocate funding, and terminate low- and no-impact work. Their responsibility should not be to fund projects, but to solve problems.
Short-term, performance-based funding. Replace fixed multi-year grants with shorter contract periods (12-18 months) tied to clear milestones. Continuation should depend on interim outcomes—not whether grantees followed the plan, but whether they made progress toward results.
Structured proposal expectations. All funded proposals should answer the core questions of the Heilmeier Catechism: What are you trying to do? What’s new? Why will it work? What are the risks? Who will care? What are the success metrics? This ensures clarity, feasibility, and relevance from the outset.
Diverse, time-limited leadership. Program leadership should include professionals from beyond academia, such as state and district officials, product developers, and implementation experts. IES should create limited-term positions to bring in new talent with the skills to design, manage, and scale applied research programs.
Use-oriented success metrics. Projects should be evaluated on their ability to generate usable, scalable knowledge that improves educational outcomes. If a study doesn’t help educators, families, or policymakers take meaningful action, it should not be considered a success.
A DARPA-inspired approach would allow IES to be more agile and responsive—to pursue bold ideas while maintaining discipline and focus. Most importantly, it would shift the agency from funding disconnected studies to driving coordinated progress on national education challenges.
Fund Larger, Interdisciplinary Grants
The current system overproduces small, disconnected studies. To get better results, IES must fund larger, better-resourced teams with a range of expertise, including people who know how to build usable tools, replicate findings, and scale up. This may result in fewer grants, given federal resource constraints, but those grants will be higher-impact.
Break the “fifth decimal problem.” Academic incentives reward hyper-precision, even when it’s irrelevant to practice. IES must shift the focus from statistical significance to practical significance, as statistical significance does not measure impact or the importance of a finding. As the American Statistical Association notes, researchers need to use other methods, including ones that “emphasize estimation over testing such as confidence, credibility, or prediction intervals; Bayesian methods; alternative measures of evidence such as likelihood ratios or Bayes factors; and other approaches such as decision-theoretic modeling and false discovery rates.”
Incorporate non-academic expertise. Teams should include product designers, implementation specialists, rapid-cycle evaluators, and plain-language communicators. These professionals bring skills that academics often lack but that are essential to bridge the gap between research and impact.
Support scaling from the start. Most IES-funded research fails to reach students. This is partly because few projects plan for scale. Future grants should require scaling strategies, identify commercial or nonprofit partners, and fund user testing as part of the research plan.
Build on the SBIR model
IES’s SBIR program has generated impressive outcomes—over $200 million in revenue from supported products. Its milestone-based, two-phase structure is a model for short-term, impact-driven funding.
But the goal of research infrastructure is not to generate more ed tech for its own sake. IES should:
Preserve SBIR’s incentives and structure. The two-stage funding model—$250,000 for nine months, followed by $1 million for two years—ensures early validation before significant investment.
Apply the SBIR model beyond software. Use short-term, stage-gated contracts for non-tech innovations like curriculum interventions, professional development models, or school improvement strategies.
Avoid saturation. The field doesn’t need a million reading apps. IES should create thresholds for funding: demonstrated user demand, evidence of positive effects, and clearly defined plans for reaching underserved students.
Tie funding to scale readiness. Phase II awards should be contingent on demonstrated product-market fit, efficacy data, and plans for long-term sustainability.
Add a focus on scaling. ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy in the U.S. Department of Energy, focuses on commercialization and scaling to translate successful bench-scale technologies to commercially viable systems. IES needs to adopt this approach to its SBIR and other research programs.
SBIR’s strength lies in its incentives and pacing, not just its ed tech focus. That structure should be exported across IES.
3. Maintain Scientific Rigor Without Bureaucratic Red Tape
IES’s statutory commitment to rigor is essential—but its methods for ensuring rigor have become outdated and counterproductive. The current system often benefits bureaucracy over results.
Strengthen and Modernize SEER
The Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER) are a vital framework for ensuring transparency, relevance, and quality. But they need stronger enforcement and strategic evolution.
Make SEER compliance non-negotiable. All IES-funded research should be preregistered, openly shared, and accompanied by a cost analysis. These three standards are basic to “Gold Standard Science.” Other SEER-aligned practices should be incorporated into grant scoring rubrics and public reporting as applicable.
Add replication to SEER. Education research must grapple with generalizability. IES should require funded projects to include plans for replication and fund second-stage replications as a matter of course.
Use SEER to fix the What Works Clearinghouse. The WWC’s fixation on internal validity has sidelined promising interventions. A SEER-based grading system could rate interventions on transparency, cost, scalability, and relevance, rather than just statistical purity.
Streamline Peer Review
Peer review is necessary, but the current model is slow, insular, and poorly suited to applied research.
Shrink review panels. Current panels include 15+ reviewers reading up to 20 applications, encouraging superficial reviews and academic gatekeeping.
Diversify reviewers. Panels should include educators, product developers, and other non-academic voices. Every proposal should be reviewed for technical merit, practical utility, and likely impact.
Review more frequently. An annual review cycle slows progress and deters timely work. Rolling review should become the default, particularly for applied studies.
The Path Forward
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild IES. We can restore an outdated system, or we can create a research infrastructure fit for the 21st century.
That system must be:
Mission-Driven, focused on national priorities, not researcher preferences.
Team-Based, built around interdisciplinary teams, not solo investigators.
Impact-Focused, rewarding relevance, usability, and scale, not academic prestige.
Agile and Accountable, using shorter timelines, success-based renewals, and smarter reviews.
Early signals show this model works. The Transformative Research in the Education Sciences program has already attracted new talent and funded bold, interdisciplinary work with real-world potential. It’s time to expand these efforts and hardwire them into the Institute’s structure.
We don’t need tweaks. We need transformation.
