Education R&D at Different Levels
At the federal level, education R&D operates through agencies like the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Federal education R&D focuses on large-scale research initiatives, developing evidence-based solutions that can be implemented nationwide, and building the foundational knowledge base that informs education policy and practice.
Federal agencies also collect and analyze meaningful data across diverse populations, fund rigorous research studies, and disseminate findings to state leaders, educators, and policymakers. This national perspective allows for research on broad education challenges that individual states or districts couldn’t address alone, while also ensuring that innovations developed in one region can benefit learners everywhere.
State education R&D is how states build and steward system-wide infrastructure for applied research, design, development, and evaluation that tackles their most urgent education and workforce challenges. It uses state levers including future-facing visions and strategic plans, dedicated R&D capacity, modern longitudinal data systems, funding, and policy flexibilities to support locally grounded cycles of inventing, testing, and refining new approaches to teaching and learning.
Rather than relying on isolated pilots, state education R&D connects and learns from community-based innovations across local systems, translating insights into evidence-based tools, policies, and models that can inform system transformation. By coordinating partners, providing technical assistance, and embedding evidence-based improvements into state priorities, it helps ensure that what works for learners and communities is discovered faster, spread more equitably, and sustained beyond individual leaders or grant cycles.
Local education R&D is how community priorities can translate into evidence-based innovation. It involves engaging learners, caregivers, educators, and community partners as co-designers to identify pressing problems, prototype new systems and models of teaching and learning, and run structured cycles of inquiry that generate credible, context-rich evidence about what works, for whom, and under what conditions. Local leaders align time, talent, and funding; leverage policy flexibilities and pilots; and use real-time data and student experience measures to refine ideas before scaling.
This grounded, practitioner-led R&D connects local experimentation to system strategy and state agendas. Districts and schools document and share insights, influence state research priorities, and participate in networks that spread effective models. By normalizing R&D language, building staff capacity for evidence-based improvement, and partnering with universities, intermediaries, and technical assistance providers, they create learning systems where iteration is expected, community voice drives design, and education transformation endures.
Nonprofits and philanthropy serve as catalysts that turn bright spots into systems change, connecting local innovation to the policy and resources needed for impact at scale.
Philanthropy
Philanthropy provides flexible, often early-stage capital; convenes cross-sector partners; and acts as connective tissue between researchers, educators, communities, and policymakers. By seeding and de-risking community-driven pilots, supporting participatory research, and investing in technical assistance, tools, and networks, they help local and state leaders run stronger cycles of design, testing, and evaluation. Strategic, multi-year investments enable communities to build the long-term infrastructure,people, data, and learning systems, that allows effective innovations to take root and spread.
Policy Influencers
Policy influencers translate community voice and emerging evidence into compelling narratives and actionable agendas. They build bipartisan coalitions, elevate local success stories, organize site visits and briefings, and advocate for legislation, funding, and data systems that embed R&D in state and federal infrastructure. By aligning private and public dollars, coordinating funder collaboratives, and championing inclusive approaches that center diverse learners and communities, they help create a robust, responsive education R&D ecosystem that can meet urgent needs while advancing long-term transformation.