The federal government's premier education research agency has grown slow, disconnected from classrooms, and unable to deliver the timely findings that teachers and state policymakers desperately need, according to a blunt internal assessment submitted to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. 
The 95-page report, authored by Dr. Amber M. Northern, a senior advisor at the Department of Education, recommends a fundamental restructuring of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) — a $700-million-a-year agency that funds the bulk of rigorous education research in the United States. Despite two decades of scientific achievement, the report concludes that IES has too often prioritized academic precision over practical use, scattering its grants across hundreds of disconnected projects while producing data that can take years to publish and research that rarely makes it into a classroom.
The critique lands as the nation faces a deepening academic crisis. National test scores released last year showed that students across all grades and subjects were still performing below pre-pandemic levels, with no state achieving reading gains in 4th or 8th grade and a record one-third of 8th graders scoring below basic proficiency in reading. With the Trump administration pushing to return education authority to states and reduce Washington's footprint in schooling, the pressure on IES to demonstrate its value has never been greater.
The report, titled "Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences: A Strategy for Relevance and Renewal," contains more than 50 recommendations built on interviews with nearly 400 people — researchers, state officials, district leaders, teachers, and technology experts — and more than 230 public comments. The findings describe an agency that, despite genuine scientific accomplishment, has drifted from its core mission of generating knowledge that improves what happens in schools.
Chief among the report's findings is that IES spreads its research dollars too thin. In recent years, the agency's main grant competition allowed applicants to submit work under roughly a dozen broad topic areas, producing what the report calls a "scattered research agenda" that rarely builds toward coherent solutions. Northern recommends that IES instead focus on three to five high-priority challenges — such as early literacy or algebra achievement — identified with input from state and district leaders, and that all four of the agency's centers work in parallel on those same problems.
The report saves some of its sharpest language for the National Center for Education Statistics, the agency's statistical arm. NCES manages dozens of surveys and data collections, many of which, Northern writes, have never been comprehensively reviewed since their creation. Some surveys overlap; others ask outdated questions or rely on inconsistent definitions. Critically, the various datasets are not designed to talk to each other, creating information silos that prevent the kind of holistic analysis policymakers need. The report also notes that two of NCES's flagship longitudinal studies — each costing more than $46 million — were quietly cancelled in early 2025.
Speed is another recurring complaint. IES products are "often out-of-date upon release," the report states, limiting their usefulness for practitioners making real-time decisions. Northern calls for automated data verification, standardized state reporting forms, and expanded use of application programming interfaces, the digital plumbing that would allow researchers, policymakers, and even AI tools to query federal education data directly, rather than waiting months or years for reports to be compiled, reviewed, and published.
