Getting ‘What Works’ in Education into the Hands of Teachers and Students
For more than twenty years, the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has served as a guiding light for U.S. education research. Its work has pushed the field forward, supporting high-quality, rigorous research in a field known for its reliance on word-of-mouth over science. The studies it funded have answered critical questions about “what works” in key areas like improving reading achievement and increasing associate’s degree attainment. It has served as a centralized, objective repository of data and research to inform educator practice, school district procurement, and state legislation. Even with these achievements, IES has room to grow to ensure that cutting edge research makes it into the hands of those who need it, when they need it.
As part of IES’s ongoing leadership, it has been moving to adopt an approach called “living evidence.” Use of this emerging approach would keep decision-makers up-to-date about the solutions that have been rigorously tested and hold potential to address core challenges facing American schools: How do we respond to astonishingly low scores on NAEP tests? Are there evidence-based approaches we can employ in schools that will help end the national “epidemic” of social isolation? How do we ensure that both our college graduates and those who do not wish to attend college can obtain high-paying jobs?
Harnessing Innovation
This week, FAS and its partners at the Future Evidence Foundation (FEF) released a new report: Harnessing Innovation: Options for Implementing Living Evidence at the Institute of Education Sciences (which you can download using the button on the left-hand side of this page). It describes in great depth how IES could build on existing processes to produce living reviews as part of their What Works Clearinghouse.
Over time, many have come to believe that the agency moves too slowly to be responsive to practitioner needs, that its approach to sharing research findings does not make clear enough for users whether an intervention is backed by strong evidence, and that it needs to better support innovation. Living evidence is not the silver bullet that can address all of these issues in full. And yet, its proposed adoption could be the foundation for a sea change, allowing IES to more responsively share when new best practices and innovative approaches are identified in the academic literature through the What Works Clearinghouse. However, recent seismic shifts have severely damaged IES’s capability to move forward with using this innovative model: the Trump Administration’s cancellation of nearly all active contracts, including those that made the What Works Clearinghouse’s work possible, and a reduction-in-force (RIF) that led to the firing of nearly all of IES’s staff.
Report Insights and Key Takeaways
The report was produced as the product of a year-long partnership, where FAS and FEF were granted the opportunity to engage deeply with leadership and staff from IES. Our team learned about their day-to-day processes and potential roadblocks on the path to change. The final ‘options memo’ was carefully constructed to give the IES team a set of realistic approaches they could take to addressing some of their greatest challenges: discerning the topics where knowing ‘what works’ could be most beneficial to the more than 100 million people that the U.S. education system touches, finding the highest-quality academic research from the thousands of studies produced each year on education, and doing this work within a limited set of resources (IES funding made up less than 1% of the Department of Education’s overall spending in 2024). These recommendations were informed by conversations with many of those that knew IES’s work best, from its contractors to the readers of the What Works Clearinghouse’s reports. They offer feasible ways for IES to craft more efficient processes for developing their resources.
From this process, our team had two key takeaways:
- While the What Works Clearinghouse faces challenges in achieving its goal to make rigorous research accessible to policymakers and practitioners, the staff and contractors that led its work were steadfast in their dedication to improving its resources.
- Living evidence is not just the way of the future in academic circles beyond the U.S., but is a model that is feasible to implement in large federal agencies.
However, canceling contracts and firing experienced, dedicated staff has kneecapped IES’s ability to make the changes necessary to begin creating and deploying living reviews. An opportunity may now be missed to better align IES’s work not just to what their constituents need, but also to how a global community is moving forward in thinking about how to better connect evidence to policy and practice. While the administration has signaled its intent to rebuild IES in the future, it will take time to enact a new vision, and to fix what will inevitably break in the absence of staff to support key resources including the Regional Education Laboratories, the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), and the What Works Clearinghouse. In that time, peer government R&D agencies such as UK Research and Innovation and major philanthropic organizations such as the Wellcome Trust will step up to lead the way on developing infrastructure that supports the use of emerging technology to build living reviews, moving the rest of the world forward while U.S. government agencies remain in the past.
Living Evidence Global Community of Practice
Living evidence still has a path forward in the U.S, and opportunities to continue to grow along with the growing global movement. Innovation outside of government for living evidence holds promise for U.S. education stakeholders, led by work through the HEDCO Institute at the University of Oregon and the clearinghouse Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development. The recommendations in the report will offer value for such organizations as they work to shift toward living systematic reviews, setting the tone for best practice in evidence synthesis while IES is in transition. FAS and FEF will continue to help support this work through our convening of a Living Evidence Community of Practice.
Further, it is our hope that the learnings shared in the report will be considered in re-imagining future iterations of IES. In its short 23 years of existence, IES has raised the rigor of evidence that influences education and made strides in both generating and summarizing evidence that has the potential to inform practice. Even if the administration moves forward in its stated aim of “returning education back to the states”, state and local leaders will still need IES’s resources to understand how best to disburse their budgets. Employing a living approach to evidence synthesis, disseminated at a national level, is a streamlined way to enable evidence-based decision-making nationwide. If the administration genuinely prioritizes government efficiency, the report’s recommendations warrant serious consideration.
Federal clearinghouses should incorporate open science practices into their standards and procedures used to identify evidence-based social programs eligible for federal funding.
The federal government should broaden institutional capacity to collect and integrate evidence on public values into policy and decision making.
With millions of new scientific papers published every year, acting on research insights presents a formidable challenge. But what if evidence could “live”?
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