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.
Creating a Science and Technology Hub in Congress
Congress should create a new Science and Technology (S&T) Hub within the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team to support an understaffed and overwhelmed Congress in addressing pressing science and technology policy questions. A new hub would connect Congress with technical experts and maintain a repository of research and information as well as translate this material to members and staff. There is already momentum building in Congress with several recent reforms to strengthen capacity, and the reversal of the Chevron doctrine infuses the issue with a new sense of urgency. The time is now for Congress to invest in itself.
Challenge and Opportunity
Congress does not have the tools it needs to contend with pressing scientific and technical questions. In the last few decades, Congress grappled with increasingly complex science and technology policy questions, such as social media regulation, artificial intelligence, and climate change. At the same time, its staff capacity has diminished; between 1994 to 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS), key congressional support agencies, lost about a third of their employees. Staff on key science related committees like the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology fell by nearly half.
As a result, members frequently lack the resources they need to understand science and technology. “[T]hey will resort to Google searches, reading Wikipedia, news articles, and yes, even social media reports. Then they will make a flurry of cold calls and e-mails to whichever expert they can get on the phone,” one former science staffer noted. “You’d be surprised how much time I spend explaining to my colleagues that the chief dangers of AI will not come from evil robots with red lasers coming out of their eyes,” representative Jay Obernolte (R-CA), who holds a master’s degree in AI, told The New York Times. And AI is just one example of a pressing science need Congress must handle, but does not have the tools to grapple with.
Moreover, reliance on external information can intensify polarization, because each side depends on a different set of facts and it is harder to find common ground. Without high-quality, nonpartisan science and technology resources, billions of dollars in funding may be allocated to technologies that do not work or policy solutions at odds with the latest science.
Additional science support could help Congress navigate complex policy questions related to emerging research, understand science and technologies’ impacts on legislative issues, and grapple with the public benefits or negative consequences of various science and technology issues.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo instills a new sense of urgency. The reversal of the decades old “Chevron deference,” which directed courts to defer to agency interpretations in instances where statutes were unclear or silent, means Congress will now have to legislate with more specificity. To do so, it will need the best possible experts and technical guidance.
There is momentum building for Congress to invest in itself. For the past several years, the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress (which became a permanent subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration) advocated for increases to staff pay and resources to improve recruitment and retention. Additionally, the GAO Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team has expanded to meet the moment. From 2019 to 2022, STAA’s staff grew from 49 to 129 and produced 46 technology assessments and short-form explainers. These investments are promising but not sufficient. Congress can draw on this energy and the urgency of a post-Chevron environment to invest in a Science and Technology Hub.
Plan of Action
Congress should create a new Science and Technology Hub in GAO STAA
Congress should create a Science and Technology Hub within the GAO’s STAA. While most of the STAA’s current work responds to specific requests from members, a new hub within the STAA would build out more proactive and exploratory work by 1) brokering long-term relationships between experts and lawmakers and 2) translating research for Congress. The new hub would maintain relationships with rank-and-file members, not just committees or leadership. The hub could start by advising Congress on emerging issues where the partisan battle lines have not been drawn, such as AI, and over time it will build institutional trust and advise on more partisan issues.
Research shows that both parties respect and use congressional support agencies, such as GAO, so they are a good place to house the necessary expertise. Housing the new hub within STAA would also build on the existing resources and support STAA already provides and capitalizes on the recent push to expand this team. The Hub could have a small staff of approximately 100 employees. The success of recently created small offices such as the Office of Whistleblower Ombuds proves that a modest staff can be effective. In a post-Chevron world, this hub could also play an important role liaising with federal agencies about how different statutory formulations will change implementation of science related legislation and helping members and staff understand the ins and outs of the passage to implementation process.
The Hub should connect Congress with a wider range of subject matter experts.
Studies show that researcher-policymaker interactions are most effective when they are long-term working relationships rather than ad hoc interactions. The hub could set up advisory councils of experts to guide Congress on different key areas. Though ad hoc groups of experts have advised Congress over the years, Congress does not have institutionalized avenues for soliciting information. The hub’s nonpartisan staff should also screen for potential conflicts of interest. As a starting point, these advisory councils would support committee and caucus staff as they learn about emerging issues, and over time it could build more capacity to manage requests from individual member officers. Agencies like the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine already employ the advisory council model; however, they do not serve Congress exclusively nor do they meet staff needs for quick turnaround or consultative support. The advisory councils would build on the advisory council model of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an agency that advised Congress on science between the 1970s and 1990s. The new hub could take proactive steps to center representation in its advisory councils, learning from the example of the United Kingdom Parliament’s Knowledge Exchange Unit and its efforts to increase the number of women and people of color Parliament hears from.
The Hub should help compile and translate information for Congress.
The hub could maintain a one-stop shop to help Congress find and understand data and research on different policy-relevant topics. The hub could maintain this repository and draw on it to distill large amounts of information into memos that members could digest. It could also hold regular briefings for members and staff on emerging issues. Over time, the Hub could build out a “living evidence” approach in which a body of research is maintained and updated with the best possible evidence at a regular cadence. Such a resource would help counteract the effects of understaffing and staff turnover and provide critical assistance in legislating and oversight, particularly important in a post-Chevron world.
Conclusion
Taking straightforward steps like creating an S&T hub, which brokers relationships between Congress and experts and houses a repository of research on different policy topics, could help Congress to understand and stay up-to-date on urgent science issues in order to ensure more effective decision making in the public interest.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
PLEASE NOTE (February 2025): Since publication several government websites have been taken offline. We apologize for any broken links to once accessible public data.
There are a number of additional investments Congress can make that would complement the work of the proposed Science and Technology Hub, including additional capacity for other Congressional support agencies and entities beyond GAO. For example, Congress could lift the cap on the number of staff each member can hire (currently set at 18), and invest in pipelines for recruitment and retention of personal and committee staff with science expertise. Additionally, Congress could advance digital technologies available to Congress for evidence access and networking with the expert community.
The Hub should be placed in GAO to build on the momentum of recent investments in the STAA team. GAO has recently invested in building human capital with expertise in science and technology that can support the development of the Hub. The GAO should seize the moment to reimagine how it supports Congress as a modern institution. The new hub in the STAA should be part of an overall evolution, and other GAO departments should also capitalize on the momentum and build more responsive and member-focused processes to support Congress.