The Ed. Dept.’s Research Clout Is Waning. Could a Bipartisan Bill Reinvigorate It?

Even as the U.S. Department of Education dismantles large swaths of the Institute of Education Sciences, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to create a new research center modeled on the Pentagon’s moonshot research-and-development program.

The proposed legislation, introduced this week by Reps. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., would create a fifth IES center, the National Center for Advanced Development in Education or NCADE to fund “informed-risk, high-reward education research” to improve teaching and learning.

“We must pursue innovation with both ambition and accountability,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. The proposal ” builds a smarter bridge between research and the classroom—accelerating evidence-based breakthroughs, strengthening data transparency, and empowering educators with tools that deliver real results.”

The concept is not a new one. Over the last decade and more, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have attempted similar initiatives modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Thatat program funds explicitly high-risk, high-reward research that has underpinned advancements like the internet and global navigation systems—and has informed education-related initiatives such as some of the earliest digital adaptive tutoring systems.

But the proposal also comes during a period of extreme uncertainty for the future of the Education Department as the backbone of education research. In 2025, the administration canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and grants that fund technical assistance, grants, and year-over-year studies of how young students and high school graduates fare. Staff reductions have shrunk the National Center for Education Research, one of IES’ current four centers, which funds research partnerships across 12 content areas, to just one staff member.

During IES’s major staffing and grant cuts this spring, former IES Director Mark Schneider and current senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute explicitly favored DARPA’s model to replace the National Center for Education Research’s typically slower, deliberative grantmaking process. Schneider dubbed NCER’s work as featuring “three Fs: Five years, five million dollars, and failure (the length of time of its grants, the amount of money usually given out, and the typical outcome).”

Limited results from prior R&D initiatives

Similar education R&D initiatives include the Obama-era proposed ARPA-Ed and the Investing in Innovation program, which evolved into the still-active Education Innovation Research grants under the first Trump administration. The Biden Administration also piloted a $30 million initiative called Accelerate, Transform, and Scale, dedicated to “high-impact, high-potential” research and development.

These prior iterations of an education ARPA have had very limited results compared with the Pentagon’s R&D flagship, with many more research restrictions and far less financial support.

If passed, the current proposal would authorize $500 million for NCADE, including a new IES commissioner and advisory panel on advanced research development, as well as staff to administer and evaluate the center’s research projects.

By comparison, DARPA’s budget topped $4 billion in fiscal 2024, or more than five times IES’ current budget.

Some of the priorities in the bill also seem to conflict with Trump administration priorities. The new IES center, for example, would help find solutions to ensure that schools have “access to a diverse teaching workforce.” Just this week the administration sued a Minnesota district over a contract that seeks to preserve minority teachers.

The Alliance for Learning Innovation, an education research advocacy group, argues even a small R&D program would be a boon at a time when the vast majority of IES staff and grants have been eliminated or restructured, and experts warn the nation’s education research infrastructure is on rocky footing.

If approved, NCADE would ramp up rapid testing and iterative research to tackle education problems that are “too big or complex” for existing research grants, according to ALI.

“Chronic absenteeism is a great example of a complex, thorny problem that wouldn’t be solved with one type of research,” said Sara Schapiro, ALI’s executive director
“It’s mental health; it’s curriculum; it’s student engagement in school; it’s high school redesign—all these things that could come together to help us really get to some of the root causes of chronic absenteeism.”

Support for research infrastructure

The Data Quality Campaign, which works with states to improve student education data, said shoring up and improving basic research infrastructure of this sort would be crucial to developing major breakthroughs in teaching and learning.

The proposal separately would authorize another $500 million to modernize, integrate, and link state longitudinal data systems across education, workforce, nutrition, and other social services. In particular, NCADE would support finding ways to link longitudinal data across states while also protecting student data privacy—a massive undertaking.

“You can’t do R&D without data. You can’t do a research question on whether this particular intervention has impacts on earnings … unless you have connected data across not just education or K-12, but across P-20 and the workforce,” said Kate Tromble, DQC’s vice president for federal policy and advocacy. “

State data, meanwhile, look to be increasingly important if the reductions to IES begin to effect the Education Department’s core data collections on schools, students, and teachers.

“Certainly as the federal infrastructure [for education research] potentially declines either in quality or access, this grant program would help a lot with filling the gaps in state systems so that they can step in and ensure that we have the longitudinal data that we need in order to understand all of the research,” Tromble said.

Prior attempts to launch NCADE during the Biden administration failed to gain traction in Congress, and Schapiro said the outlook for the proposed NEED Act is similarly unlikely if it remains a standalone bill. But, Schapiro said bipartisan support is a hopeful sign in the divisive current political climate.

“This is one of the rare things where you know there is some consensus: that we cannot eliminate funding for data, research, and innovation,” Schapiro said.