Last week, the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency under billionaire Elon Musk announced nearly $900 million in cuts to the chief research arm of the U.S. Department of Education—vaulting the little-known Institute of Education Sciences (IES) into news headlines.
The recent moves by the Trump administration appear to cancel scores of contracts undertaken by the IES. The young government office, founded in 2002 by Congress, funds research and collects statistics about the state of education in the United States.
Derek Briggs, professor of education and director of the Center for Assessment Design Research and Evaluation (CADRE) at CU Boulder, said he has trepidation about the cuts. For more than 20 years, the IES has played a critical role in driving high-quality research about what works, and what doesn’t, in terms of how America teaches its students.
“Gutting is the word that has been used a lot,” said Briggs, who is not currently receiving funding from the IES. “If the data and resources that were cut are no longer going to be provided, it would be to the great detriment our ability to monitor trends and to conduct good education research.”
Briggs shared his take on what researchers know and don’t know about the recent cuts—and why they could matter for schools around the country.
Do you think the IES does important work?
The IES funds and supports very important education research and data collection. It’s a critical resource for objective evidence related to the condition of education in the United States.
Why does that matter for everyday Americans?
There are data that are prohibitively expensive for individual researchers to try to gather, so you really need resources and economies of scale to collect this kind of data efficiently and effectively.
It’s very costly and challenging, for example, to capture the experiences of nationally representative cohorts of students across the country over time. An example of this are the multiple iterations of the the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics within IES.
In the original iteration of this study, students who were in kindergarten in 1998-99 were followed through the eighth grade. Then another cohort of kindergarten students in the class of 2010-11 were followed through the fifth grade. In the most recent iteration, kindergarten students in the class of 2023-24 are to be followed. It would be terrible if data collection were to be interrupted because this would hinder our ability to compare the learning experiences and outcomes of these successive cohorts of students during the most formative periods of schooling.
Can you give an example of how researchers might use that kind of information?
As a graduate student, I took advantage of the data in the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988, which, in contrast to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, focuses on the experiences of students as they transition from high school to postsecondary experiences. I used this data to examine the efficacy of test preparation programs for college admissions. I examined whether students that had gotten commercial coaching for tests like the SAT and the ACT were doing better than students that had not gotten that coaching. What I found was that coaching did have an effect, but it was far smaller than what was being promised by commercial coaching companies.
Studies like this had been done in the past by the College Board and the Educational Testing Service (ETS). But because the College Board and ETS were affiliated with SAT, their studies on the effects of coaching were regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. The fact that nationally representative data on college admissions test preparation were available from an external organization that was independent of the test makers gave my research a lot more credibility.
How did you react when you heard about the cuts?
It’s a little bit baffling. If you look at the articles in the national press, so far no one’s really willing to go on record as to what has been cut. Most of the information you get from DOGE is on X through tweets, and the tweets tend to be rather sensationalistic, focusing on the millions of dollars that have been saved. But cost saving always has to be evaluated relative to the benefit lost. It’s hard to get a clear sense of just how pervasive the cuts have been or what rationale is being provided for how the cuts were made.
With that said, there’s a real sense of uncertainty among those of us who do education research and trepidation about what the future holds—one day you might be in the middle of research work, and the next day, you might find out that the plug has been pulled.
One of IES’ high-profile programs, which seems to be a target of the recent cuts, is the What Works Clearinghouse. What is it?
Around the time when the IES was founded, there was a real emphasis on doing more randomized, controlled experiments to find out whether certain educational interventions were actually having effects on student achievement and other outcomes.
The What Works Clearinghouse was designed to assemble the results from these kinds of studies into one place. If you go into the What Works Clearinghouse and search for a particular topic or even an intervention name or a curriculum, you can find out if there have been high-quality studies conducted on the efficacy of those programs.
There are some questions about whether it’s met its intended goal. In the past, I was involved in a study that focused on how school and district leaders make use of research in their decision making. We found that very few of these educators reported using the What Works Clearinghouse regularly.
DOGE’s argument is that it’s eliminating wasteful spending. Do you think some of these cuts are justified?
One of the things that IES is does is to fund qualified researchers to conduct multi-year research projects. I’ve served on one of the IES grant proposal review panels, and I just want to make the case for just how difficult it is to actually get a proposal funded. It can take people months of work to put together these proposals. Then maybe 10% the proposals or fewer get funded. It often takes multiple tries, multiple years of submitting proposals before you’re able to get funded. By the time you get through those many hoops, the quality of the proposals that are funded is usually quite high.
The programs and services that IES is expected to provide by Congressional mandate are critical if we care about supporting scientific research. Good science requires a combination rigorous experimentation and qualitative investigation. And that’s the only way we can expect to make progress in how we understand the processes of teaching and learning.
CU Boulder Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and university style guidelines.