The federal role in education dates to 1867 when President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first “Department of Education” for the purpose of:
...collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several States and Territories, and of diffusing such information respecting the organization and management of schools and school systems, and methods of teaching, as shall aid the people of the United States in the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems, and otherwise promote the cause of education throughout the country.
Which is to say what is now the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the modern U.S. Department of Education is responsible for the oldest and most fundamental of all federal activities bearing on “the cause of education throughout the country.” This at a time when nobody thinks that “cause” is functioning very well. IES is where we learn what is and isn’t functioning—and what might work better.
By no means is everything there worth doing. When I led its predecessor—the Office of Educational Research and Improvement—back in the late 1980’s, I tried with zero success to scrap or shrink the excessive portion of the agency’s budget that supported the largely useless but deeply entrenched “regional education laboratories,” as well as a gaggle of similarly-entrenched “research centers” in a bunch of universities. Yet the “labs and centers” persist to this day, and as far as I can tell, were spared from the meat-axe that DOGE swung through IES on Monday.
Yet the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) of 2002, which established IES in its present form, corrected much of what was weak and wasteful in the previous arrangement—and the new agency got off to a strong start under the leadership of Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, who strove with considerable success to see that its work would be conducted as proper scientific research—controlled experiments, etc.—and data gathered and reported with objectivity and integrity.
Whitehurst’s successors, most recently Mark Schneider, serving six-year terms designed to avoid election cycles and maintain professionalism, carried on this pattern of rigor and respect for science while pushing for the reform of stodgy practices at IES, as well as faddism, jargon, and the featherbedding that takes place through in-grown, in-bred “peer review” and procurement practices.
There’s still a way to go—and DOGE, if it actually sought the “government efficiency” in its name, could help modernize IES, perhaps even put out to pasture some sacred cows, such as the regional labs. But slashing and burning, as happened the other day, won’t improve matters. It’s just going to weaken the foremost truth squad in American education, the chief sponsor and funder of rigorous analysis, reliable data, and clear-eyed evaluations in a realm that needs more of those things, not less.
