“For all the reorganizing that’s going on, there is an awareness that IES is performing a unique service to the country, and we need to be thoughtful about its next steps,” Northern said.
Northern said she met with 400 people last year and read through more than 200 public comments on reforming IES, many of them from research organizations, advocacy groups and individual researchers.
Researchers generally applauded the Northern report. Many of the recommendations mirrored the public comments for speeding research and statistical collections and making them more accessible and useful to schools. Indeed, many of the same ideas were also in a 2022 National Academy of Sciences report on the future of education research.
“From what we can see, not one of the recommendations was a new idea to NCES,” Peggy Carr, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a statistical agency that is housed inside IES, told me in an email. “Many had already been implemented or we were working on when the center was dismantled. Other recommendations were met with implementation challenges, frankly hurdles, that we did not control.”
Northern did not disagree. “It’s not as if I was trying to reinvent the wheel,” said Northern. “Some of these ideas are not unique or not new, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing them.” Northern said she didn’t track the progress that had already been made on some reforms or why others were not implemented.
Not radical change
It’s notable that the Northern report did not recommend radical changes, such as bringing statistical work in-house, as opposed to its costly practice of relying on outside contractors. That could save money but would require hiring more federal employees, an unpopular idea in Congress. (Earlier in her career, Northern worked at Westat, one of the primary contractors that IES relies on to conduct research, produce statistics and administer assessments.) Nor did Northern suggest sending federal research dollars directly to the states, which the Trump administration has proposed for all federal education spending. Northern mentioned this possibility only in an appendix, noting that it would require congressional authorization.
“But I’m not holding my breath. I decided to live in the real world,” Northern said, explaining that she focused on changes that IES could make under existing legislation.
Publicly, however, she and her supporters say her report represents big shifts, which will perhaps be more appealing to the Trump administration which doesn’t want to be seen as reproducing an exact replica of what DOGE dismantled. “These are not nips and tucks,” Northern wrote in her report.
Some of Northern’s recommendations are technical changes about things like Application Programming Interfaces, or API’s, that allow software to communicate with each other. But others are strategic ideas, such as focusing federal research on a handful of topics rather than scattershot studies in a variety of areas. She does not suggest what those big topics should be. Northern wants federally funded research to be more responsive to states’ education priorities, and not to researchers’ agendas, but didn’t specify exactly how to accomplish that. And she wants states to coordinate and test similar approaches in different settings to see which students benefit.
The Education Department did not respond to my questions about which recommendations it might adopt and when. An Education Department press statement announcing the report’s release was guarded. Acting IES director Matthew Soldner was more enthusiastic in a lengthy blog post, but he’ll need a greenlight from political appointees to proceed.
Northern expressed optimism that IES will be saved, but wouldn’t speculate on specifics. “None of this stuff can happen until there’s a restaffing and there’s a plan first,” said Northern. “I’m confident this is going to happen. But how quickly? All those are questions that haven’t been answered yet.”
Mixed signals
The public release of the Northern report was itself seen as a positive sign by research advocates. Three people familiar with the report said it took more than two months to review because of concerns inside the administration, reflecting tensions between rebuilding parts of the department and the political priority to shut it down. During the delay, a senior Education Department official, Lindsey Burke, described IES as the department’s “gem in the crown” during an online event in January hosted by the news organization Chalkbeat. (Burke, previously a Heritage Foundation fellow who wrote the education chapter of Project 2025, said in that blueprint for the Trump administration that IES’s statistical role should be preserved but potentially split between the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, with education research going to the National Science Foundation.)
Other signals from the administration point in many different directions. President Trump’s 2026 budget proposed cutting IES’s roughly $800 million budget by two-thirds. Then, the administration ordered the largest expansion of a higher-education data collection in history: a new college admissions survey to enforce the ban on affirmative action. “They’re relying on IES in a lot of ways,” said Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates. “They seem to recognize that the data are essential for the field and for their priorities.”
Congress ultimately rejected the proposed cuts and largely maintained IES funding. However, the Education Department still hasn’t spent the funds that Congress appropriated to IES in fiscal 2025. A Democratic congressional aide said there is “a lot” of unspent money at IES and that the department has not shared a plan for spending it.
Congress begins a push
Congress is pushing to rebuild. A committee report accompanying the 2026 appropriations bill directs the Education Department to rehire staff at IES. Even so, staffing remains far below the previous level of roughly 200 employees and now stands at 31, according to researchers. The headcount had dropped to as low as 23 after the mass firings but began rising again in the fall, largely to administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. Northern’s report does not address the canceled projects or the staffing shortages.
At least one influential observer believes last year’s destruction is creating an opportunity for real reform at IES. Mark Schneider, IES director from 2018 to 2024, said it has been difficult in the past to pursue incremental reforms like those proposed in the Northern report because of bureaucratic resistance. Still, Schneider knows that any rebuilding will be a political challenge. “It’s going to require a lot of pressure,” he said.
As the debate continues, the patient may be slipping away. In a blog post last week, Chester E. Finn, Jr., a former Education Department official in the 1980s and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, warned the loss of veteran statisticians is already degrading education data.
Without that expertise, we may never get an accurate picture of what is going on in the classroom.
Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
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