IES Gets Mixed Grades as It Comes of Age

This article discusses how a U.S. education research arm earned qualified praise for playing a difficult role. Concerned about the credibility of federally financed education studies, Congress passed a law in the fall of 2002 that replaced the U.S. Department of Education's top research office with the Institute of Education Sciences. This article discusses some actions made by Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the head of the IES. He de-emphasized the competitive grant program for field-initiated studies, which let researchers across the field propose their own study ideas, and replaced it with more-focused grant programs in cognitive science, early-childhood education, and other areas. He shut down the far-flung Educational Resources and Information Center, or ERIC, clearinghouse system and created a leaner, more centralized ERIC to replace it. The federally funded regional education laboratories were revised, and the national research-and- development centers likewise were trimmed and given new missions and more-specific research tasks. The IES also put into place a new peer-review process that looks more like the procedure used at the National Institutes of Health to screen study proposals. IES over the past six months or so has been stepping up its efforts to be more relevant to practitioners, tinkering with the What Works Clearinghouse, making plans to develop practical policy guides, and forming task forces on urban education that put researchers in touch with educators from the trenches. The efforts appear to be mollifying some critics, and some are increasingly hopeful that education research will prove useful to practitioners.