Is Trump Gutting Education Research a New Beginning or Just ‘Slashing and Burning’?

The Trump administration’s gutting of the Institute of Education Sciences on Monday temporarily disables an essential source of data on a host of basic information — everything from high school graduation rates and school safety to which neighborhoods have the highest quality schools.

At its most basic, it tells Americans how well U.S. schools educate young people at a time when the public is more focused than ever on basic questions of achievement.

Advocates for a more focused and efficient federal education infrastructure view the move as an opportunity to rid the institute of old, inefficient, and ineffective research methods, even as researchers and industry leaders say the cuts will stop many key studies, trials, and interventions in their tracks.

The move could also complicate Senate confirmation hearings for Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, setting the stage for contentious questioning on Thursday.

One industry insider called Monday’s actions “pretty devastating to the research infrastructure,” with several others saying administration officials canceled 189 contracts. But even that was unclear after Monday’s chaos. An administration official said the number totaled 89, citing a tweet from the Department of Government Efficiency that put the dollar total at $881 million. The department didn’t issue any official statements or breakdowns of the cuts. 

Most sources with knowledge of the cuts asked not to be named in order to speak freely about them — and, in a few cases, to preserve their ability to compete for future contracts.

DOGE, an informal agency led by billionaire Elon Musk, has spent the past few weeks slashing federal programs at President Trump’s direction.

“It’s apocalyptic, is all I can say,” said the director of one federal office who asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly.

DOGE workers for the past week have essentially occupied U.S. Education Department offices in downtown Washington, D.C., accessing sensitive information systems. On Friday, private security personnel blocked a group of House Democrats from entering the building, setting up a videotaped confrontation that went viral.

Several sources said Monday’s moves don’t affect what’s widely considered a key IES function: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known familiarly as the Nation’s Report Card.

NAEP will continue to be administered, sources said, but contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled and will be offered to new bidders.

On Tuesday, an Education Department official told The 74 that any IES contracts required by law would be re-issued for new competition.

On the chopping block: a host of programs, including the What Works Clearinghouse, Common Core of Data, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database of colleges and universities, and many others. The programs provide Americans with wide-ranging data on school quality, effective school interventions, and college data on finances, tuition, financial aid, enrollment, completion, and graduation rates, among other indicators. 

A person familiar with AIR’s work said the lost contracts amount to “millions of dollars.” 

Tofig called the cancellations “an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars” already appropriated by Congress.

“These investments inform the entire education system at all levels about the condition of education and the distribution of students, teachers, and resources in school districts across America,” he said. “Many of these contracts are nearing completion, and canceling them now yields no return on investment to taxpayers.”

The terminated evaluation and data contracts, Tofig said, are “exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars, and which are not.” 

One person who was not broken up about Monday’s events is Mark Schneider, a former longtime federal education official, who said his expectation is that much of the key research work will resume under new contracts. He couldn’t immediately confirm that but said his understanding was that, except for NAEP and one or two other untouched programs, “every other contract, as far as I know, has been canceled.” 

Schneider, who served as an IES director in the first Trump administration and stepped down last spring after more than three years under President Biden, estimated that about three-fourths of the institute’s 100 or so employees would be affected. The move amounts to the temporary dissolution of two key Education Department operations: the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

One source knowledgeable about the move described an emergency meeting on Monday in which IES employees heard of the contract cancellations. “I think they thought that IES’s independence was going to allow it to kind of squeak through,” he said. “And I think the leadership was just beyond shocked. I mean, they hadn’t been talking about any of this stuff happening.”

The administration on Saturday also ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop its investigative work. The agency, created by President Obama after the 2008 financial crisis, has long been a target of conservatives.

In late January, Trump issued an executive order that directed all federal agencies to temporarily pause grants, loans, and federal assistance, but 22 states and the District of Columbia sued, challenging the legality of the move and eventually blocking it. On Monday, a federal judge said the administration hadn’t complied with that ruling and ordered federal agencies to restore any paused or withheld dollars immediately. 

Schneider, the former IES director, said Monday’s developments don’t mean the end of the agency, but rather “an opportunity to clean out the attic” and revitalize essential research functions that the department has long neglected.

“There’s a bunch of stuff that’s been accumulating for all these decades, and they’re built on old technology,” he said. “They’re not even measuring the things we care the most about.”

News of the canceled contracts took education researchers and officials by surprise Monday afternoon, with at least two members of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP policy, saying they were just hearing about it through colleagues — or via the rumor mill.

• An official at a trade organization that represents research firms said that in many cases, classroom interventions such as tech tools being studied in real time will also disappear.
  
  
• The official also said shutting down the Common Core of Data will dramatically affect “every single real estate site” on the Internet that helps users probe neighborhoods on the basis of school quality. “That’s how people decide where to buy houses.”

Felice Levine, executive director of the American Educational Research Association, said the group was “deeply concerned” about Monday’s actions, saying NCES provides nonpartisan and unbiased information on important education indicators. “The robust collection and analysis of data are essential for ensuring quality education,” she said.

However, another person knowledgeable of IES’s inner workings, who requested anonymity to speak freely, agreed with Schneider that the nation needs “a different kind of approach to R&D to think about how we want to move forward.” 

That, she said, will require a commitment to research focused on effective teacher practice, among other indicators. That won’t happen with the current system. “I think we’ve gotten to a point with the current IES structure where things have been done the way they’ve been done for so long that no one can roll it back. That’s a real challenge.” 

Schneider, IES’s most recent director and now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has recently suggested breaking up the entire Education Department and moving its major functions to other Cabinet-level agencies.

He noted, for instance, that IPEDS, “the premier system” for reporting on colleges, is “totally archaic,” costing about $9 million annually but is, in his view, based on old technology, hard to use and provides little value.

“What does a modern system look like, and how do we get that?” he asked. “To just throw everything away is easy. To try to imagine how to rebuild some of these essential data systems that the nation needs so that they’re modern, efficient, effective — that’s a much harder challenge, and that’s the challenge I hope that we rise to meet.”

In a podcast broadcast Tuesday on LinkedIn, Schneider admitted that “given how much work I put into reforming IES with only marginal success, that they could do in one day … I’m a little envious.”

But he said DOGE’s technique of “moving fast and breaking things” in this case might be “dumb” for a few reasons: While he favors, for instance, getting rid of the IPEDS contract, he noted that the department can’t publish its College Scorecard, which it wants to protect, without it. The department also can’t effectively produce NAEP reports without the Common Core of Data.

“If you break X, you’re actually breaking Y and Z,” he said. “I mean, that’s a lack of experience, a lack of information.”

In an interview with The 74, Schneider wouldn’t immediately say whether he’d accept an offer to lead IES again.

An industry insider who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely said she has worked well with Schneider in the past and predicted that if he were once again in charge of IES, she might have faith that his leadership could start “a different conversation” about research. “But I just don’t see it yet.”

She said that she might believe that improvement is possible if she and her colleagues were dealing with “rational policy actors” in the Trump administration. But the new administration doesn’t represent “a sort of regular Republican world,” she said. “We’re in a world in which they’re slashing and burning everything.”

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.