A recent piece by Kevin Mahnken in The 74 summarizes recent developments that mean more funding for R&D in education.
A recently passed $1.7 trillion federal omnibus package includes a $70 million boost to the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), the Department of Education’s arm for statistics, research, and evaluation. Within that 9.6% bump, $40 million are allocated for research, development, and dissemination, including an unspecified amount intended to foster “quick-turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to improve education outcomes for all students.” The initiative will be housed within the National Center for Education Research, one of the Institute’s four research and statistics hubs, with the hope that it will eventually be spun off into a fifth such center.
The IES Director, Mark Schneider, described the infusion of money as a down payment towards “something the department’s been talking about for 20 years.”
This bill’s passage comes after what some in the academic community have called a decade of disinvestment in federal education research. In the hopes of reversing those developments and spurring a nationwide recovery from COVID-related disruptions to school, Congressional Democrats and Republicans teamed up last summer to offer legislation that would have created a “National Center for Advanced Development in Education.”
For more, see: https://www.the74million.org/article/a-darpa-for-k-12-omnibus-bill-includes-substantial-new-funds-for-education-rd/
