In this special, invitation-only GLR Week engagement held on July 19 at 12:30 p.m. ET, we were honored to be joined by two leaders from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) for a briefing on the proposed National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE). IES received an additional $30 million from the $1.7 trillion federal omnibus budget package of 2022. The funds are designated to support “quick-turnaround, high-reward, scalable solutions” to significantly improve outcomes for all students. As proposed, this new Center would follow a model similar to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create the extra flexibility needed to achieve breakthroughs in education tools and practices. IES executives — Mark Schneider, Ph.D., Director, and Liz Albro, Ph.D., Commissioner of Education Research — discussed the structure of IES along with their vision and plans for implementing activities aligned with the goal of establishing a DARPA approach in education. Schneider explained how taking risks and learning from failure are essential components of this innovative approach to education research: 

Why now? What’s the goal and the end game? First of all, [we hope to replicate] DARPA’s model of rapid turnaround, high-risk, high-reward investments for all kinds of things that are usually not found in government agencies. In particular, embracing risk is something that is pretty rare in agencies. But DARPA is built around the fact that most things fail, and one of the goals is to learn from failure. Failure is common in any kind of research endeavor: pharmaceuticals, physical science, biological science, and we have to learn to live with failure and to learn from failure. We tend to talk about the high reward, but we also have to always remember that part of the model is high risk.

Moderator Jim Kohlmoos of Edge Consulting and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching engaged the IES executives in an informative and thoughtful conversation about this proposed work. He then shifted to a conversation with expert commentators, Phil Halperin of the Silver Giving Foundation and Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Ph.D., of the Spencer Foundation, who shared their reaction to the concept of this innovative approach to education research from their perspectives as principals of leading foundations that are launching new funding opportunities for transformative research. These leaders also represented the voice of educators and practitioners who would be both partners in and beneficiaries of research that will be designed to result in new and needed interventions, tools and resources. Nasir emphasized the point made by the IES leaders about the importance of NCADE centering its work around equity and engaging in collaboration with the individuals on the front-lines to make the transformative changes in education that are needed now: 

[We would like to see the NCADE] approach really centered on equity, by which we mean building systems that serve all learners and that recognize both historic and contemporary barriers to doing so. [The Spencer Foundation has put] some stakes in the ground about what we think gets there, including deep collaboration. Researchers can’t do transformative work by themselves in the ivory tower and need to really be working alongside from the very beginning with people who would be — or who are — facing the challenges and opportunities that exist in education systems and who are at the front-lines.