Last month, my colleague Jill Barshay detailed potentially devastating cuts made to education research when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) terminated 89 contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the Department of Education. Soon after, DOGE canceled an additional 10 contracts at regional education laboratories around the country.
DOGE officials did not save nearly as much as they claimed from these cuts. Many of the canceled contracts, which are detailed in an unverified spreadsheet that Barshay analyzed with the help of education researchers, were nearing completion, with little remaining federal money to be spent. I spoke to Barshay last week to learn more about how the cuts could impact research on young children. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Did DOGE target any specific education topics within these canceled contracts?
The canceled contracts fall into three categories. One is evaluations of how the government spends its money. There’s a rigorous evaluation of after-school programs, for example. So, these evaluations are looking at how taxpayers money is spent in education. Is it working? We can’t know now, because we cut a lot of those studies off.
A second category are big datasets and longitudinal surveys. One of the big ones is something called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and it tracks a national sample of students, from birth through elementary school. And it’s one way that we’ve been able to see that early childhood programs are effective.
Another category is assessments — we’ve pulled out of international tests. That’s how we can tell how U.S. students are doing compared with other countries.
In addition to that early childhood longitudinal study, are there any other studies involving young children that were cut?
There was a contract, a rather large one, that looked at how a specific literacy program was faring. It’s supposed to be a high-quality literacy instruction program to help children, with a special emphasis on disadvantaged children.
We also had a contract to produce a systematic review of evidence on what are the best, evidence-based ways of teaching and providing reading interventions for kids from kindergarten to third grade. This is really important. There are a lot of struggling readers. We really want kids to be able to read by third grade. This project was putting together a panel of research experts to comb through all the studies and say, “Where is the best evidence? How should we advise teachers?” And then they were supposed to produce these guides for teachers.
Another one is a synthesis of what works to boost attendance for kids from kindergarten through grade 12. That’s not specific to early childhood, but we do know attendance has really been a problem with kindergarten and first grade kids, and it was supposed to synthesize the evidence for what are the best things we can do to boost attendance for kids. So that’s killed. We’re not going to find out about that.
What did experts you spoke to say about impacts on children and future education research?
Children are getting services as part of these rigorous evaluations, and they’re getting really high-end implementations of interventions that we believe should be effective. Imagine you’re a kid who’s getting a tutoring program, and suddenly, we’re pulling the plug. We’re not going to study this anymore. That means you’ve lost your tutor. Also, teachers have put in a lot of time, investing to bring researchers into the school and figure out how to randomize children and set these things up. And it’s just heartbreaking when you’ve taken all this extra time out to gain knowledge, and now you’re not going to gain it.
We also won’t have the benefit of this wisdom. I know there was a randomized controlled trial of an after-school program, where they finished conducting the study, and they know which things in the after-school program are effective and which aren’t. They started to draft the outline of their final report — they were at the end. And the plug has been pulled.
One thing I want to be mindful of is it’s not like everything [the research department] does is the best study. They’re not necessarily the most efficient organization. I’m sure there is a lot of extra overhead and waste. There may be some things that should be looked at and made more efficient. But I can’t see why a randomized control trial that’s nearly complete, why you should pull the plug on that.
You can read Barshay’s full story on the DOGE cuts here.
Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at (212) 678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.
This story about federal cuts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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Last month, my colleague Jill Barshay detailed potentially devastating cuts made to education research when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) terminated 89 contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the Department of Education. Soon after, DOGE canceled an additional 10 contracts at regional education laboratories around the country. DOGE officials
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