An Education Innovation Agenda For The Next President

No matter who gets elected to the highest office this November, the next President of the United States should put innovation at the forefront of their education agenda. Fresh approaches and cutting-edge tools, rooted in an evidence base, are needed now more than ever. Students are still trying to rebound from COVID-era learning setbacks and in many areas of America, most students in middle school are still not even reading at grade level.

Education innovations, especially those that tap into artificial intelligence (AI), can help overcome the challenges American public schools face. When applied responsibly in classrooms, AI can unlock new ways to personalize instruction, engage learners, and alleviate teacher workloads. Tailoring student support and increasing student engagement will accelerate learning, and improve academic outcomes. Making a teacher’s workload more manageable, especially by reducing administrative tasks, will free them up to focus on the relational and instructional parts of the job that they love.

Neither presidential candidate has put forward specifics on their education agenda. Donald Trump has only offered broad strokes of what he would do as president to improve education, and Kamala Harris has been light on details so far. Nonetheless, the candidates will need to get serious about their education plans soon; Election Day is less than two months away.

When it comes to educating America’s students, the next president should embrace an innovation agenda, and indeed there’s quite a bit that a President can actually do to influence regulation, even in a post-Chevron era. Specifically, the President should be leveraging their influence over the federal budget, administration leadership, and federal agency priorities to create the conditions for a flourishing education innovation ecosystem.

For instance, the next president should nominate innovation-forward leaders to head up the U.S. Department of Education and its research arm, the Institute of Institute of Education Sciences (IES). They should call for increased investments in education research and development (R&D), namely at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and IES, in their first budget request to Congress. To build on promising developments from the Biden-Harris era, the new president should grow IES’ Accelerate, Transform, and Scale Initiative and promote cross-agency collaboration to foster innovation in a coordinated way.

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Under the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, the federal government took meaningful steps to advance an education innovation agenda, but there is still much more work to be done. Federal investments in education R&D increased over the last presidential term. For IES, federal appropriations grew from just over $600 million in 2020 to roughly $800 million in 2023 and 2024. For NSF’s STEM education directorate, it went from approximately $940 million in 2020 to about $1.2 billion in 2023 and 2024. However, these are modest increases, considering that the federal government invests so little in R&D for education compared with other sectors.

One significant win for education innovation came out of the 2023 appropriations process when Congress directed IES to create “a new funding opportunity for quick turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to significantly improve outcomes for students. This resulted in the Accelerate, Transform, and Scale Initiative (ATS). Inspired by DARPA and other advanced research project agencies, ATS has brought much-needed attention to applied research and experimental development to IES, an agency that primarily supports basic research. Basic research is important, but its insights cannot translate into meaningful applications in the classroom without support for the “D” in R&D. ATS was an important step forward, but it represents a $30 million investment, a mere fraction of IES’ overall budget.

Finally, in the Biden-Harris years, NSF and IES co-funded two new education-focused AI Institutes, offering a strong example of cross-agency collaboration to spur learning innovation. However, it’s an isolated instance of NSF and IES coordinating education R&D efforts. The next president can do much more on this front.

One of the first things a new president must do is assemble their cabinet. They should appoint a Secretary of Education who values innovation and can take steps like elevating the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program to seed promising new approaches and scale evidence-backed solutions.

Secretary Cardona has not been a vocal proponent of this program but the next Secretary of Education could be. They could make EIR a signature part of their strategy to disrupt the status quo and ensure innovations steeped in evidence make their way into classrooms. The Secretary could promote the adoption of EIR’s highest-impact innovations by leveraging their convening power and connecting districts with successful grantees.

Just as important, the president should nominate an innovation-forward IES Director. The new director should be a leader who understands why the ATS Initiative is a critical component of the education R&D ecosystem and would seek to not only sustain but expand it.

After the president has put the right leadership team in place, they must craft a budget request to Congress, showing their investment priorities. With the President’s Budget, they can put the necessary funding behind an education innovation agenda. While the Biden-Harris era saw modest increases in funding for education R&D, the next president should seek a more substantial investment.

For example, they should call for at least $900 million for IES, with $75 million bolstering the ATS Initiative. Additionally, the president should request $1.5 billion for NSF’s STEM education directorate and $500 million for the Education Department’s EIR program. These are the types of robust investments in education R&D that will make new, evidence-based tools and approaches possible.

Finally, the president should facilitate cross-agency collaboration to promote thoughtful, coordinated federal support for education innovation. As a first step, the president should direct the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to conduct and publish a crosscut analysis of all current education R&D spending across federal agencies.

A clear and comprehensive picture of how the federal government supports education R&D could expose gaps while surfacing opportunities for agencies to work together. The president should also lift up cross-agency collaboration exemplars like the AI Institutes in speeches, interviews, and communications campaigns.

Furthermore, they should direct agency leaders to communicate regularly and identify opportunities to join forces and achieve big goals. This could entail consistent communication between the IES Director and NSF Director, and their teams, to share insights and best practices, and build connective tissue between their respective education R&D investments.

Innovation is not yet on the presidential candidates’ education agendas, but if they want to make meaningful improvements in America’s public schools, it should be. No matter what the next president aims to achieve in education, they will not be successful without supporting the underlying education R&D that evaluates the efficacy of existing interventions and surfaces new tools and approaches. Education R&D cuts across all education priorities and the next president should seize the opportunity to make it a central plank of their education platform.