Announcing IES's Planned FY27 Grantmaking

This time each year, I begin to get wistful about the joy of the first day of school. As a child, the trappings of a new school year—including new pencils, new notebooks, and maybe a new outfit—put it right up there with my birthday as something to look forward to. The hard truth is that, as an adult, there are few jobs that give you that “first day of school” rush. Education is the exception, of course, and that might be the reason why I worked on college campuses for several years before eventually finding my way to IES.

You might think that by moving from direct service to education research, particularly education research at the federal level, there’d be no more first days of school for me. But you’d be wrong: there are several! Each Center within IES has its own “first day of school” equivalent. And, for our National Center for Education Research (NCER) and National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER), today’s the day!

That’s because, today, we are excited to launch IES’s Fiscal Year 2027 research grant competitions. Here’s what you need to know.

IES will be launching Fiscal Year 2027 competitions in three tranches. The first tranche, launched today, announces five competitions. They are:

• Using State Longitudinal Data to Support State Education Policymaking for NCER (84.305S) and a largely equivalent program for NCSER (84.324S);
• Research Training Programs, for both NCER (84.305B) and NCSER (84.324B); and
• Statistical and Research Methodology in Education for NCER (84.305D).

Applicants who review the Requests for Applications (RFAs) for these first five competitions are likely to find them familiar. That is by design, and it reflects our belief that these competitions are “core infrastructure” in our efforts to support the development of the education sciences and the training of education scientists. 

That isn’t to say there’s nothing new in this first tranche of grants, because there is. First, we’ve spent a good amount of time this past year thinking about how we can better connect the work of our Centers to leverage the power of the Institute as a whole. As an example, we would encourage applicants to consider how an NCER or NCSER grant might connect to the work of our National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). There are any number of methodological innovations that might be of value to the team working on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and there is always a need for training on how to use NCES datasets to their best advantage. Another change of note is our expansion of our Using State Longitudinal Data to Support State Education Policymaking into NCSER, which we call Using State Longitudinal Data to Support State Education Policymaking in Special Education.

Applicants to our second and third set of competitions, however, will notice a notable difference between our historical practice and our future plans: specific topic areas that carry across multiple competitions and multiple years of grantmaking.

So, what exactly do I mean? In Fiscal Year 2027, we intend to limit our competitions to research in the following areas:

At the strategic level, our decision to focus research on specific topics is rooted in a simple observation: there are persistent problems of student performance—and persistent capacity gaps in education systems—that merit IES’s full attention. The topics we have chosen are grounded in input from a variety of sources, including feedback from the State Learning Agenda pilot project involving the Comprehensive Centers and Regional Educational Labs, NAEP scores, and IES’s past investments.

Tactically, we envision this emphasis on specific topics playing out in three ways. 

First, as I allude to above, we don’t believe that emphasizing a set of topics for a single competition year is likely to generate sufficient research to address problems of this magnitude. (Similarly, while there are researchers who already work in these areas, we know that others will need time to pivot to them, should they choose to do so.) As a result, we anticipate topics to persist for multiple fiscal years. Tentatively, we anticipate the topics above to be used in competitions in Fiscal Year 2027, 2028, and 2029.

Second, as directive as this focus on topic areas may already seem, it’s our sense that even shift will be insufficient to build knowledge in a comprehensive manner. For example, although we indicate above an emphasis at NCER and NCSER on “literacy,” it isn’t the case that we believe that the field needs “just any” research on literacy. At this stage in the field’s development, there are specific questions within the literacy space that need greater near-term emphasis (e.g., questions specific to improving writing) compared to others (e.g., questions specific to the development of foundational literacy skills). 

Therefore, when possible, future RFAs won’t just solicit research in a broad topic. Instead, they will present a Research Agenda with questions that—if addressed in totality across multiple grants—will generate a cohesive body of knowledge. We believe this approach has the potential to more effectively and efficiently address the nation’s most pressing problems of education practice and policy. It’s also consistent with our statutory charge to “accumulate knowledge,” a decidedly easier endeavor when work is more cohesive from the start! The “when possible” in the above is an important caveat. We do not anticipate that, in our inaugural year of this shift, we will propose detailed research agendas for each of the topics above. This is both in the spirit of continuous improvement (we have confidence in this approach, but we will surely learn something in the first year that demands change in the next) and because, in some topic areas, a high-quality research agenda will require more time to develop.

Which brings me to the third and final element of this shift: the role of Networks and Network Hubs. IES’s experience with research networks—that is, a group of discrete research projects intentionally brought together alongside a Hub that can coordinate, amplify, and support their work—has been strongly positive (see, for example our Reading for Understanding Research Initiative and our Expanding the Evidence Base for Career and Technical Education (CTE) Research Network). To date, two roles we have not asked Hubs to explicitly and systematically play are those of needs-sensors and evidence-synthesizers. In Fiscal Year 2027 and beyond, we anticipate Hubs doing both. In part, this work will serve as inputs to the Research Agendas that IES will use in subsequent years to drive our grantmaking strategy. As importantly, it can serve as a source of evidence-based content for educators and policymakers to strengthen practice and improve student outcomes.

So, what next? Earlier, I wrote that IES’s Fiscal Year 2027 grants will be announced in three tranches. The shift to topically-focused grantmaking and all that it entails affect only the second and third tranches—not those announced today. (As I mentioned, those announced today are “core infrastructure,” and as such are topic-agnostic.) 

IES anticipates announcing its second tranche of grants in late September or early October. At that time, we anticipate announcing:

• From Seedlings to Scale for NCER (84.305J) and
• Transformational Research in Special Education for NCSER (84.324T).

Finally, in December, we anticipate announcing our third and final tranche of grants for Fiscal Year 2027. Specifically: 

• Education Research Grants for NCER (84.305A) and NCSER (84.324A);
• Education Research and Development Centers, for both NCER (84.305C) and NCSER (84.324C); and
• Research Networks Focused on Critical Problems of Education Policy and Practice, for both NCER (84.305N) and NCSER (84.324N).

We’re excited—"first day of school” excited—to preview our Fiscal Year 2027 grantmaking plans … and I hope you are excited to see them. No plan is perfect, and I suspect some readers will have feedback for how we can improve. Please don’t hesitate to send comments, positive or negative, my way. As always, I can be reached at matthew.soldner@ed.gov.