Opinion: New Bill Offers Roadmap for Ed Innovations. Here’s What Else It Should Do

On Dec. 9, Reps. Suzanne Bonamici and Brian Fitzgerald introduced the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act of 2025. This is an updated version of legislation they introduced in 2024, which was never voted upon. NEED is intended to spur innovation in teaching and learning by creating a fifth center, the National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE), in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). 

NCADE would be modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the Defense Department that focuses on breakthrough national security technologies. DARPA has also advanced many civilian breakthroughs, including the internet, GPS, advanced microprocessors, and COVID-19 vaccines. There are DARPA-inspired agencies in departments such as Energy, Transportation, and Health and Human Services, all aimed at harnessing modern research methods to produce breakthroughs in their respective policy domains. NEED would bring IES into this movement.

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According to the NEED Act, NCADE would “identify, develop and promote advances in and new solutions for teaching and learning, with an emphasis on breakthrough technologies, new pedagogical approaches, innovative learning models and more efficient, reliable and valid forms of assessments.” 

In laying out the criteria for deciding which projects to fund, NEED calls for using “commercial applications of a proposed project to increase the likelihood of scalability of such project.” Scalability is important if IES and NCADE are to improve student outcomes, and commercialization is the best way to achieve it. Legislation specifying commercialization is essential, since it would help overturn a historical bias in IES against commercial firms. 

Under the NEED Act, NCADE must hire broadly, recruiting professionals from, for example, engineering, the learning sciences, and artificial intelligence. This would broaden the narrow pool of academic disciplines from which IES usually draws its program officers.

Shorter-term appointments and wage flexibility would bypass the handcuffs of IES’ current hiring processes, allowing the new center to bring in more creative and energetic personnel.

Beyond these benefits in the proposed legislation, here are a few additions that are not included that should be considered during floor debates.

First, the NEED Act should specifically make sure NCADE follows evolving best practices in contracting. The Department of Defense is undertaking a systematic review of its contracting processes — and there are lessons from that effort that should inform NCADE. DOD’s new acquisition strategy emphasizes the need to increase competition, especially by encouraging entry by new firms. When companies hold contracts for too long, they and their government overseers grow intertwined, dampening incentives to deliver optimal results for taxpayers. While the NEED Act points to the need to bring in new firms, the call should be even clearer.

NCADE should also more clearly prioritize off-the-shelf solutions, access to up-to-date software and the involvement of true tech companies that are more like Palantir than ETS. The NEED Act should emphasize performance-based contracting but also give NCADE “Other Transaction Authority,” so it can fund prototypes, partner with nontraditional suppliers and move at the speed required for modern innovation — flexibility granted to the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

Second, the NEED Act should foster the much-needed modernization of the National Center for Education Research (NCER). It’s clear that NCER’s business model has run its course, something I describe as “three Fs:” five years, five million dollars and failure (the duration of its grants, the amount of money usually given out and the typical outcome). NCADE will provide an alternative to NCER’s scattershot approach, in which individual projects, mostly led by university-based researchers, win disconnected one-off grants. Though NCER’s current model can fund high-quality research, far too much money goes to areas driven by niche academic interests rather than the education needs of the nation. While NCER is playing catchup with its transformative research in the education sciences program and its Accelerate, Transform and Scale initiative, it is still wedded to its outdated field driven research model. NCADE can provide a challenge and an alternative to NCER’s outmoded approach to funding.

The recently announced National Science Foundation Tech Labs initiative is another model for how NCADE should approach funding decisions — and how that approach could profitably spur changes in NCER. Tech Labs’ shift toward team-based, outcomes-oriented funding reflects the growing scale of challenges facing the nation — challenges that are increasingly beyond the reach of individual investigators. There is some pushback against this approach, since it shifts resources away from the traditional individual researcher grants model that has driven the NSF (as well as IES and the National Institutes of Health). There is some concern that Tech Labs will move away from basic science to focus on solutions to emerging problems. This is far less of a concern for IES, since it is by law a mission-based, applied science agency. As the NEED Act is debated, the Tech Labs initiative should be monitored closely to help inform NCADE’s development. 

Of course, hanging over all this is the fate of IES and the Department of Education overall. If IES remains intact, the vision and the goals of the NEED Act can transform how IES supports education research. If that function gets moved to other federal agencies, the NEED Act has identified essential reforms that should inform education research and development no matter where that sits.