The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has taken a hit from DOGE, losing about 90 percent of its workforce. Regardless of the future of the Education Department, we need to continue to improve education R&D and identify what in IES should be preserved, or indeed expanded, to meet the nation’s needs today and in the future. Those functions should find a home in a rebuilt IES or in any other agency that takes on IES’s responsibilities.

Consider the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The value of NAEP’s commitment to tracking performance over time was illustrated with its 2024 results, which provided a window into the nation’s struggle to recover from the Covid pandemic’s harmful effects on learning.

Especially important are NAEP’s state-by-state results. Governors and state school chiefs follow their state’s performance over time and relative to other states. This can produce political pressure to identify policy changes to improve student achievement.

Consider how Virginia responded to its dismal performance on the 2024 NAEP. In a 50 minute-long podcast, Virginia’s Governor, Secretary of Education, and Superintendent of Public Instruction together presented Virginia’s NAEP results and discussed the policy changes they were enacting to address the commonwealth’s lagging performance. That’s a lot of political horsepower harnessed to improve student achievement, all triggered by NAEP’s state results.

The “Mississippi Miracle” offers another window on how state NAEP scores drive policy. Mississippi’s growth in fourth grade reading has received widespread acclaim. The state’s efforts have spurred other states to change, serving as a how-to model for best policies and practices. In Louisiana, a stand-out among the 2024 NAEP results, the governor and state superintendent of education also touted Louisiana’s strong performance and pointed to specific policies they credit for the improvement.

NAEP’s pressure on states is crucially important because states, not the federal government, control the most important levers of education policy. In turn, NAEP may be the single most powerful policy tool the Education Department has. Remember, NAEP state results are only for fourth and eighth grades. It may be time to institute state-by-state 12th grade NAEP, augmenting the national results we now have.

What about the measurement of adult literacy and numeracy? Businesses and communities need to know what skills adults bring to the job market. Getting state-by-state results could help state leadership identify shortfalls in the skills of their adult population and develop programs and policies to address such deficiencies.

Studying adult skills is not new ground for IES. In 2003, IES administered the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), a nationally representative sample of 19,000 adults 16 and older. I was the Commissioner of NCES at the time and led the move to discontinue NAAL in favor of OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), allowing the comparison of the competencies of American adults with those in many other countries. Between 2012 and 2017, the US surveyed over 12,000 adults as part of the PIAAC program. With a sample that size, NCES was able to estimate levels of literacy and numeracy for all states and counties plus the District of Columbia.

The most recent PIAAC results were released in December 2024. These were based on a sample of fewer than 4,000 American adults. NCES had planned to administer a supplemental sample that would have allowed state and county estimates like those previously released. However, in November 2022, NCES ran out of money, and the supplemental sample was not collected. With no state-by-state results, the analysis and reporting were limited, as was PIAAC’s impact.

Here are two ways to address this lack of state-level reporting.

First, we can commit to ensuring a large enough PIAAC sample so that state results can be reported. The downside here, as in all international assessments, is that the survey is designed in response to the collective preferences of the many countries that participate in the study (over 30 in PIAAC). This produces a diffuse survey covering far too many aspects of skills than are needed by US policy makers.

An alternative is to resurrect a national assessment tightly focused on the American labor market and the policy needs of the nation and states. Coupled with the commitment to a large enough sample so that state results can be reported, this could help states and businesses identify the skills of their own workforce and determine policies to improve those skills.

The hollowing out of IES creates an opportunity to refashion its role in federal education R&D. IES must support the states as they assume the expanded role envisioned by the Trump administration. Helping states measure the skills of their adult population is a valuable task, in direct alignment with this administration’s push for state-driven education policy and workforce success.