Opinion | Getting schools ‘back to basics’ is more complicated than it sounds

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Kids are back in school, and a new academic year brings another opportunity to make progress toward one of our state’s most elusive goals: teaching every child in Minnesota — without exception — how to read.

It’s harder than it sounds.

Reading isn’t an innate human skill. We know our brains rejigger our temporal lobe, Broca’s area, and the angular and supramarginal gyrus to hone the skills necessary for reading. There’s also natural human variability that influences how each child learns to read.

Advancing this cognitive and social science took decades, and distilling it into practical strategies that educators can use to teach kids to read requires research that informs development and vice versa. Applying the science of reading to improve literacy is only one example. Education research and development (R&D) has helped Minnesota schools understand how our state’s academic acceleration programs impact college success, evaluate discipline policy reforms, and create easy-to-use assessments of language and early literacy skills for Hmong-speaking preschoolers.

Understanding how kids grow, think and succeed has never been more urgent. At the same time, it’s also been misunderstood. Education Secretary Linda McMahon often uses Mississippi’s recent literacy gains to demonstrate the power of local control and schools getting “back to basics.” It’s right to celebrate that tremendous achievement but dishonest to omit the facts that Mississippi’s progress was facilitated by decadeslong research into the science of reading and by technical assistance funded through the federal Department of Education.

This is precisely why Congress has for years funded the independent, nonpartisan Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and other government agencies to help researchers explore our nation’s most pressing education questions and to help local leaders apply new insights to implement innovative solutions. It’s expensive and experimental work, but lawmakers in both parties understood its many benefits far outweighed its costs.

Until February, that is.

Condemned by Elon Musk as “divisive” and “wasteful” spending, our national education R&D system is now collapsing. Nearly $1 billion in active research and data collection projects was terminated by the Trump administration, and 90% of IES employees were fired. Technical assistance to states and districts was suspended due to the attempted elimination of IES’ Regional Educational Laboratories. Even the high-impact Small Business Innovation Research program didn’t survive Trump’s rampage.

“Everyone, from students to parents to policymakers, should be concerned,” warns Sara Schapiro, who leads the Alliance for Learning Innovation and recently released a blueprint for federal education R&D. “The new cracks in our national education data infrastructure will mean less data is collected and shared with students and families seeking to make informed decisions about educational and career trajectories.” It also means disseminating existing research and generating new knowledge just got significantly trickier.

This comes as our schools face overlapping crises, including ongoing teacher shortages and a youth mental health epidemic. Whether or not one believes that creating evidence-based instructional guides or teaching students how to identify misinformation is “woke nonsense,” dismantling our national education R&D ecosystem at this critical moment feels akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, smashing the bathtub and burning down the house in which the bathtub sat.

Minnesota needs a viable alternative now but currently has no statewide office or official designated to articulate another path forward. We have regional bright spots, yet what we have in raw data and academic research we lack in overall vision and direction.

Reimagining education R&D must also include making it more inclusive and useful. Concerns about academic researchers gatekeeping knowledge have validity. Our Legislature and the Minnesota Department of Education can invest in and implement an R&D system that holds researchers accountable for engaging students, parents and teachers throughout the process. Chicago Beyond and the Assessment for Good (AFG) initiative offer effective models. For example, AFG’s work to design playful assessment tools proves research can provide valuable insights to educators while helping students build greater self-awareness about their own strengths and challenges.

With a return on investment surpassing even infrastructure spending, public R&D investments are worth every taxpayer dollar spent. Sadly, Gov. Tim Walz and our Legislature are considering substantial cuts to public education. Philanthropy could be a viable stopgap. As a former foundation leader, I regularly used publicly funded research to support grantmaking decisions; it would be reasonable to expect foundations to help sustain this public good. There are national foundations seeking to stabilize our education R&D ecosystem, such as the William T. Grant Foundation, but Minnesota funders need to join that effort by funding critical data infrastructure, research capacity, and programs that bridge between research and practice.

Education R&D is the sine qua non of our public education system. Dismantling its infrastructure is further evidence that this administration would rather chant slogans than find innovative solutions to our nation’s most urgent education challenges. Minnesota’s response will decide whether our students truly get the excellent education they all deserve.