Dive Brief:
- "Dramatic, unreasoned, and unlawful actions" taken by the Trump administration to significantly downsize the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences are making it impossible to carry out education research, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.
- The funding and staffing cuts made to IES will hamper the institute's ability to conduct impartial, high-quality research and share those findings with educators, researchers and policymakers, according to the federal lawsuit, which was filed in Maryland district court.
- With this legal challenge, the pushback against the Trump administration's actions to reduce the size of the federal government continues to grow. Another lawsuit disputing IES shrinkage was filed by the Association for Education Finance and Policy and the Institute for Higher Education Policy on April 4 in federal court in Washington, D.C.
Dive Insight:
Both lawsuits say the the Trump administration’s actions are preventing IES from carrying out its statutory duties. They ask that U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the Education Department end their efforts to eliminate IES and restore its contracts, staff and other resources.
The Education Department did not respond to request for comment on Wednesday.
The challenge by AERA and SREE, which are represented in the lawsuit by Democracy Forward, a national legal organization, calls the February cancellation of $881 million in education research grants and the March 11 termination of 90% of IES staff "arbitrary" and "capricious" and a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.
Only about 20 staff remain at IES, and only three people are still employed at the National Center for Education Statistics, which is one of four centers within IES, according to the AERA-SREE lawsuit.
NCES and its predecessor organizations have focused on data collection and analysis for more than 150 years. NCES' demise will make it "impossible to track progress, assess learning, identify gaps affecting students, and set priorities for attention over time and across the country," including for student proficiency trends from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's Report Card, the complaint said.
The AEFP-IHEP lawsuit adds that Congress has not repealed the Education Sciences Reform Act or eliminated statutory mandates that require IES to collect and analyze data, support research on specific topics, and provide access to research and data to the public. The organizations are represented in the lawsuit by Public Citizen Litigation Group, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.
Michal Kurlaender, president of AEFP, said in an April 4 statement that many of its members have "faced serious challenges to their research and work" because of the IES funding and staffing cuts.
“We want to do all that we can to protect essential data and research infrastructure," Kurlaender said. "This is fundamental to our mission of promoting research and partnerships that can inform education policy and improve education outcomes.”
