Last week, the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency under billionaire Elon Musk announced nearly $900 million in cuts to the chief research arm of the U.S. Department of Education—vaulting the little-known (IES) into news headlines.

The recent moves by the Trump administration appear to cancel scores of contracts undertaken by the IES. The young government office, founded in 2002 by Congress, funds research and collects statistics about the state of education in the United States.

Derek Briggs, professor of education and director of the Center for Assessment Design Research and Evaluation (CADRE) at ���������� Boulder, said he has trepidation about the cuts. For more than 20 years, the IES has played a critical role in driving high-quality research about what works, and what doesn’t, in terms of how America teaches its students.

“Gutting is the word that has been used a lot,” said Briggs, who is not currently receiving funding from the IES. “If the data and resources that were cut are no longer going to be provided, it would be to the great detriment our ability to monitor trends and to conduct good education research.”

Briggs shared his take on what researchers know and don’t know about the recent cuts—and why they could matter for schools around the country.

Do you think the IES does important work?

The IES funds and supports very important education research and data collection. It's a critical resource for objective evidence related to the condition of education in the United States.

Why does that matter for everyday Americans?

There are data that are prohibitively expensive for individual researchers to try to gather, so you really need resources and economies of scale to collect this kind of data efficiently and effectively.

It's very costly and challenging, for example, to capture the experiences of nationally representative cohorts of students across the country over time. An example of this are the multiple iterations of the the , which is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics within IES.

In the original iteration of this study, students who were in kindergarten in 1998-99 were followed through the eighth grade. Then another cohort of kindergarten students in the class of 2010-11 were followed through the fifth grade. In the most recent iteration, kindergarten students in the class of 2023-24 are to be followed. It would be terrible if data collection were to be interrupted because this would hinder our ability to compare the learning experiences and outcomes of these successive cohorts of students during the most formative periods of schooling.

Can you give an example of how researchers might use that kind of information?

As a graduate student, I took advantage of the data in the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988, which, in contrast to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, focuses on the experiences of students as they transition from high school to postsecondary experiences. I used this data to examine the efficacy of test preparation programs for college admissions. I examined whether students that had gotten commercial coaching for tests like the SAT and the ACT were doing better than students that had not gotten that coaching. What I found was that coaching did have an effect, but it was far smaller than what was being promised by commercial coaching companies.

Studies like this had been done in the past by the College Board and the Educational Testing Service (ETS). But because the College Board and ETS were affiliated with SAT, their studies on the effects of coaching were regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. The fact that nationally representative data on college admissions test preparation were available from an external organization that was independent of the test makers gave my research a lot more credibility.

How did you react when you heard about the cuts?

It’s a little bit baffling. If you look at the articles in the national press, so far no one's really willing to go on record as to what has been cut. Most of the information you get from DOGE is on X through tweets, and the tweets tend to be rather sensationalistic, focusing on the millions of dollars that have been saved. But cost saving always has to be evaluated relative to the benefit lost. It's hard to get a clear sense of just how pervasive the cuts have been or what rationale is being provided for how the cuts were made.

With that said, there's a real sense of uncertainty among those of us who do education research and trepidation about what the future holds—one day you might be in the middle of research work, and the next day, you might find out that the plug has been pulled.

One of IES’ high-profile programs, which seems to be a target of the recent cuts, is the . What is it?

Around the time when the IES was founded, there was a real emphasis on doing more randomized, controlled experiments to find out whether certain educational interventions were actually having effects on student achievement and other outcomes.

The What Works Clearinghouse was designed to assemble the results from these kinds of studies into one place. If you go into the What Works Clearinghouse and search for a particular topic or even an intervention name or a curriculum, you can find out if there have been high-quality studies conducted on the efficacy of those programs.

There are some questions about whether it's met its intended goal. In the past, I was involved in a study that focused on how school and district leaders make use of research in their decision making. We found that very few of these educators reported using the What Works Clearinghouse regularly.

DOGE’s argument is that it’s eliminating wasteful spending. Do you think some of these cuts are justified?

One of the things that IES is does is to fund qualified researchers to conduct multi-year research projects. I've served on one of the IES grant proposal review panels, and I just want to make the case for just how difficult it is to actually get a proposal funded. It can take people months of work to put together these proposals. Then maybe 10% the proposals or fewer get funded. It often takes multiple tries, multiple years of submitting proposals before you're able to get funded. By the time you get through those many hoops, the quality of the proposals that are funded is usually quite high.

The programs and services that IES is expected to provide by Congressional mandate are critical if we care about supporting scientific research. Good science requires a combination rigorous experimentation and qualitative investigation. And that’s the only way we can expect to make progress in how we understand the processes of teaching and learning.

���������� Boulder Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and university style guidelines.

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Professional actors from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival performed an abridged version of “Much Ado ���������� Nothing,” a play that addresses rumors, gossip and misinformation. This 45-minute adaptation was directed by Professor Kevin Rich of ���������� Boulder’s Department of Theatre & Dance. The performance was followed by a dynamic conversation featuring violence prevention experts from ���������� Boulder and “Much Ado” actors, who discussed how the arts can foster empathy, strengthen relationships and encourage “upstander” behavior (taking action to help prevent mistreatment).

Beverly Kingston, director of ���������� Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, who appeared on the panel, encouraged community members to learn more about how to prevent violence: “Parents and community members are on the front lines of shaping the culture around young people,” said Kingston. “When we come together to normalize and practice upstander behavior, we’re giving the next generation the tools they need to handle conflicts in healthier, more constructive ways.”

“Shakespeare’s work is shockingly relevant today,” said Amanda Giguere, director of outreach for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. “Shakespeare understood a lot about violence and mistreatment, and ‘Much Ado ���������� Nothing’ gives us the opportunity to think about the harmful impacts of rumors and the role we all play in preventing violence.”

Community and parent engagement were emphasized throughout the evening as vital components in spreading messages about violence prevention. Experts highlighted how families can pay attention to red flags and warning signs that people may be struggling with, and shared some resources, including Colorado’s program, a tool to anonymously report dangerous behavior.

The event is part of the ongoing , an initiative that has reached more than 140,000 students across Colorado since its 2011 launch, combining live theater with practical strategies to prevent harm. This program is the subject of a forthcoming handbook for educators, which will help teachers implement these lessons in the classroom. “Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators,” written by Giguere, will be published in 2025 by University Press of Colorado. 

Organizers encouraged attendees to continue the conversation at home, with friends, and within their broader communities to ensure the messages shared during the event extend beyond the stage.

Find more information about .

The Shakespeare & Violence Prevention production of “Much Ado ���������� Nothing” is funded in part by Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, and by individual donors.

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With just an iPad, students in any classroom across the world could soon r in any physics textbook—transforming these static images into 3D simulations that run, leap or spin across the page.

These new, living textbooks are the brainchild of a team of computer scientists led by Ryo Suzuki at ���������� Boulder.

“Usually, those diagrams are fixed. We have to imagine what happens,” said Suzuki, assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science. “But what if we could take any static diagram from any textbook and make it interactive?”

He and his colleagues recently took home a “best paper” award for their work at the  this October in Pittsburgh.

Picture this: You crack open your high school physics textbook to a drawing of a skier teetering at the top of a jump. The diagram is supposed to teach you about topics like kinetic energy, such as the energy of a skier zooming down a hill. But the skier never actually moves. He just sits there.

Until now.

For the new study, Suzuki’s team designed a tool that allows students to record that diagram with their iPads. Then, after users adjust some settings, the tool draws on artificial intelligence to get the skier to move across the screen. He zooms down the hill, hits the jump and soars. It’s scientifically accurate, too: Students can adjust the friction of the snow, making their skier zoom faster or slower with a few swipes.

Suzuki sees the project as a chance to reinvent the textbook—giving learners the opportunity to not just read about physics but see topics like momentum and electrical currents in action.

“We believe the future of education and learning should be more interactive and personalized,” said Suzuki, who began the project as a researcher at the University of Calgary in Canada.

It’s alive!

Aditya Gunturu, first author of the study, remembers his own days learning about physics. He used to sit in science class in high school, thinking there must be a better way to visualize topics to convey motion.

“I was so frustrated,” said Gunturu, a master’s student in computer science at the University of Calgary. “I wanted to visualize these concepts.”

He’s not alone: Gunturu’s mother is a biology teacher in India and often draws on a blackboard to show students, for example, how cells divide—a phenomenon textbooks can only capture in snapshots.

The team's invention, Augmented Physics, could help.

The tool relies on a model called Segment Anything from the tech company Meta. It’s a computer visualization tool that allows users to click on a photo to isolate particular objects—a dog, or maybe a face. Similarly, through Augmented Physics, students and teachers select various objects inside a diagram, such as the skier and the ski jump, and assign those objects roles. The AI then applies some basic physics, such as the force of gravity, to make those objects move.

It works for a several different kinds of diagrams, too. They include optics diagrams—so students can simulate how a prism refracts sunlight, for example—and electrical circuits—so they can see currents zip along wires. In a full circle moment, the researchers tested their tool out on some of those same diagrams in Gunturu’s physics textbook from years ago.

Beyond physics

The team also designed its product with feedback from real students studying physics and with science teachers. One educator was impressed by the tool’s ability to help students lead their “own little experiments.”

The tool isn’t perfect yet, Suzuki noted. So far, it can only turn a brand new diagram into an effective simulation about 60% of the time. But the team is working to improve those success rates.

Ultimately, the researcher and his colleagues would like to move beyond physics—using similar technology to transform any diagram in any kind of document into a vivid, 3D world that students can step into with the aid of augmented reality glasses.

“That’s our goal—to escape from static 2D into the interactive 3D world,” Suzuki said.

Gunturu’s mom, meanwhile, can’t wait for him to design a tool that works on biology textbooks.

“That would be her dream come true,” he said.

Other co-authors of the new study included Rubaiat Habib Kazi at Adobe Research; Nandi Zhang and Jarin Thundathil at the University of Calgary; and Yi Wen at Texas A&M University.

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This election season, voters across Colorado will decide on a host of proposals and amendments touching on areas such as bail, abortion and trophy hunting. Among the boxes waiting to be filled in is , which would add language establishing, among other things, a “right to school choice” into Colorado’s constitution.

Amendment 80 needs to bring in 55% of the vote to go into effect since it changes the constitution. Kevin Welner, professor in the School of Education at ���������� Boulder, is a legal scholar and director of the (NEPC). He’s examined policies across the United States around issues like charter schools and school vouchers—or programs in which states give K-12 students subsidies to attend private schools. Welner co-authored the 2021 book “” and co-edited the 2023 book “.”

To help voters make an informed choice, he gives his take on the language in Amendment 80—and the types of new lawsuits its passage might lead to.

What is Amendment 80?

The , which is the information provided to voters about the initiatives on the Colorado ballot, identifies three things this amendment would do: One is to create a right to school choice. It also creates a right for parents to direct the education of their children. The third is that it creates a right for all children to have an equal opportunity to access a quality education. 

The second two that I mentioned are identified in a separate section of the amendment that's labeled “Purpose and Findings.” Whether a court would interpret that language as actually creating those rights is up in the air—one of many questions that will be left to judges in the future.

Doesn’t Colorado already allow school choice?

Colorado is among the states that have most enthusiastically embraced school choice. We have the choice to send our children to a neighborhood school, as well as other public schools within our local districts. We can also send our children to public schools outside our local districts. And we have magnet schools, innovation schools and many charter schools. Of course, parents can choose to homeschool or to send their children to private schools, including private religious schools. A key exception is that, in Colorado, we don’t have vouchers.

Kevin Welner

If that’s the case, why do proponents say that Colorado needs a constitutional amendment?

The stated reason is that, by putting this into the Colorado constitution, we would prevent the state legislature from ever taking away all the forms of school choice that we currently have. What if, for example, a future state legislature and governor decided to repeal our laws around charter schools? 

I'm skeptical, however, that this is really the reason behind the ballot initiative. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance where any of these school choice options would be eliminated in the state.

What do you think is the main concern?

The advocates behind this initiative are advocates of school vouchers and probably see this as a way to advance that cause. I do think that if this got into the state constitution, it would make vouchers more likely in the state—vouchers, in this case, being a public subsidy for private school tuition. 

Around the country, we have about a dozen states now that have universal or near-universal voucher programs, where almost every student is eligible for a subsidy.

You’ve studied those programs. What have we learned from them so far?

We have strong evidence in two areas: academic outcomes and budgetary impacts.

On the academic side, we have high-quality studies of four large-scale voucher programs. For three of these programs—in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio—the research shows strongly negative outcomes, particularly in mathematics test scores. For the fourth, in Washington, D.C., the research shows no academic impact.

What about on the budgetary side?

We see these universal programs blowing a hole in state budgets. The lingo that we use when we talk about voucher uptake is that there are “switchers” and “stayers.” The switchers are people who see the voucher and say, “I'm now enticed to move from public school to private school.” A stayer, in contrast, already attends private school or intends to. In those cases, the state is subsidizing education that it otherwise wouldn't have subsidized at all. Switchers generally help the state budget, while stayers hurt the state budget. 

When you're calculating the budgetary impact of a voucher policy, you have to guess at that ratio of switchers and stayers. A lot of states guessed way wrong. Most notably, a price tag for fiscal year 2024 of $65 million, but the actual cost was $332 million.

You’ve said that Amendment 80 might kick off a lot of lawsuits. How so?

The most likely litigation that would be successful would be from a parent challenging a school district's decision to deny a charter school application or revoke or non-renew a school’s charter. 

Imagine you're the parent of a child who either is attending or wants to attend a charter school. The district doesn't allow that charter school to go forward because of poor performance, low enrollment or fiancial mismanagement. If there's no other charter school nearby at the child’s grade level, the parent could point to Amendment 80 and say, “Well, I have a right to send my kid to a charter school, and you've just taken away that right.”

What other litigation is possible?

It's sort of (perverse) fun as a legal scholar to play with this language and come up with all the lawsuits that it could engender. Lots of people anticipate lawsuits from parents who can’t afford tuition and therefore demand that the state subsidize a private school education—so that they have a meaningful right to choose that private school education.

For the parents’ right to direct their child’s education: If I, as a parent, object to a history class where my child is taught that the South left the union to preserve slavery, can I insist that my child be excused or the lesson be changed? Can I do the same with a science class where my child is taught Darwinian evolution? Can I object to assigned books with passages I don’t like? This can go on and on, with each individual parent exercising this new right in various ways and making things very difficult for everyone else in the school.

���������� Boulder Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and university style guidelines.

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