Future of Evidence in Education Network Releases New Principles for Building and Using Education Evidence

BALTIMORE, Md., September 23, 2026. The Future of Evidence in Education Network, a cross-sector group of researchers, evaluators, and evidence leaders, released two reports today on improving the production and use of evidence in education. Schools are under growing pressure to improve student outcomes as national assessments continue to show significant academic challenges. Districts and states must make consequential decisions about curricula, programs, policies, digital products, and AI-enabled tools. These decisions require investments of money, staff time, and instructional time. The released reports provide guidance for making those decisions and for strengthening the education R&D system that supports them.

Over the past two decades, federal investment helped establish stronger standards for causal research, expanded research capacity, built national data systems, generated evidence reviews, and strengthened partnerships between researchers and education agencies. Those advances improved the field’s ability to determine whether various programs and policies improved student outcomes. However, as federal support for education research and research infrastructure becomes more uncertain, preserving and strengthening that public investment is critical.

The Future of Evidence in Education Network formed to examine how the education R&D system can preserve these gains while strengthening the research infrastructure, institutions, and practices needed to produce useful evidence over time. Its initial work includes two reports addressing both sides of that challenge: how the education R&D system can produce stronger bodies of evidence over time, and how education leaders can best use the evidence available to them now.

“The past two decades have produced stronger methods and clearer standards for determining whether education programs affect student outcomes. Those are important accomplishments to preserve, but the decisions facing schools, districts, and states require more. Education leaders need to know whether findings are likely to hold in their setting, what implementation will require, why results differ across studies, and what the research as a whole indicates. These reports ask what kind of R&D system can produce that knowledge and how the available evidence can inform decisions.”

The first report, Necessary but Not Sufficient: Six Design Principles for a Stronger Education R&D System, examines the institutions, investments, research practices, and partnerships needed to support education R&D. It argues that rigorous individual studies are only one part of the knowledge leaders need. Its six principles call for rigorous, independent, decision-relevant research; transparent reporting and review; planning and synthesis across studies; research capacity and durable partnerships; sustained public investment in research infrastructure and innovation; and ongoing assessment of whether the whole system is producing knowledge that serves its public purpose.

The report is intended for researchers, funders, government agencies, research organizations, and others who shape how education research is created and used. The principles provide a framework for designing investments, institutions, and research practices that produce the kinds of knowledge education leaders need.

The companion report, Evaluating Causal Evidence in Education: A Practical Guide, focuses on using causal evidence to inform decisions. Its ten principles address what readers need to know: what is required to implement the program; what the program was compared with; which outcomes were measured; how large and precise the estimated effects were, and whether those effects mattered in practice; how relevant the study population and setting were to the decision at hand; how to interpret subgroup findings; and how these same principles should be applied to personalized, algorithmic, and other emerging tools.

The guide is designed for education leaders considering whether to adopt, pilot, continue, or scale a program, product, practice, or policy. Rather than rating programs or certifying “what works,” the guide provides a set of questions to help leaders judge what conclusions the evidence supports, whether findings apply to the decision at hand, and what the evidence does not yet tell them.

The Network is also releasing a response to the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed revisions to the Education Department General Administrative Regulations (EDGAR), which include proposed changes to federal evidence definitions. The response emphasizes scientific independence in the production and review of evidence, transparent standards and documentation, and an education R&D system that supports the accumulation of knowledge across studies. The reports were not developed in response to the EDGAR proposal, but the proposal illustrates why questions about how evidence is defined, reviewed, and accumulated matter for education research and decision-making.

The Network will launch the reports at the 2026 Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, September 23-26. The Network grew out of a December 2025 convening of 16 researchers, evaluators, and evidence leaders, supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. Necessary but Not Sufficient was edited by Kelly Hallberg (University of Chicago) and Erin Higgins (Align R&D). Evaluating Causal Evidence in Education was edited by Cara Jackson (Center for Outcomes Based Contracting) and Luke Miratrix (Harvard Graduate School of Education). Dr. Wong served as convening chair and series editor.

The reports, the Network’s response to the proposed EDGAR revisions, and information about the Network’s ongoing work are available at edevidencenetwork.org.