The Brink: How did serving in this role change your perspective on how educators can go from conducting research to shaping the nation’s education research agenda?

Jones: What to me is invaluable about active researchers coming into these federal positions is that it [helps] maintain connection to what is cutting edge and what is contemporary in research. 

One of the amazing things about the federal workforce is that so many of the people in those roles dedicate their entire careers to federal service. But what that also means is that there can be, at times, less connection to what is going on on the ground in research, because people have been in Washington doing their work for two decades. And so the commissioner plays this role of infusing federal agencies with new and emerging knowledge that keeps the ball rolling, and keeps the field moving forward in really important ways.

One of the best opportunities I had in the role was under the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. In the spring of 2024, they sponsored a government-wide effort called AI Aspirations, where they asked leaders from each department to cast a vision for how AI could improve [their field]. I was nominated to cast this vision for how AI could transform education. Over a series of several months, I got to visit the White House on multiple occasions to do this. 

When we think about educational research and the role of AI, one of the things that is abundantly clear to me, because I was a funder, is that whatever we invested in as researchers, industry and private entities are going to do that work at a much quicker pace and on a much larger scale. Where I’m now trying to do some of this [AI] work, with a few Wheelock colleagues, is in initiatives focused on bringing evaluation into educational technology, trying to incentivize and provide opportunities for companies and venture capitalists to understand the importance of evidence. If left to their own devices, there’s no incentive there.

The Brink: You wrote in your NCSER farewell letter that special education is radically different from what it was when you started in the field in the early 2000s. What are some of the advances you’ve seen, or how has it changed?

Jones: At a fundamental level, the Institute of Education Sciences’ (IES) research and special education [initiatives] have changed how the field thinks about the capabilities of children with disabilities. Historically, even into the early 2000s, many kids with a range of disabilities were marginalized in schools, and [schools] really focused on functional skills, preparing them for life as adults. And from the beginning, IES research has shown that when you use high-quality instructional methods and materials, these students can learn and are capable of much more than educators in schools have thought. So that, in and of itself, has been groundbreaking to me.

The other big one is just what we know about teaching and learning to support students with disabilities. So, across almost every subject area, our knowledge of how to structure and scaffold academic content for kids with disabilities has transformed. When I was a [special education] classroom educator in the early 2000s, I was given the same textbook and curriculum as my general education peers, and I spent my nights and weekends figuring out how to take that and translate it to the level that my students were working at at the time.

Over the last 20 years—and I think we really saw it during the pandemic—special education has transformed into a field that’s driven by data. Schools are increasingly using universal screening tools, collecting data on where students are at, using that data to identify students who might need additional support, and then monitoring the effectiveness of instruction by continuing to collect progress monitoring data over time. 

And I think we are seeing that kids are achieving more now than ever. Many more students with disabilities are successfully graduating, going on to universities, and achieving employment upon graduation.

The Brink: Toward the end of your tenure, layoffs left your group with a fraction of its staff. What was it like leading during this period, and how did you and your colleagues keep the agency’s work moving?

Jones: It’s been a lot. I was brought into this role by the previous director to innovate and try to push the field of special education research forward. I got to try to do that for about a year and a half before the change of administration. IES had historically hovered around 200 people, and after the department’s initial rounds of cuts, we were left with 17 people. 

Initially, the Department of Education cut about $2 billion of contracts to IES. Some of those have come back, but it very much brought the work to a halt. I think the staff was experiencing a trauma. [These longtime employees] forewent opportunities at universities and other places with much larger paychecks because of their belief in federal service, and to see so many folks just cast aside was heartbreaking. 

Our job over the last year has been to keep this enterprise together and going. And what that has meant is working daily to support our existing grantees and get their money to them on a yearly basis. We had to fight tooth and nail to ensure that we were able to get money to our grantees, and that is an ongoing challenge.

The Brink: Would you encourage other faculty to serve in these kinds of federal roles?

Jones: I would, without a doubt. You are able to impact the field in a way that, as an individual researcher, you just [can’t]. More than anything, it has just changed the way I think about what research is for, how people think about it in decision-making in Washington and across the country, and how we can tell a better story about what research is and what role it should play in public decision-making. 

I was probably naive about how valuable what we [do] is in actual decision-making. We publish academic articles. If we are lucky, we get cited in newspaper articles or education publications. But when decisions are being made at the local level, the state level, the federal level, research is very rarely being invoked, or at least it’s not being invoked as the primary driver of decision-making. I think that was surprising and also really left an impression on me.

We need to be able to tell a story about the role of educational research and why it’s so important. And I don’t think we, as a field of educational research, have always prioritized how we tell the story of our impact. I think we assume we’re making an impact without evidence or stories to back it up. We have to be public storytellers about research and think about anecdotes and evidence of when it makes an impact.

The Brink: Do you mean anecdotes, like, ‘I saw this in a classroom, I applied this study, and it worked?’ Can you tease this out a little bit?

Jones: I said this in my farewell letter, and I meant it—what is unique about education in this country is that it’s not like we have an FDA of education. If you are prescribing medicine, that has to go through formal channels of approval from the federal government. There is no parallel within education. So, when students receive curriculum and instruction, there is no imperative that what they are exposed to has a stamp of approval from some federal entity.

To me, there’s an urgency because we have an obligation to make sure that kids’ time is well spent, and you get them early. 

Internally within the field, within research, I think we treat it as self-evident that what we’re doing is important and is good for kids. But that’s a very insular conversation, and a greater percentage of our effort should be focused on outward-facing conversations, public scholarship, being out there and present, and standing up and advocating for the importance of research and driving educational decision-making.

I think universities are in a similar spot, where we’ve become very comfortable as a country with the idea that university is just something that you do; there’s a value. But when our core institutions are coming under attack, you better have your story together. It’s going to take effort.

The Brink: How has your time in the federal government affected your research at BU?

Jones: Much of special education research focuses on what goes on in classrooms between teachers and students. When grants are funded, they rely on classroom and school-based research, which means researchers go out and forge partnerships with school districts.

There’s a separate research community that I’ve been a part of through my training and through being at BU and the Wheelock Education Policy Center (WEPC) [Jones is an affiliated faculty member]. The vast majority of [WEPC’s] research partnerships focus on research and state partnerships. It is very rare for special education researchers to work in partnership with states. That is something I pushed hard for during my time at IES—to open up new research opportunities in partnership with state departments of education.

But as I return to BU, I will be able to leverage the experience and visibility of the position to continue to be a trusted actor in partnership with state departments of education. And I think BU Wheelock, because of WEPC, is incredibly well-positioned to do that work.