“Education research funding” refers to grant support for rigorous, peer-reviewed research into teaching, learning, and education systems — not to school operating budgets, classroom grants, or teacher-practice mini-grants. The audience for this guide is the sponsored-programs administrator, education-school grants officer, or investigator who needs to know which funders support education as an academic research discipline, what grant mechanisms they use, and how proposal development and review differ from general STEM or biomedical funding. The three funders that define this landscape in the United States are the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for STEM Education, and a small set of private foundations — most prominently the Spencer Foundation — that fund education research specifically rather than education practice or reform broadly.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES)
IES is the research, statistics, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education, created by the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002. It is the largest single federal funder dedicated exclusively to education research and is organized around two grant-making centers: the National Center for Education Research (NCER), which funds research spanning early learning through postsecondary and adult education, and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER), which funds research on infants, children, and youth with or at risk for disabilities.
IES organizes its core Education Research Grants program around a sequence of research goals rather than a single “one size fits all” proposal type, so an investigator’s proposed activities determine which goal — and which review criteria — apply:
- Goal 1 – Exploration: identifies malleable factors associated with education outcomes and generates hypotheses for future intervention development.
- Goal 2 – Development and Innovation: develops new or improved education interventions, strategies, or programs and iteratively pilot-tests them.
- Goal 3 – Efficacy and Replication: tests whether a fully developed intervention produces the intended effect under controlled conditions, typically via a randomized controlled trial.
- Goal 4 – Effectiveness: tests whether an intervention already shown efficacious works when implemented at scale, under real-world conditions, often by an independent evaluation team.
- Goal 5 – Measurement: develops or validates assessments and other measurement tools used in education research and practice.
Beyond the core Education Research Grants competition, IES also funds longer-horizon Research and Development Centers, cross-institution Research Networks focused on a shared priority topic, Research Training Programs (predoctoral and postdoctoral), Researcher-Practitioner Partnership grants that pair university researchers with school districts or state education agencies, and grants supporting statistical and research-methodology development. Applications go through IES’s own peer-review process, with panels typically including both methodologists and content-area experts; unlike a general-science NSF panel, IES review criteria explicitly weight the strength of the theoretical or logic-model rationale and, for later-goal (Efficacy/Effectiveness) awards, the rigor of the causal design.
NSF’s Directorate for STEM Education (formerly EHR)
The National Science Foundation funds education research through what is now the Directorate for STEM Education (EDU) — renamed from the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) in October 2022, though “EHR” still appears in some legacy program and solicitation names. Where IES research is overwhelmingly K-12 and PreK-12-adjacent and administered by the Department of Education, NSF’s education-research portfolio sits inside the broader NSF merit-review system (Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts) and spans STEM education specifically, from early learning through the professoriate, including undergraduate and graduate STEM education.
Programs a research administrator is likely to encounter here include EHR/EDU Core Research (basic research on STEM teaching and learning), Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) (development and testing of PreK-12 STEM education innovations), and Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE), alongside education-focused applications of NSF’s cross-cutting career-development mechanism, the CAREER award. Because these are standard NSF awards, they are reviewed against NSF’s usual two merit-review criteria rather than IES’s goal-structure criteria, and they route through the same NSF proposal and award infrastructure (Research.gov, the PAPPG) as any other NSF directorate — see CASRAI’s NSF Grants: An Overview guide for that general mechanism.
Private foundation funders: the Spencer Foundation and others
Outside the two federal agencies, the Spencer Foundation is the most prominent private funder focused specifically and continuously on education research, rather than education practice, reform advocacy, or direct classroom support. Its core programs are the Small Research Grants program (awards up to $50,000, for projects of one to five years) and the Large Research Grants program (awards from $125,000 to $500,000, also one to five years), both open to research addressing the understanding and improvement of education broadly construed — not limited to a single discipline, methodology, or education level. Spencer’s review process is foundation-run rather than a federal peer-review panel, and its grants generally carry more proposal flexibility and a shorter application-to-decision cycle than an IES or NSF competition, which matters for administrators advising early-career investigators on where to seek a smaller, faster award versus a larger federal one. A broader set of private foundations fund education-adjacent work with varying degrees of research specificity; administrators should confirm whether a given foundation’s program is scoped as academic research (with the expectation of peer-reviewed dissemination) or as practice/programmatic funding before treating it as equivalent to an IES or NSF research award for purposes like effort reporting or F&A recovery, since foundation award terms on those points vary far more than federal terms do. See CASRAI’s foundation grant dictionary entry for how foundation awards generally differ from federal grants in terms and reporting.
How education-research funding differs from general STEM/science funding
Several structural differences distinguish this funding landscape from a typical NIH R01 or an NSF basic-science award, and they matter for proposal strategy as much as for administration:
- Problem-driven rather than purely curiosity-driven framing. IES in particular expects proposals to articulate a specific education problem and a theory of change connecting the proposed research to improved outcomes — closer to an applied-research logic than to basic-science hypothesis testing.
- An explicit evidence-tier structure. IES’s five-goal sequence functions similarly to an evidence-graduation ladder (exploration through effectiveness), which maps loosely onto the evidence tiers used elsewhere in federal education policy, such as under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the What Works Clearinghouse’s standards for causal evidence. General STEM funders do not typically require this kind of staged evidence progression.
- Cross-disciplinary review panels. Because education research draws on psychology, economics, sociology, developmental science, and subject-specific pedagogy (e.g., mathematics or science education), review panels are often more methodologically heterogeneous than a single-discipline NIH study section or NSF panel, and proposals need to be legible to reviewers outside the investigator’s home discipline.
- A narrower, more concentrated funder base. STEM/biomedical researchers can typically approach dozens of federal institutes and mission agencies. Education researchers work with a much smaller set of core funders — IES, NSF EDU, and a handful of foundations — which makes funder-specific proposal fit and timing strategy disproportionately important.
- Different administrative touchpoints. IES awards are administered through the Department of Education’s grants infrastructure (G5) rather than Grants.gov submission portals used elsewhere in HHS/NIH, and IES budget and reporting conventions differ in some respects from NIH’s; research administrators supporting an education school for the first time should not assume NIH-style pre-award workflows transfer directly.
Grant types and mechanisms at a glance
| Funder | Typical mechanism | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| IES (NCER/NCSER) | Education Research Grants (Goals 1–5), R&D Centers, Research Networks, Research Training, Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships | PreK–12 through postsecondary/adult and special education, US-focused |
| NSF Directorate for STEM Education | EHR/EDU Core Research, DRK-12, IUSE, CAREER (education-focused) | STEM teaching/learning specifically, PreK–12 through graduate/professoriate |
| Spencer Foundation | Small Research Grants (≤$50,000), Large Research Grants ($125,000–$500,000) | Broadly construed education research, any discipline/methodology |
Frequently asked questions
Is “education research funding” the same as school funding or classroom grants?
No. This term refers to grant funding for academic, peer-reviewed research about education — studying what works, why, and for whom — not to operating funds for schools, teacher mini-grants, or program implementation dollars. A research administrator handling an IES or NSF EDU award is doing standard federal sponsored-research administration, not school-district grant management.
What’s the difference between IES and NSF funding for education research?
IES, part of the Department of Education, funds education research across all subjects and levels using its own five-goal evidence structure and its own G5 grants administration system. NSF’s Directorate for STEM Education funds education research specifically about STEM teaching and learning, reviewed under NSF’s standard Intellectual Merit/Broader Impacts criteria and administered through NSF’s usual proposal infrastructure.
Do private foundations fund academic education research?
Yes — the Spencer Foundation is the leading example, funding research specifically (as opposed to practice or advocacy) through its Small and Large Research Grants programs. Other foundations support education-related work, but administrators should confirm a given program is scoped as peer-reviewed academic research before treating its award terms as equivalent to a federal research grant.
How competitive is IES funding?
IES funds a minority of the applications it receives in most years, and funding rates vary by goal and topic area; Goals 1–3 historically draw the largest applicant pools, while Goal 4 (Effectiveness) trials draw fewer but larger applications. Administrators should check the current fiscal year’s request for applications (RFA) on ies.ed.gov for the specific competition’s funding rate and deadlines rather than relying on a fixed figure.
Can an education researcher apply to both IES and NSF for related work?
Yes, provided the proposed work is genuinely distinct and any overlap is disclosed per each funder’s current and pending support requirements — a common strategy is an NSF EDU award for STEM-specific learning research paired with an IES award for a broader or cross-subject question, but administrators should review both agencies’ current overlapping-support and duplicate-funding policies before submission.
