[Federal Register Volume 88, Number 196 (Thursday, October 12, 2023)]
[Notices]
[Pages 70652-70654]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2023-22482]


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DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

[Docket ID ED-2023-IES-0011]


Request for Information on Potential New Program, From Seedlings 
to Scale (S2S)

AGENCY: Institute of Education Sciences, Department of Education.

ACTION: Request for information.

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SUMMARY: The National Center for Education Research (NCER), a center 
within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), is seeking insight to 
guide its efforts to fund quick-turnaround high-reward, scalable 
solutions intended to improve education outcomes for all students.

DATES: We must receive your comments by November 13, 2023.

ADDRESSES: Comments must be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking 
Portal at regulations.gov. However, if you require an accommodation or 
cannot otherwise submit your comments via regulations.gov, please 
contact the program contact person listed under FOR FURTHER INFORMATION 
CONTACT. The Department will not accept comments submitted after the 
comment period. To ensure that the Department does not receive 
duplicate copies, please submit your comments only once. Additionally, 
please include the Docket ID at the top of your comments.
    Federal eRulemaking Portal: Go to www.regulations.gov to submit 
your comments electronically. Information on using regulations.gov, 
including instructions for accessing agency documents, submitting 
comments, and viewing the docket, is available on the site under the 
``FAQ'' tab.
    Privacy Note: The Department's policy is generally to make comments 
received from members of the public available for public viewing in 
their entirety on the Federal eRulemaking Portal at 
www.regulations.gov. Therefore, commenters should be careful to include 
in their comments only information that they wish to make publicly 
available. We encourage, but do not require, that each respondent 
include their name, title, institution or affiliation, and the name, 
title, mailing and email addresses, and telephone number of a contact 
person for the institution or affiliation, if any.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Erin Higgins, Education Research 
Analyst, National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education 
Sciences, U.S Department of Education, 400 Maryland Avenue SW, 
Washington, DC 20202-7240. Telephone: (202) 987-1531. You may also 
email your questions to [email protected], but as described above, 
comments must be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal at 
regulations.gov.
    If you are deaf, hard of hearing, or have a speech disability and 
wish to access telecommunications relay services, please dial 7-1-1.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: 

Background

    Our education system is tasked with helping Americans across their 
entire lifespan to successfully engage in civic activity and 
participate in an ever-evolving workforce, building the foundation for 
the Nation's future.
    In the Explanatory Statement accompanying the fiscal year (FY) 2023 
Consolidated Appropriations Act (P.L. 117-328), Congress directed IES 
to invest in quick-turnaround high-reward, scalable solutions intended 
to improve education outcomes for all students.\1\ To fulfill this 
directive, IES's Accelerate, Transform, and Scale (ATS) initiative will 
support advanced education research and development (R&D) to create 
scalable solutions to improve education outcomes for all learners and 
eliminate persistent achievement and attainment gaps. Through this 
initiative, IES will invest in bold, innovative ideas that come from 
interdisciplinary, diverse teams that have the potential to make 
dramatic advances towards solving seemingly intractable problems and 
challenges in the education field.
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    \1\ United States Congress. Committee Print of the Committee on 
Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, on H.R. 2617/Public 
Law 117-328. 117th Congress, Second Session. Washington: US. Govt. 
Publishing Off. 2023.
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    ATS will pilot efforts modeled on the advanced research projects 
agencies (ARPAs) found throughout the Federal government. ARPAs 
leverage insights from traditional/basic research to develop and scale 
breakthrough solutions and capabilities in focused areas that research 
or industry do not traditionally support. Many domains of R&D are 
primed for breakthrough advances that can make inroads on long standing 
education goals, such as personalizing student and educator learning, 
dramatically increasing learners' motivation and engagement, 
transforming the implementation and usefulness of assessments, and 
supporting successful transitions from school to career and between 
careers.
    To advance ARPA-style efforts in education, the ATS initiative will 
build on several existing IES investments, including the Leveraging 
Evidence to Accelerate Recovery Nationwide (LEARN) Research Network, 
the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, the Standards 
for Excellence in Educational Research (SEER) Research Network for 
Digital Learning Platforms, prize challenges, and the Transformative 
Research in the Education Sciences research program. ATS will also 
support new activities that emphasize creating scalable, high impact 
solutions, such as going from idea to prototype and preparing existing 
tools, techniques, and products with evidence of effectiveness for 
scaling.
    This RFI is focused on a proposed new program within ATS we are 
calling ``From Seedlings to Scale'' (S2S). IES is considering a three-
phase investment strategy for S2S to support transformative ideas as 
they grow from seedlings to scalable solutions. As proposed, S2S would 
focus on high quality research, robust product development, and 
sustainability and scaling in the education marketplace. The 
performance goals below highlight how, at a high-level, each of those 
elements could be combined into a successful project.
    Across the three proposed phases of funding, the Department 
envisions that successful performers would:
     Develop a full product or a broadly-applicable, new 
capability.
     Foster collaboration between product developers, 
researchers, and

[[Page 70653]]

educators who are highly-skilled in their respective disciplines and 
across disciplines.
     Challenge what is currently possible by pursuing 
breakthroughs, not incremental improvements or ``point solutions.''
     Maintain an unwavering focus on improving learner 
outcomes, continuous improvement, and rigorously evaluating 
performance.
     Define from the beginning a credible path to significant 
impact and commercial success (including free and open-source 
pathways).
     Catalyze new areas of interest and investment.
    Through the specific questions in the next section, IES is 
soliciting public comment on the two topics described below, Focus 
Areas and Program Design, to inform the development of the S2S program.

Topic One: Proposed S2S Focus Areas

    IES is currently considering four focus areas:
     Developing approaches that can be used to help learners 
build skills throughout their life spans to gain broadly applicable 
competencies and domain-specific skills in growing areas critical for 
international competitiveness in the jobs of the future.
     Creating tools and systems that can accurately identify 
and determine the unique needs of individual neurodiverse learners and 
propose a custom suite of instructional and technological supports to 
guide their learning.
     Creating next-generation tools for educators for feedback, 
recommendations, and supports that leverage artificial intelligence to 
augment teaching and planning. These efforts should support educators 
and coaches to reflect holistically on the elements of daily practice, 
including learning environment, instructional strategies, and student 
performance.
     Creating new techniques and approaches to help educators 
and learners implement strategies to support behavior and emotion 
regulation and to support learners' interactions with others in ways 
that build and maintain caring environments, strong relationships, and 
robust mental health.
    We have also developed a list of potential cross-cutting areas that 
would be listed alongside the focus areas as ``additional topics of 
interest.'' We do not anticipate that these additional topics would 
become requirements for potential performers; rather, they would be 
strongly recommended as areas to consider. The additional topics of 
interest include:
     Data modernization (including transferability, 
interoperability, and common measures).
     Human-centered design for education innovation.
     Open, fair, and transparent research.
     Data privacy and security.
    IES is not currently soliciting examples of ideas for breakthrough 
solutions under these categories, but we plan to announce more efforts 
in this area soon after the initial priority areas are solidified.

Topic Two: Proposed S2S Program Design

    IES proposes to leverage a tiered investment model to spur R&D to 
accelerate the creation of tools, techniques, and products that can 
lead to breakthrough solutions for any stage of the education system: 
pre-K, K-12, postsecondary (including community colleges and technical 
training institutes), and adult education. We envision that this 
investment model will use a three-phase process to support developing 
transformative solutions. We offer a brief sketch of the proposed model 
below. Advancement from one stage to the next would not be automatic 
but would be contingent on performance and available funds. We 
anticipate that the timeline for completing all three phases would take 
an average of six years. However, it is possible that phase three 
awards focused on scaling may not follow-on directly from a phase two 
award if IES chooses to structure this phase similar to the Department 
of Energy's ARPA (ARPA-E) SCALEUP program (https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/scaleup), which was launched by ARPA-E to provide funding 
for projects to continue scaling.
    For the first phase of funding, teams would have approximately one 
year to demonstrate that their proposed solution could meet four 
essential milestones: (1) serve a set of education providers, educator, 
or learner needs; (2) define and refine the key performance indicators 
(KPIs) for the solution; (3) create a prototype that can demonstrate 
elements of the core functionality at a ``demo day''; and (4) conduct 
one or more successful studies providing evidence of the promise of the 
proposed solution for improving learner outcomes relative to 
traditional approaches, should the solution be fully developed.
    Projects that demonstrate a compelling use case(s) and promising 
prototype would be able to move to the second phase. This stage would 
be approximately two years. The second phase would focus on rapid, 
iterative development to turn the prototype into a functional solution, 
answering key research questions about its design, establishing 
product-market fit, and gathering initial evidence of promise. In this 
second stage, awardees should also be looking for opportunities to 
forge strong external partnerships that can function together to 
improve learner outcomes.
    The third phase of funding would last approximately three years. 
This stage would focus on leveraging strategic partnerships to support 
continuous improvement, expanding the user base, and independently and 
rigorously evaluating the impacts of the solutions that showed evidence 
of promise and strong product-market fit. In this stage, it would be 
critical to evaluate whether this new solution improves education 
outcomes and reduces persistent achievement and attainment gaps 
relative to existing solutions, and to determine cost, implementation 
ease, and other important measures that reflect both effectiveness and 
product-market fit. It is also possible that this phase may not follow 
directly from the previous two phases, allowing time to further develop 
the partnerships necessary for scaling.
    This is a request for information only. This RFI is not a request 
for proposals (RFP), a request for applications (RFA), or a promise to 
issue an RFP or a notice inviting applications (NIA). This RFI does not 
commit the Department to contract for any supply or service whatsoever. 
Further, we are not seeking proposals and will not accept unsolicited 
proposals that align to this potential program. The Department will not 
pay for any information or administrative costs that you may incur in 
responding to this RFI. The documents and information submitted in 
response to this RFI will not be returned.
    Solicitation of Comments: To assist in refining the topic areas and 
program design for the S2S program, we invite comments in response to 
the questions below:
    (1) Are the focus areas and cross cutting topics described well 
suited to advanced development R&D?
    (a) Are these areas already adequately covered by existing funding 
mechanisms? If not, why not?
    (b) Are there other topics that you think would yield more promise 
for identifying and developing breakthrough solutions? If so, what do 
you find more compelling about that topic?

[[Page 70654]]

    (2) To successfully develop products and ecosystems that make a 
major impact on learners' education outcomes, teams will need a variety 
of supports. IES may require support from private industry in areas 
such as providing consultation and coaching to teams, convening 
potential partners for research and scaling.
    (a) What would an ideal team look like to maximize the likelihood 
of success? For example, what role would researchers, education 
agencies (at the state or local level), and private companies play in 
the team?
    (b) How can we ensure community engagement and input?
    (c) What kind of experience does your organization have with 
supporting ARPA-style R&D efforts, especially those related to the 
education sciences? What case studies can you share from your 
experience?
    (d) Particularly in the areas of fair, open, and transparent 
research and data privacy and security, what kind of programing or 
resources would you recommend providing teams?
    (3) With a focus on developing quick-turn around, high-reward and 
scalable solutions, what would you propose are the core activities and/
or benchmarks for success for a project in each of the phases? What 
examples can you provide around past successes in social science 
domains or specifically related to education R&D?
    (4) Could you provide any estimates of the costs, assets, and 
contributions required for a team to successfully complete each phase?
    (5) As a part of this effort, IES may seek support in establishing 
a technical working group (TWG) to inform the activities that will 
guide research teams for the S2S competition. If we were to establish a 
TWG related to the S2S competition, what kind of expertise would you 
propose is essential to a TWG in this area? Are there specific 
organizations or individuals that you suggest be included in the TWG?
    Accessible Format: By request to the program contact person listed 
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Mark Schneider,
Director, Institute of Education Sciences.
[FR Doc. 2023-22482 Filed 10-11-23; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4000-01-P