Over several years, the education research community was frustrated by the lack of collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, leading innovative research to be underutilized by practitioners and making scaling of NSF-funded discoveries difficult. Lewis-Burke recognized an opportunity to confront this challenge with congressional focus on competitiveness and learning loss from the COVID-19 pandemic, and Administration changes bringing attention to translation of research results. Lewis-Burke worked with a client coalition interested in this issue, securing authorizing language in the CHIPS and Science Act that created a new NSF center scale program for partnership and education translation, as well as FY 2022, 2023, and 2024 appropriations language encouraging these partnerships and the specific creation of the center scale program.
