(Commentary by Bob Pianta, dean of UVA’s Curry School of Education and Human Development, and Tara Hofkens, a UVA postdoctoral research associate) The Bush-Obama years saw unprecedented investments in education research, mostly focused on solutions—generating and evaluating interventions that improve student performance. In fact, the structure through which the Institute of Education Sciences allocates resources to research is designed primarily to produce tools, practices and policies that increase student performance on state assessments of academic achievement.