WASHINGTON –U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), Todd Young (R-IN), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), and Tim Kaine (D-VA) today introduced the Innovation Zone Act (IZ Act), legislation to ensure that the Department of Education has clear guidelines on how and when to report data on experimental site initiatives.
This improves transparency, holds the experimental sites accountable to the public, and allows policymakers to make better informed decisions on the viability of potential policies being tested at the experiment sites.
The IZ Act would require the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education to provide colleges with a clear direction for reporting data and provide the higher education community an opportunity to submit suggestions for future experiments, improving the efficacy of innovational experiments.
“To innovate we need the data to know what works, and what doesn’t,” said Dr. Cassidy. “The Innovation Zone Act builds on the Department of Education’s initiative to provide what works.”
TheIZ Act would also rename experimental sites as “innovation zones” to better reflect the program’s mission of encouraging higher education institutions to experiment with strategies to increase student success.
