Two education bills from George W. Bush's first term are long overdue for reauthorization. One, of course, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in late 2001. The other is the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which in November 2002 replaced the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) with a new Institute of Education Sciences (IES). But as the organization responsible for putting the "scientifically based" in the scientifically based research mandated by NCLB--not to mention the home of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)--IES deserves attention in its own right. In this article, the author traces the evolution of IES, and looks ahead to its future. Under the leadership of director Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, IES has created a new culture of favored research that, while sometimes narrow in methodological scope, has changed the conversation in the research community about rigor and relevance--and thus changed, at least at the margins, the research enterprise itself. (Contains 3 figures.)