As reading and math scores fall to their lowest point in the past quarter-century, the US now has fewer tools to understand and develop interventions for this troubling trend. When the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the Department of Education last year, firing nearly half of its workers and allowing the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to cancel nearly $900m in contracts, a little-known agency called the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was among the hardest hit. NCES, a federal statistical agency, has for decades collected critical data on the state of education in America, including The Nation’s Report Card, an assessment of what students know across math, reading, writing, science and history.
NCES data also helps set US education policy and allocate funding for school districts. But nearly all of the statistical agency’s work was abruptly terminated and its headcount dropped from about 100 to four. Some were rehired; NCES now has 12 staffers, according to the agency’s website.
The cuts, which are part of the administration’s broader attack on taxpayer-funded data and research that don’t align with the president’s priorities, have hamstrung the historically under-resourced agency’s ability to collect and report on a range of data on K-12 and college students. These include surveys on the prevalence of guns and violence at middle and high schools and studies on how students are paying for college, former NCES employees say. Now, most of the agency’s ongoing data collections and reports appear to be inactive or reduced in scope, according to a tracker, based on publicly available information, published by the American Statistical Association. (The education department did not answer the Guardian’s questions about how many data collections have been terminated.) Savannah Newhouse, an education department spokesperson, said in a statement to the Guardian that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research and statistics arm of the education department that NCES is part of, is still collecting some data, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress , known as The Nation’s Report Card.
She’s now founder and executive director of the non-profit Agora Education Research. For Peggy Carr, the former NCES commissioner, who was abruptly fired last spring after nearly four decades at the agency, “probably the most painful example” was the termination of the Early childhood longitudinal study (ECLS). The ECLS followed thousands of students across the country from kindergarten through fifth grade, evaluated their academic achievement and surveyed their parents, teachers and school administrators.
Last winter, Doge canceled the $47m contract in the middle of the third iteration of the survey, which occurs roughly every decade. The study contractor, Westat, was preparing to follow up with a group of the 15,000 first graders it had surveyed in the fall of 2023, when the students were entering kindergarten, when the funding was suddenly cut. This would have been the first survey of kids born after Covid, and included new questions tailored to understanding the effects of the pandemic, such as childcare arrangements and hybrid in-person and online instruction.
Since it started in 1998, the ECLS has been cited in nearly 3,000 academic papers, including research on how early reading is a predictor of reading skill in later grades, the importance of developing executive function skills and the effects of full-day versus half-day kindergarten on reading and math learning. In addition to the loss of data for research, advocates say the Trump administration’s cuts to education data let years of work and millions of government dollars go to waste. Some longitudinal studies were canceled in the final years of data collection.
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