The nation’s education data agency needs major changes to meet rapidly changing information needs, but years of staff and budget cuts have left the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics too unstable to adapt on its own.
That’s the conclusion of the American Statistical Association in a new framework it released Tuesday, which calls for a full overhaul of the way districts, states, and even private groups work with the federal agency to collect and use everything from student demographics and academic progress to school financial reports and career outcomes.
“NCES is doing a valiant effort to keep all the oars in the water with a very tiny team right now,” said Shelley Martinez, co-author of the ASA report and former executive director of the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. But, she said, “we really need to galvanize a group of colleagues from across the education world ... around a common vision and strategy.”
The group has called for NCES to take more of a “curating” role in cleaning and maintaining data across federal, state, local, and private education sources, as well as ensuring that data is handled safely and ethically and is more useful to state and local practitioners.
The U.S. Department of Education did not return requests for comment.
The ASA contends that NCES has been “effectively dismantled” since 2025, when its budget was cut by $900 million—roughly three-quarters of its contracts and grants—and 97% of staff and leadership was dismissed, leaving only three staff to administer both the National Assessment of Educational Progress portfolio, the Common Core of Data collection, and other major projects. While a few staff positions have since been resurrected, many longstanding NCES data collections and partnerships have stopped.
This year, for example, the congressionally mandated Condition of Education, an annual report intended to help inform education policy and monitor trends, was released with only updated data on only 17 of the 702 indicators for which NCES collects information from states, districts, and private sources. The most recent data for district enrollment, for example, dates to 2024, while data on teacher-student ratios and school crime and discipline have not been updated since 2022.
The ASA’s report is the latest in a long line of alarms sounded from experts in and out of government about NCES’ waning budget and staffing, professional autonomy, and efficiency. An internal report by Amber Northern, brought in from the Thomas B. Fordham Association in May 2025, lambasted the NCES for having outdated collections and slow turnaround on reporting results.
The group is seeking ideas and comments on the framework from educators in the field. ASA policy researchers Martinez and Stephen Provasnik, former NCES deputy commissioner, discussed with Education Week why simply restoring budget and staff would do little to fix national data systems that are becoming unstable.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does education data really matter for the daily work of schools and educators?
Martinez: Education data is infrastructure that people just take for granted that it normally works. Statistics are like roads and bridges that people drive on every day and don’t think about much—unless there’s a bridge collapse. For a long time, NCES has been the go-to place to fix problems like, “Oh, we don’t have a consistent definition of this,” or, “we don’t have a way of handling this data-quality issue that we’re seeing emerge.”
Provasnik: First, the money school districts get from the federal government—like Title I, which is billions of billions of dollars—is all structured on formulas that require the data that NCES supplies. It’s been coasting, but there comes a point when the data are less reliable. There will be court cases taking the federal government to task saying, “We did not get our fair share; the allocation was inappropriate,” which will turn on the fact that NCES does not have a reliable, solid way in which it can justify its data that are key to the formula of distributing Title I [aid for disadvantaged students], Perkins [career-technical education funding], and others.
One of the Trump administration’s justifications for cuts to NCES was that the agency’s processes and collections are outdated. What are some of the best places to modernize federal education data?
Martinez: We think that connections to [other] statistical systems is key to this modernization because that’s where you’re going to get other experts in methodologies and improvements in techniques. There is a future where the statistical systems [across federal agencies] are all modernizing, and you could imagine omnibus data collections. For example, NCES and the Bureau of Labor Statistics both have had longitudinal studies on major transitions into the workforce. There could be in the future, federal-level collaboration that helps us cross over topics from, say, education to the workforce.
How much of modernizing education statistics is dependent on Congress changing education research law?
Provasnik: NCES is not necessarily in the driver’s seat for what data should be collected. In the past, Congress says, “here are topics that we want,” and NCES goes about eliciting from experts how to translate those into data collections that the federal government then leads.
Rather than follow that model, this is more an organic idea: Getting data that the states already say they need, or helping identify and fill the needs that states identify. NCES can help in formatting, cleaning, turning it into more useful data by making connections with statistical expertise and technical expertise. Or they’re helping the states figure out how to meet a [data] need. Then NCES is working with a very grounded sense of purpose and has the state’s buy-in. They’re working together as opposed to an independent data collection that’s shared with states and everyone else after the fact.
NCES has extremely limited capacity for major changes right now. How do you see this working?
Provasnik: If you think about prior reports [including 2022 recommendations from the National Academies of Science and an internal report released by a special advisor to the Education Department], none of them have created any great change. We’re really focused on getting a community of people who can buy into the vision that’s needed. This is not a plan for NCES to change overnight but for rethinking the role of NCES in a national data ecosystem that can only develop slowly over time. NCES would be a major player, but it could never do them by itself, even in the best of times. This is reenvisioning for a 21st century healthy data ecosystem.
Martinez: If you look across all the principal [federal] statistical agencies, NCES is for sure the hardest hit in terms of staffing cuts, contract cuts—and every [statistical] agency’s down 20% or more of their staff, so it’s not a time when anyone’s feeling flush, for sure. But we also recognize that those are the moments when sometimes innovations and things are more possible because … it’s a good opportunity for some of the creative, innovative ideas to spring forth.
