The National Center for Education Statistics has tracked academic progress and achievement gaps in U.S. schools for more than 150 years. Educators, policymakers, and researchers alike rely on its data.
But a new report, part of a yearlong study by the American Statistical Association, warns that NCES is developing serious gaps in capacity and data to support education policy.
“NCES is the weakest among the 13 principal federal statistical agencies in terms of support from its parent agency (i.e., the Department of Education), budget and staffing, and professional independence,” said Steve Pierson, the director of science policy for AmStat. “These weaknesses undermine NCES’s ability to be agile and accountable.”
Education statistics is one of the first federal forays into education. The first federal education department—largely dedicated to collecting education data—was created in 1867 in the Department of the Interior, more than a century before the Education Department became a full cabinet-level agency in 1979. It oversees some of the longest running federal education studies, such as the congressionally required Condition of Education and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (NCES’s very first report in 1870 documented education inequality at a time when 1 in 5 white and 4 in 5 Black Americans could not write their own names.)
NCES operates on roughly $380 million annually, the report found, including $185 million for assessment, $121.5 million for statistical studies, $38.5 for grants for statewide longitudinal data systems (as of fiscal 2023), and would receive an estimated $43 million in staff in 2024, through the Institute of Education Sciences budget.
That’s the third largest budget for a federal data agency studied, but tied for the lowest budget growth, 1.5 percent, since fiscal 2022.
The report also found that NCES has less control over its budget and staffing than other agencies, in part because Congress has not updated its authorization law in more than a decade. For example, in-house staff are paid for through the budget of IES, which oversees the education statistics center. That, Pierson noted, has made NCES less “agile,” because most data collection and assessment are run by outside groups working under set multi-year contracts.
The AmStat report is the latest in a series of warnings about the data agency. Last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine deemed the education statistics agency “overburdened.” For example, NCES lost 25 full-time employees, or 30 percent of its staff, from 2002 to 2021, in part due to budget constraints.
“NCES simply cannot meet current and future demands for data and evidence-based analysis as it is currently operating,” the National Academies report said, “and it is in danger of losing institutional knowledge and innovation capabilities because of its decreasing staff size and increasing reliance on contractors.”
Matthew Soldner, the acting director of IES who also started his career at the agency at NCES, said its data are “critical to informing the work IES’s research and evaluation centers as well as that of federal, state, and local policymakers” and shared the report’s concern about “the very real decline in purchasing power that NCES has experienced in recent years. This is particularly acute in light of the ever-growing demand for data and calls for innovations in NCES’s data collection, analysis, and release.”
In a prior interview, he also told Education Week that NCES is still “deep in the recovery” from pandemic disruptions to its 30 ongoing surveys and longitudinal studies.
Those disruptions, as well as staff and budget constraints, have led the agency to delay national household education and teacher and principal surveys; indefinitely suspend surveys on school crime and safety and college and career attainment, and cancel U.S. participation in several upcoming international comparison studies of reading, math, science, and computer science proficiency.
Both the AmStat and National Academies reports called for NCES to be given more control over its budget and responsibilities.
“Methodologies are changing, technologies are changing, user needs are changing, laws are changing,” Pierson said. “Since the pandemic, there has been much more need for timely, relevant, frequent data from education statistics amid the welter of public and private education data.”
