Woodworth has built his research career documenting the benefits of schools in Charter and is now a stock market at the Hoover Institution, a conservative reflection group at Stanford University. “There are things that the Ministry of Education is likely to be better left to states, or, frankly, the federal government should not be involved,” he said. “But the NCEs have existed for more than 100 years before the fund of the end of the Ministry of Education because one of the legitimate objectives of the federal government in education is to collect data so that people can see how schools are doing. We must make data -based decisions. »»
The abolition of the “disturbing” commissioner
Woodworth also decreed the unexplained and sudden dismissal last week of his successor, Peggy Carr, a person named from Biden whose congression determined by a six -year term was supposed to extend until 2027. He described his departure as “worrying development”. The Trump administration has placed Carr, an employee of 30 years of career career, on paid administrative leave, and appointed Chris Chapman interim commissioner. (Held last week, Carr said she didn’t want to comment on her dismissal now.)
The Executive Director of the American Statistical Association, Ron Wasserstein, said that the abolition of Car would undermine public confidence in education statistics. “The deletion of the head of a statistical agency without justifiable professional cause is likely to erode this confidence, because it will be perceived by many as an attempt to unduly influence official statistics or as a distrust signal for the agency itself,” he wrote on LinkedIn last week.
These fears are well founded. Woodworth said cases when he was able to resist the political pressure of Trump and Biden administrations. Trump officials, he said, wanted him to say that American academic performance was worse than international tests. “They wanted to use a different number,” said Woodworth, “because they argued that the education system failed.” He also said that Biden administration officials asked him to generate statistics for January 19, 2021, the day before taking office. “We had estimates of the number of schools operating in January,” said Woodworth. “But wanting to know the exact number on this special date has shouted in political use.” Although Woodworth was able to resist these requests, he worried with the withdrawal of Carr, the political isolation of which he once enjoyed disappeared.
“Congress must speak”
“Congress must express themselves,” said Woodworth. “Congress requires that these data points be collected … Do you not think they are worth it to be collected?” You allow them to be deposited mainly.
Woodworth called on Congress to take measures to preserve the country’s data infrastructure, which includes not only the NCE but also 12 other main statistical agencies that collect everything, from unemployment statistics to air travel. Woodworth thinks that Congress should set up a federal statistics agency under its AEGIS so that the data cannot be deleted or distorted by the president.
“Even if Mr. Trump may not be interested in a particular data point,” he said, “the next administration can really need it to put their policies in place. This is why the statistical system is supposed to be apolitical.”
Unlike other statistical agencies in the federal government, such as the census office or the work statistics office, the NCES does not have many statisticians within the staff. Indeed, the rules of credits of the congress limit the hiring of full -time staff from the education department and require that most of the ONCS budget be spent outside. Woodworth estimates that 90% of its data collection and reports are subcontracted to companies and private organizations. Even some of its websites with .GOV areas are in fact maintained by external entrepreneurs. Woodworth has also said that Nces does not manage its own installation to contain all the data. Instead, the federal government pays the same private research organizations to keep them in their data centers.
“I have been talking about for a long time that the biggest effort for Buck is to hire more federal staff and stop using so many entrepreneurs,” said Woodworth. External entrepreneurs are not only paid more than federal workers, but contract payments also include general costs for office spaces and employees’ benefits and a profit margin. This makes it a main target for cost reduction.
With the cancellations of the DOGE contract, the functions of maintaining historical data and providing data to the public have been canceled with the collection of new data. “We don’t really know what will happen to this data,” said Woodworth.
Archiving and crowdsourcing data
Researchers from private research organizations have described internal efforts to quickly archive the data. Although many statistics are always accessible to the public and can be downloaded from websites from the Ministry of Education, researchers also hope to protect the original raw data that has not been expared for students’ privacy. We do not know what will happen to this information.
There are informal and non -coordinated efforts to preserve public data in the event that open access disappears. Datalumos, a free data archive access to access to the University of Michigan, is one of these crowdsourcing site. In February, researchers downloaded data files from 1968 from the Department of Education Civil Rights and a large mine of basic education data called ED Data Express. It has included figures since 2010 on the registration of students, teachers, school funding, absenteeism, graduation, homeless students and more.
Private research organizations should start the mass dismissals of education statisticians now that a large part of their work has been terminated. This could mean a loss of expertise and institutional knowledge on how to collect the country’s school data.
Woodworth is particularly concerned about the cancellation of a widely used data set called the common data nucleus, which includes figures on the registration of students by grade, sex, income, race and ethnic and geography. Poverty and registration rates in this data set are used to calculate the distribution of approximately $ 16 billion in Federal Title I funding for low -income children.
Losing this data also means that it will be impossible to bring together a national representative sample of students for research purposes or to pass the next national evaluation of educational progress (NAEP), a test mandated by the congress known as the Bulletin de la Nation.
The NAEP was initially spared from the first series of discounts on February 10. But NAEP includes a large basket of assessments, and nine days later, on February 19, the Department of Education canceled a contract to administer one of the NAEP tests, an assessment of the long -term trend of the 17 -year administration which has not been administered since 2012. The law says that this particular evaluation must be administered periodically, but did not specify the period.
About $ 1.4 million in mail room contract
DOGE and the Ministry of Education praised on X that they had ended an apparently absurd contract of $ 1.4 million to observe shipping and office operations in a mail center. Woodworth explained that this contract was necessary because Nces does not have its own mail center to distribute a range of questionnaires as well as incentive payments in cash to families and teachers to fill them. He had to use the census service room. “You must actually have someone there to make sure that the forms are managed correctly and that no one exposes data,” said Woodworth.
DOGE staff have not publicly revealed how they decided what data cut and which to preserve. Indeed, neither Doge nor the Department of Education have yet disclosed or not confirming a list of cups. The Press Bureau of the Department of Education did not respond to my requests.
Woodworth said that he was told that Doge’s staff members had entered the Ministry of Education and forced staff to correspond to each collection or data task to a line of law. If data collection was mentioned by its name, this data set was more likely to be saved. The Higher Education Act specifically refers to the integrated post -secondary teaching data system (IPEDS), a collection of data from universities and colleges, and has been spared. However, the Educational Science Reform Act more generally describes the type of data that NCE should collect without mentioning the official names of data sets. Many of these data collections have been canceled. If Doge’s objective had been to avoid submitting to the laws of Congress, it had apparently not succeeded. The Knowledge Alliance, a advocacy organization for private research organizations, identified seven data collections and research activities that DOGE cut in the service of education despite its codification by the congress.
Project 2025, a plan that the Conservatives wrote for Trump before taking office, calls for the elimination of the Ministry of Education. But it also stipulates that the collection of statistics is a precious function to which the federal government should “be limited” to educational policy. So far, it seems that this is a case where the Trump administration does not follow the script.
