Woodworth has built his research career that documented the benefits of charter schools and is now an associate at the Hoover institution, a conservative cerebral trust at Stanford University. “There are things that the Ministry of Education is doing, which should probably be better for countries or, frankly, the federal government should not participate,” he said. “But the NCS has existed for more than 100 years before the Ministry of Education is founded, since one of the legitimate goals of the federal government in education collects data so that people can see how schools are doing. We need to make decisions managed by data. “
Removal of Commissioner “Disturbing”
Wedworth also defined the unexplained and Suddenly removal last week By his successor Peggy Car, appointed Biden, whose congresically set six -year term was to expand in 2027, he called her the departure “disturbing development”. The Trump administration has placed Carr, a 30-year-old NCES career employee on paid administrative leave and pointed to the current Chris Chapman commissioner. (Reached last week, Kar said he did not want to comment on his dismissal now.)
The Executive Director of the American Statistical Association Ron Vasserstein said the removal of Carr would undermine public confidence in education statistics. “The removal of the statistical agency leader without a justified professional cause is likely to erode this confidence, as this will be perceived by many as an attempt to improper influence on official statistics or as a signal of distrust in the agency,” he Written in LinkedIn last week.
These fears are well justified. Wedworth told cases where he was able to oppose political pressure from both Trump and Biden’s administrations. Trump officials, he said, he wanted to say that academic results in the United States were worse than was reported on international tests. “They wanted to use a different number,” Woodworth said, “because they claim that the education system fails.” He also said that the employees of the Biden administration asked him to generate statistics for January 19, 2021, the day before Biden took office. “We had grades about how many schools they worked in January,” Woodworth said. “But the request to know the exact number of this particular date shouted for political use.” Although Wedworth managed to stay against these requests, he worries that with the removal of Carr, the political isolation he once enjoyed is gone.
“Congress has to talk”
“Congress has to talk,” Woodworth said. “Congress requires these data points to be collected … Don’t you feel worth collecting? Allow them to be missed. “
Woodworth called on the Congress to take action to preserve the national data infrastructure, which includes not only NCES, but also 12 other major statistical agencies that collect everything from unemployment statistics to the airline’s trip. Woodworth believes Congress should set up a Federal Statistics Agency on its auspices so that the data cannot be removed or distorted by the President.
“Although G -H Trump may not be interested in a certain point of data,” he said, “the next administration may really need it to put its policies in its place. Therefore, the statistical system is assumed to be apolitical. “
Unlike other statistical agencies in the federal government, such as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the NSS has not many staff statistics. This is because the rules for budget loans in Congress limit full-time staff in the education department and require the majority of the NCES budget to be spent externally. Woodworth estimates that 90 percent of their data collection and reporting work has been agreed to private companies and organizations. Even some of its websites with .Gov domains are actually supported by external contractors. Woodworth also said that NCES did not manage its own facility to store all data. Instead, the federal government pays the same private research organizations to keep it in their data centers.
“I’ve been arguing for a long time that the biggest explosion for the dollar is actually to hire more federal employees and stop using so many contractors,” Woodworth said. Not only more of the federal workers are paid outside the contractors, but the payments contracts also include overheads for office space and employee benefits and a profit margin. This makes them the main goal of reducing costs.
With the cancellation of the DOG contract, the obligations to maintain historical data and the provision of public data were canceled together with the collection of new data. “We don’t really know for sure what will happen to this data,” Woodworth said.
Backup and crowdsourcing data
Researchers from private research organizations describe internal efforts to quickly archive data. Although many statistics are still publicly available and can be downloaded from the Ministry of Education websites, researchers also hope to protect the original raw data that are not edited for students confidentiality. It is not clear what will happen to this information.
There are some informal, uncoordinated efforts to preserve public data in the event that open access disappears. DatalumosA free opening archive with open access at the University of Michigan is such a crowdsourcing site. In February researchers Uploaded data files Dating from 1968 of the Civil Rights Office of the Education Division, along with a huge lining of primary education called ED Data Express. It includes figures from 2010 to record students, teachers, school financing, absences, graduation, homeless students and more.
Private research organizations are expected to launch mass dismissals of education statistics now that much of their work has been terminated. This may mean loss of expertise and institutional knowledge on how to collect national school data.
Woodworth is especially concerned about the cancellation of a widely used set of data called Common Core of Data, which includes numbers for enrollment of students in class, gender, income, race and ethnicity and geography. The degree of poverty and enrollment in this set of data is used to calculate the distribution of approximately $ 16 billion in federal funding for Title I for low -income children.
The loss of this data also means that it will be impossible to gather a nationally representative sample of students for research purposes or to take the next national assessment of educational progress (NAEP), a congress test known as a national map.
Initially, NAEP was spared by the first round of abbreviations on February 10th. But NAEP includes a large basket of estimates, and nine days later, on February 19, the Education Department canceled a contract for the administration of one of the NAEP tests, the law that applies that this tendency assessment must be administered periodically but not determined since 2012 that the law is that this particular assessment should be administered periodically, but not periodically, but not to be administered. administered periodically, but it has not been determined since 2012 that the law says that this particular evaluation must be administered periodically, but has not been determined since 2012. The law says that this assessment must be administered periodically but not determined since 2012 that the law says that this particular assessment must be administered periodically but not determined since 2012.
For this Post Room Agreement for $ 1.4 million
And Dog, and The Ministry of Education is advertised on X that they have terminated a seemingly absurd contract of $ 1.4 million for monitoring postal and clerical operations at a postal center. Woodworth explained that this contract is necessary because NCES does not have its own postal center to distribute a number of questionnaires, along with cash payments to families and teachers to fill in them. He had to use the post room of the Census Division. “You actually have to have someone there to make sure that the forms are processed properly and no one puts out data,” Woodworth said.
Doge employees have not publicly discovered how they have decided which data to reduce and which to save. In fact, neither Dodge nor the education department have yet disclosed or confirmed a list of abbreviations. The press release of the Education Division did not respond to my inquiries.
Woodworth said he was told that Doge employees have entered the Ministry of Education and require NCES employees to match any data collection or task to a line in law. If the data collection is mentioned by name, this set of data is more likely to be saved. The Higher Education Act specifically refers to the system of integrated post -harm (IPEDS), collecting data from universities and colleges, and it was spared. But the Law on the Reform of Educational Sciences generally describes the type of data that the NA must collect without mentioning official names of data sets. Many of these data collections have been canceled. If Dog’s goal was to avoid giving up the laws of Congress, he obviously failed. The Alliance of Knowledge, identified advocacy organization for private research organizations Seven data collections and research activities This dog is shortened in the education department, although it was codified by Congress law.
Project 2025A plan that the Conservatives wrote about Trump before taking office called for the removal of the Ministry of Education. But it is also stated that the collection of statistics is a valuable function that the federal government should “limit” itself to educational policy. So far, it seems that this is a case where the Trump administration does not follow the script.
