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Imagine a city that relies on a well. It’s not the most glamorous job, but recognizing the water supply’s importance, the city pays a caretaker to diligently measure the depth of the well and record his observations in a daily log. As the data typically confirms that the well has ample water, the necessity of monitoring it slips by. Then, in an effort to reduce government spending and lower property taxes, the job of well caretaker is eliminated. When a drought hits, the city suddenly has a limited supply of water and no recent measurements for gauging when the well will run dry.
For education research and data, the well caretaker is the National Center for Education Statistics. A father dropping his daughter off at high school or the grandmother watching her grandson get on the school bus has probably never heard of it. If NCES loses staff in government layoffs and stops collecting, analyzing and reporting education data from across the country, will they notice? The school bell still rings. The lights are on. But when the metaphorical drought hits — when schools close because enrollment drops and less money is coming into the district — families will be caught off guard. Without trend data, communities will be unprepared for budget cuts or other dramatic changes.
Just like the city with the well, advocates will lose count of critical metrics, warning systems will fail and families will lose track of how well their schools are performing. From how much states spend on education to college enrollment trends to the outcomes of early childhood education, NCES data is the quiet but essential workhorse behind nearly every debate about school quality, access and student achievement.
Consider school finance data. Dollars and cents should be easy to measure, right? Can’t states simply tally what is spent? The reality is that without NCES, that data would be insufficient. Without NCES’s continued stewardship, states will fall back on a patchwork of inconsistent reporting systems that make spending comparisons impossible. Without the federal mandate — and NCES’ careful planning, collection and validation — spending data will likely lack the detail and accuracy needed to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the billions of federal, state and local dollars spent on schools.
But even that oversight hasn’t been enough. It is still difficult to say what is spent on specific classrooms, let alone specific students. Researchers using this data on a regular basis have been calling for better measurement — not the abandonment of the baseline.
Incomplete data has real consequences. Without accurate enrollment and demographic information, states and the federal government don’t know which schools need additional funding to serve more students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. If budget cuts come, and principals and district leaders lack evidence for cost-effectiveness, it will be more difficult to continue allocating scarce resources. State legislators will have less confidence in understanding how districts and schools are pivoting to serve new student needs, such as AI literacy or work-based learning that prepares young people for a rapidly changing economy. And, as a result of these cascading failures, students will miss out on learning opportunities that enable them to achieve their highest potential.
Most importantly, the loss of school funding data will make it nearly impossible to conduct research on any multi-state education intervention. One of the most critical things researchers consider when structuring studies is the difference in spending between the subjects (states, districts and schools) that they are measuring. Many major national studies of charter school efficacy, for instance, have relied on this data in order to fairly analyze outcomes. There is a possible future in which evaluations of the effects of private school choice will be hampered by a lack of easily available and nationally normed data. This also holds true in conducting well-structured and rigorous studies of non-fiscal initiatives, like high-dosage tutoring.
No agency is perfect. We have both been critics of NCES, noting its slow pace, duplicative collections and outdated systems. The national data infrastructure has not kept up with the speed of technological and policy change. NCES’ data products are often hard to navigate. But in an era of misinformation and polarization, independent, transparent data is one of the few tools that the organizations focused on education research, advocacy and accountability must all agree on.
Hobbling NCES’ financial data collection now will unwind too much progress. It will create a vacuum that even well-funded researchers, policymakers and practitioners cannot fill. The nation’s advance warning system will be lost. The decades-long debate about whether America spends enough on education will become ever more muddled. Important indicators of school policy will become a guessing game, and students will be the ones who lose.
In other words, the well will go dry before anyone knows it.
NCES must have the resources to revitalize and fulfill its mission. Despite recent proposals and federal actions, we do not believe that NCES must be eliminated to return power to the states; states already have power. Instead, the federal government should modernize NCES’s data tools, improve accessibility for the public and strengthen collaboration to reduce reporting burdens on states and districts. Without this standardized financial data, researchers will lose the ability to reliably study the results of any multi-state education reforms or interventions, because it is key to accurately adjusting state-by-state findings.
Since 1996, national organizations like the Data Quality Campaign have helped 48 states create systems for seamless data collection from districts and public charter schools. Of those, 36 include information about school-level expenditures. These systems can be further improved to collect timely, detailed spending data that can be more closely aligned with federal standards while still managed by each state.
States like Colorado and Arizona are creating new portals that report spending data in a way that makes it easy for the public to understand. Places like Indiana are linking education and workforce data closer together. Imagine the power for parents and concerned citizens if NCES’ website were strengthened to include similar visuals and opportunities for data exploration.
State and federal agencies can, directly or through public-private partnerships, create the 21st-century data infrastructure that America’s education and workforce systems need. In an era of personalized learning and career pathways, and increasingly diverse educational providers to serve them, researchers and advocates must embrace and encourage a stronger and more modern NCES, not run away from efforts to examine how dollars are used and whether they are being spent effectively.
The fight for reliable education data isn’t just about numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s the dedication to checking the well to gauge the community’s well-being and creating better systems for measuring the water when technology evolves so this knowledge is never again imperiled. It’s about whether America is willing to make decisions based on facts rather than hunches, on the value of measurement over the burden of effort.
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