Woodworth established his research career, documenting the benefits of charter schools, and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. “Some of the things the Ministry of Education does should probably be left to states better, or frankly, the federal government should not be involved,” he said. “However, there was more than 100 years of history before the Ministry of Education was established because one of the legitimate purposes of the federal government in education was to collect data so that people could see how schools performed. We need to make data-driven decisions.”
Removal of Commissioner “disturbing”
Woodworth also last week denounced his successor, Peggy Carr, a Biden-appointed man whose six-year term was decided by Congress should have been extended to 2027. He called her departure a “disturbing development.” The Trump administration will Carr be an NCE employee with 30 years of career, receive paid administrative leave and appoint Chris Chapman acting commissioner. (Arrivaled last week, Carl said she didn’t want to comment when she was fired.)
Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistics Association, said Carl’s removal would undermine public trust in educational statistics. “Removing heads of statistical agencies without a reasonable professional career could erode that trust, as many will be seen as attempting to inappropriately affect official statistics or signal distrust of the agency itself,” he wrote on LinkedIn last week.
These fears are beneficial. Woodworth tells the story of his ability to resist political pressure from the Trump and Biden administrations. He said Trump officials hoped he would say that U.S. academic performance is worse than reported on international exams. “They want to use different numbers because they think the education system has failed,” Woodworth said. He also said that Biden administration officials asked him to generate a statistics that was January 19, 2021, the day before Biden took office. “We estimate how many schools opened in January,” Woodworth said. “But want to know the exact numbers on that particular date screaming political uses.” Although Woodworth was able to object to the demands, he feared Carl was removed and the political quarantine he once loved had disappeared.
“Congress needs to speak out”
“Congress needs to speak out,” Woodworth said. “Congress requires collecting these data points… Do you think these data values are worth collecting? You essentially allow them to be discarded.”
Woodworth called on Congress to take action to protect U.S. data infrastructure, which includes not only NCES but also 12 other major statistical agencies that collect everything from unemployment statistics to airline travel. Woodworth believes Congress should establish a Federal Statistics Bureau under its Aegis so that the president cannot delete or distort the data.
“Even if Mr. Trump may not be interested in a specific data point, the next administration may indeed need it to develop its policies. That’s why the statistical system should be politically unpolitical,” he said.
Unlike other statistical agencies in the federal government, such as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, NCES staff do not have many statisticians. This is because Congressional appropriations rules limit the employment of full-time employees in the education sector and require most of the NCE’s budget to go externally. Woodworth estimates that 90% of its data collection and reporting work is transferred to private companies and organizations. Even some websites with .gov domains are actually maintained by external contractors. Woodworth also said NCES does not operate its own facilities to hold all data. Instead, the federal government pays the same private research organization to keep it in its data center.
“I’ve been arguing for a long time that the biggest money is actually hiring more federal workers and stop using so many contractors,” Woodworth said. Not only does external contractors pay more than federal workers, but contract payments also include overhead costs of office space and employee benefits and profit margins. This makes them a major goal of cost reduction.
The contract cancellation through Doge, together with the collection of new data, cancels the responsibility for maintaining historical data and making data provide. “We’re really not sure what happens to this data,” Woodworth said.
Archive and crowdsourced data
Researchers at private research organizations have been describing internal efforts to quickly archive data. While many statistics are still publicly available and can be downloaded from the Ministry of Education’s website, researchers also want to protect the original raw data that has not yet been deleted for students’ privacy. What will happen to this information is not clear yet.
If open access disappears, there are some informal, inconsistent efforts to protect public data. Datalumos is a free, open access data archive from the University of Michigan, and is such a crowdsourcing website. In February, researchers uploaded data files dating back to 1968 at the Ministry of Education’s Civil Rights Office and a large amount of basic education data, called ED Data Express. It includes data on student enrollment since 2010, teachers, school funding, absenteeism, graduation, homeless students, and more.
As many of their work has been terminated, private research organizations are expected to begin large-scale educational statisticians. This could mean losing expertise and institutional knowledge in how to collect school data in the country.
Woodworth is particularly concerned about the removal of a widely used data set called the Common Core of Data, which includes student enrollment numbers by grade, gender, income, race, race and geography. The poverty and enrollment rate of this dataset are used to calculate the approximately $16 billion in federal title funding allocation for low-income children.
Losing this data also means that it will be impossible to assemble a nationally representative sample of students for research purposes or for the next National Educational Progress Assessment (NAEP), a congressional mandatory test called the U.S. transcript.
NAEP was initially spared from the first round of cuts on February 10. But NAEP includes a large number of assessments, and nine days later, on February 19, the Ministry of Education canceled a contract to manage one of the NAEP tests, a long-term trend assessment of 17-year-olds, and this particular assessment has not been conducted since 2012. This law requires such assessments. However, no period was conducted during the cycle, but the period was not regular.
About $1.4 million in mail room contract
Both Doge and the Ministry of Education have touted on X that they have terminated a ridiculous contract to observe mailing and paperwork operations at the mail center for $1.4 million. Woodworth explained that the contract was necessary because NCES did not have its own mail center to distribute a series of questionnaires and pay families and teachers to fill out cash incentives. It must use the mail room of the census department. “In fact, you do have to be there someone to make sure the forms are processed correctly and no one reveals the data,” Woodworth said.
Doge staff did not disclose publicly how they decided which data to delete and which data to save. Indeed, Doge and the Education Department have not disclosed or confirmed the cuts. The Ministry of Education Press Office did not respond to my inquiries.
Woodworth said he was told that the Governor’s staff entered the Ministry of Education and asked NCES staff to match each data collection or task with a line of law. If data collection is mentioned by name, the dataset is more likely to be saved. The Higher Education Act specifically refers to the Integrated Educational Data System (IPEDS) of data sets from colleges and universities. However, the Educational Science Reform Act more generally describes the types of data that NCE should collect without mentioning the official name of the dataset. Many of these data collections were cancelled. If Doge’s goal is to avoid violating Congressional law, it obviously hasn’t succeeded. The Knowledge Alliance is an advocacy group for private research organizations that identified seven data collection and research activities that cut cuts in the education sector despite being codified into law by Congress.
Project 2025, the blueprint written by conservatives for Trump before taking office called for the elimination of the Education Department. But it also points out that statistics are a valuable function that the federal government should limit itself to education policy. So far, this is a situation where the Trump administration does not follow the script.
