As the statistics department of the education department, the chaos and chaos have become 3 people’s skeleton staff
An order to eliminate the education sector was prepared in early March, but Trump has not signed it as of last week. McMahon said on Fox News that she began firing employees as a “first step” to achieve this phase-out. Former department employees believe McMahon and her team decided which offices to cut. According to a former Department of Education official, about six people from the former McMahon think tank right-wing U.S. First Policy Institute were inside the department and studied the bureaucracy just weeks after confirmation. The Education Department did not respond to my email inquiries.
This month’s massive shooting was followed by a slam on February 10, when the Elon Musk government efficiency terminated much of the work supervised by these educational research and statistics units. Most of the department’s research and data collection is conducted by external contractors, with nearly 90 contracts cancelled, including important data collections about students and faculty. Without this data, it is impossible to correctly calculate the approximately $16 billion in federal Title I aid to low-income schools. Now, statisticians who know how to run complex formulas have also disappeared.
‘Five Alarm Fire’
Mass shooting and contract cancellations shocked a lot. “These are five types of fires that we need to understand and improve education, and we need to understand and improve education,” Andrew Ho, a psychologist at Harvard University and chairman of the National Education Commission, said on social media.
NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley, who served in the Education Statistics Department from 2010 to 2015, described it as “surreal.” “I’m just sad,” Barkley said. “Everyone has the right to take control of their own policy ideas, but no one has the right to get their own facts. No matter what direction you are going, you have to share the truth to make any kind of improvement. This is not the world we live in now.”
The deepest cutting
Although other units within the education sector lost more employees, IES lost the highest percentage of employees, accounting for 90% of its workforce. Education researchers question why the Trump administration targets research and statistics. “All of this feels like part of an attack on universities and science,” said an education professor at a major research university.
This fear is beneficial. Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal contracts and Columbia University grants, blamed the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism during campus protests last year. Four of these research grants issued by IES include evaluating the effectiveness of the federal work program, which cost the government $1 billion a year. The five-year study is about to be completed and now the public will not be able to learn the results. ((The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization at Columbia University’s Faculty College.)
Tom Brock, executive director of the Center for Community College Research at Columbia University’s Faculty College, said he was cautiously optimistic that he could successfully cancel his $2.8 million education research grant. (He plans to argue that the Teachers College is an independent entity with the rest of Colombia, whose chair and board committee are not affected by protests with students. “I’m frustrated,” Brock said. “Even if we win in the appeal, all the employees have been fired. Who will come to restore the grant? Who will report it to? Who will monitor it? They have completely eliminated the infrastructure. I can imagine a scenario where we will win in the appeal and it won’t work.”
Positive contract
Data collection is carried out with many contracts with external organizations and remains active with research grants from university professors. This includes a national assessment of educational progress, which tracks student achievement and the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which collects data about colleges and universities. But now few employees can monitor these efforts, reviewing whether they are accurate or signing new data collection and research contracts for the future.
“My job is to make sure that limited public funding for education research is the best possible,” said a former education official. “We make sure there is no fraud, waste and abuse. There is no gatekeeper to oversee it now.”
The former official asked to remain anonymous, like the dozen former employees I spoke to when I was reporting this story. Some explain that the conditions for termination are called “reduction of force” or “rif” and if they talk to the press, it could mean losing severance payments. Terminated employees should work from home on the last day of March 21, and they described access to computer systems. This is to get them to end their work in an orderly manner with colleagues and external contractors. One described how she took a picture of her cell phone with a termination notification on her laptop because she could no longer save or send files.
So far, even if some cuts affect the data and research they have authorized, Congressional Republicans have shown no signs of protest. A spokesperson for Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Workers and Pensions Committee, directed me to issue a statement to Cassidy about X. The action aims to achieve administrators’ goals to address the federal government’s redundancy and inefficiency goals. ”
Comply with the law
NCES Commissioner Buckley said in theory, bone workers may be able to comply with the law, which is often “ambiguous.” For example, an annual report on educational conditions may be only one page. The law mentions several data collections, such as financial aid for college students and teacher experience, but usually does not specify how often it must be produced. Technically, they can be suspended for years without regulations.
Barkley said the rest of the skeleton workers could award contracts to external organizations to do all the work and let them “oversee themselves.” “I’m not advocating pushing oversight to the contractors, but in theory you can do that. It depends on how much you’re tolerant of your work.”
NAEP Anxiety
Many people are worried about the future of NAEP, also known as the American transcript. Even before the fire opened, President Ronald Reagan’s education secretary William Bennett wrote an open letter in 74-year-old conservative commentator Chester Finn urging McMahon to retain NAEP, calling it “the department’s most important activity.”
Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat who chairs the Colorado Governor Association, is particularly worried. A spokesperson for Polis stressed in an email that Polis believes that “NAEP is crucial.” “Weak data collection and delete this objective measurement rod to help manifest, to understand and improve performance only makes our efforts more difficult,” he warned.
While most of the test development and management are contracted with private organizations and companies, it is unclear how the education sector signs and oversees these contracts so fewer staff. Some officials suggest that the National Evaluation Board (NAGB) that develops NAEP policies can take over the management of the test. But the board’s current staff does not have testing or psychometric expertise.
In answering the question, board members declined to comment on the future of NAEP and whether anyone in the Trump administration asked them to take over the issue. A former education official believes the Trump administration’s “apparently somewhat confused” about the division of labor between NAGB and NCES and “misunderstanding how to do the job in execution.”
Mark Schneider, former IES director Mark Schneider and now a senior fellow at the American College of Enterprise, said he hopes McMahon can rebuild NCE into a modern, more effective statistical agency that can collect data cheaper and faster and redirect IES research departments to drive breakthrough innovations like the Department of Defense. But he admitted that McMahon also laid off some offices needed for modern bureaucracies, such as centralized procurement offices.
So far, there is no indication that Trump or McMahon intends to rebuild.
