Responding to lawsuits filed after the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, canceled more than 100 key research contracts in February, the department in June said it planned to reinstate 20 of the contracts. And a lawsuit will give a short reprieve to 10 federally funded . The department is also asking the public for guidance on how it can modernize the Institute of Education Sciences, its research, evaluation and statistics arm. 

“They’re not saying in any explicit way, but you see this ‘build-back,’” said a longtime assessment professional familiar with IES, who asked not to be named to preserve professional relationships.

The department likely realized that, despite the DOGE cuts, IES still had a lot of congressionally mandated work to do. “I think there were some ‘Oh shit!’ moments, but nobody would say that, because they’re not going to criticize DOGE or the president.”

, executive director of the American Educational Research Association, called the developments “cautiously encouraging,” noting also that NCES plans updates to several surveys and administrative data collections. And it’s releasing existing surveys such as , which analyze data each year from all U.S. colleges and universities that receive federal financial aid.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 — where IES was at 10 prior to the DOGE cuts and 1 a month ago — we would place it at 3 or 4 today,” said Chavous. 

But she added that “severe staff shortages” at the department “continue to threaten data quality and research progress. We remain deeply concerned about the long-term impacts of these cuts on researchers and others who rely on federally collected and supported data.”

Despite the Trump administration’s promise to shutter the Education Department, it seems to be looking for ways to keep its research activities moving forward. Last month, the administration published a , seeking public input on how it can modernize IES. That effort will stop temporarily during the current government shutdown.

The department has also brought in , a longtime Washington, D.C., education researcher, to take on the task of reforming IES. Northern, on leave from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is expected to remain at the department until December. While her remit lasts just six months, it is giving researchers hope that having one of their own advising McMahon will yield positive results.

“I am more hopeful than I was three months ago that there will be some reinvention, rather than a death, of federal education research,” said a scholar at a top nonprofit research organization with several long-term federal contracts. “To me, it seems just absurd that the federal government would say, ‘We’re getting out of the realm of doing education research,’ because education is so fundamental to the future of the country.”

In interviews, several researchers and policy experts said they’re similarly optimistic, but most requested to remain anonymous, fearing that speaking out could jeopardize future funding and relationships with administration officials.

Of Northern, one researcher said she’s “very much someone who believes in empirical evidence. So I could not think of a better person to be advising the Trump administration on the future of IES.”

Mike Petrilli, Fordham’s president and , said he was pleased that McMahon would turn to her for guidance. “I always felt it was a good sign that they wanted somebody like Amber,” he said, viewing it as “an indication that they did want to rebuild” IES, not get rid of it.

Petrilli, who has on occasion of Trump since his first election in 2016, said he’s optimistic that “the people, the political appointees now at the Department of Education, understand the importance of research and evaluation and statistics.” But Musk’s DOGE operation, he said, was “able to do great damage, terrible damage, before anybody had a chance to stop them.”

Another person who works closely with researchers in the field, who asked not to be identified, said they have been assured by top administration officials that “There’s a lot that’s going to come back online — it’s just going to come back online in different ways that some of the field will be ready for, and other parts of the field will not be ready for.” The source said the department is looking into performance- and outcomes-based contracting, a more flexible system that lets agencies more clearly. 

Administration officials, meanwhile, have acknowledged “the chaos of the first six months,” which they don’t want to repeat, the source said. They’re in the process of shifting to “a different sort of phase where we want to see results for this money that we’re spending.”

In a statement, U.S. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said the Trump Administration “is committed to supporting a national education research entity that delivers usable, high-quality data and resources for educators, researchers, and other stakeholders. This has been clear in the Secretary’s repeated commitments to protect NAEP. NCES and IES were in desperate need of reform.”

McMahon in May told congressional lawmakers she had rehired “” of the approximately 2,000 department employees who were laid off last winter, though a department spokesperson disputed this.

Several people said they were surprised and heartened that IES last month began for eight — and possibly more — high-level assessment jobs at the National Center for Education Statistics, for work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But several experts said there’s a lot of work to do if the administration genuinely wants to rebuild its research infrastructure, given DOGE’s deep cuts last winter, when the ad hoc agency trimmed the NCES staff from about 100 employees to three. 

“It’s hard to be too optimistic, given the limited resources that NCES has in particular,” said , a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who studies state higher education finance and the financial viability of higher education. 

Kelchen said the administration’s own priorities could make McMahon’s work more challenging, noting that an Aug. 7 executive order by President Trump forces NCES to undertake a massive that will collect data on admissions practices going back five years by race, sex and test scores, among other indicators. 

The order alleges that race-based admissions practices “are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being.”&�Բ�����;

The survey, said Kelchen, is “a massive data collection effort — and it’s hard to see how it ends up being successful, especially retroactively.”

Poor NAEP results

Several people said recent poor student results on NAEP have likely catalyzed much of the strong support for IES.

“They knew the NAEP results were going to be bad, and they got these NAEP job descriptions up quickly,” said one observer.

Several others agreed, but just as many said the recent poor results bring a new urgency to reshaping NAEP so that its next generation of tests are both high-quality and relevant to educators.

“NAEP is falling further and further behind in terms of the gold standard, which it hasn’t been for some time,” said a former IES official. “But what is the plan? What’s the vision? NAEP just confirms bad news all the time. So what are we going to have in terms of policies to correct it?” 

Another person familiar with NAEP predicted that even with NCES’s smaller staff, next year’s tests “will likely go off O.K.,” but that many reporting functions, such as score reports broken out by states, have been cut to shrink costs, making the results less useful. “It’s one thing to collect the data — it’s another thing to report it in a way that people can use.”&�Բ�����;

This person said NAEP is well-known for robust reporting platforms such as its , but IES has already said it will end future district-level reporting for 8th-grade history and science tests, among others. “If we’re short-handed there, then people will say, ‘What’s the value of NAEP?’”

Looking ahead, this person worries that cuts to functions like the , an extensive database on public K-12 education, and other efforts could compromise the actual tests after 2026. “If we don’t have good sampling and weighting, then NAEP is just a test. It’s not the Nation’s Report Card, because we need all those data to be able to make it a truly national picture.”

The ‘education improvement industrial complex’

A prime example of the changes taking place is the expected reinstatement of the 10 regional education labs, or RELs, which were funded to the tune of $336 million, but were closed in February after the department alleged, without offering much evidence, that a review “wasteful and ideologically driven spending.” It noted, for instance, that a lab based in Ohio had been advising schools there to undertake “equity audits.”

But educators nationwide have rallied to the labs’ defense, noting that in 2019 the REL Southeast, based at Florida State University, helped the state of Mississippi improve reading results so much that its fourth-graders rose from 49th in the nation to 29th — the so-called “Mississippi Miracle.”&�Բ�����;

The 10 labs will now be able to begin the process of restarting their work for the remainder of the federal contract, the department revealed in a in June. 

A researcher who works with school districts to design programs said the centers could be reconceived to be more helpful to teachers: “There’s so much money. And if you think about what the products were, it’s hard in all cases to imagine that amount of money was yielding such exceptional change in the educational system that we need to keep going exactly as-is.”

This person noted that outfits like the RELs often benefit from the support of an “education improvement industrial complex” that lobbies for continued funding. The DOGE cuts, this person said, badly undercut that support system.

At the same time, a few observers said IES more broadly should continue, no matter what the fate of the Education Department in this administration. 

“I believe firmly that there should be an Institute for Education Sciences, even if it is configured differently,” said , senior director of the University of Chicago Education Lab. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, I believe in the power of R & D — and I think we need it more than ever, given declining test scores and the implications that has for our international competitiveness.”

Achievement is dropping across the board on NAEP scores, she noted. “So we have to start investing in this area if we’re going to make progress.”

For his part, Kelchen, the Tennessee scholar, said the disruptions of the administration’s first nine months haven’t taken too much of a toll on his work. Aside from an IES grant proposal that simply never got reviewed, he conducts research without federal assistance and without using federal restricted use data, which typically contains confidential information that isn’t publicly released. Accessing it requires an . 

But he said the chaos is changing his classroom: Last spring, he taught a graduate course and remembered, “Half the nights we met for class, there was some big announcement coming out of the Department of Education that affected higher ed finance,” disrupting what he thought the class would talk about. In one case, he said, a Feb. 10 discussion of higher ed expenditures was cut short by the news of DOGE’s IES grant cuts “breaking halfway through class.”

More broadly, Kelchen said the uncertainty is making everyone at the university uneasy. “It’s an interesting time to be an academic department head, just given that enrollment’s uncertain, funding’s uncertain,” he said. “We could have normal international student enrollment in a year. We could have zero. We just don’t know about anything.”

But while some of the cuts are, in his words, “dumb,” and show a lack of experience among the cost-cutters, Schneider has also pushed against many critics’ assertions that the Trump administration will effectively destroy the agency. In his view, the cuts offer an opportunity “to clean out the attic” of old, dusty policies and revitalize essential research functions. Those include the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which he maintains has lost its way and grown prohibitively expensive while in some cases duplicating the work of independent researchers.

A conservative who has held top roles in both of the last two Republican administrations, as well as the most recent Democratic one, he’s the ultimate education insider — Schneider’s conversations often invoke an alphabet soup of government agencies, contractors and think tanks. Yet he’s unusually candid about his time in government, especially now that he is no longer there.

A political scientist by training, Schneider has spent nearly two decades in education research. He served three years as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics under President George W. Bush, then spent a decade as a vice president at the non-profit American Institutes for Research. He returned to government in 2018, appointed by President Trump to lead the Institute of Education Sciences, and stayed on until 2024 under President Biden.

Through it all, he has remained an independent voice even while in office, telling ����Ӱ�� in 2023, for instance, that the reason Biden hadn’t fired him along with other Trump appointees was that education research wasn’t considered important enough for the president to bother. 

Over the course of six years at IES, he tried — mostly unsuccessfully, he admits — to reform the department into “a modern science and statistics agency.” He’s honest about his limitations, saying he “tried really hard to modernize the place” without much success. While Musk and his cost-cutters last month took a chainsaw to IES, he observes, when he led it, “I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife.”

While many education advocates are decrying Trump’s bid to eliminate the Education Department, Schneider has said carefully breaking it up could actually produce “a more efficient, dynamic and responsive school system — all things the Department of Education has been hard-pressed to do.”

Schneider sat down for a wide-ranging conversation last week with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo. They discussed the difficulties of reforming what he considers a hidebound agency, the opportunities of starting over and what the future might hold for NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card. 

Now a non-resident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he is cagey when pressed about returning to IES in a second Trump term. Schneider notes that the deep cuts have left no actual agency to run. “Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit?” But leading a revamped IES, he admits, would present “a wonderful challenge.”

At the end of the day, though, he says it remains an open question whether the next step in the Trump administration’s plans is rebuilding or neglect.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: I wanted to start with something you said about Musk’s crew a couple of weeks ago — namely that given your work to reform IES, you were “a little envious” they could “do it all in one day.” Let’s drill down. Is that what you had in mind when you were there? Or did this go further?

Schneider: [Laughs.] Let me try to figure out the best way of putting this. The issue, of course, is that IES was a 23-year-old institution. A lot of stuff got locked in. None of this is surprising: Institutions get locked down and they keep doing the same thing over and over again. I tried hard to change things. It was almost impossible. I tried to get Congress to create ARPA Ed — [National Center for Advanced Development in Education, an agency to develop and scale innovative, cutting-edge practices and tools]. A lot of people worked really hard, but we were never able to get it through Congress.

Whether Congress will ever do anything is a different question. But the fact of the matter is that even though people were in favor of it and we had a lot of political support, we still couldn’t get it across the finish line. Well, now the National Center for Education Research doesn’t exist anymore. There’s one person left there. So whether or not this is naive, we don’t need NCADE anymore. We should rebuild NCER to look like ARPA Ed. We don’t need any legislation for that, because it’s in the purview of the director to do that. That’s an amazing opportunity. We can just create a modern research funding organization with no need for congressional action.

My colleague Kevin Mahnken recently talked to Doug Harris from Tulane. He said IES is “being knocked over by these cuts.” I think beneath a lot of this is people like Doug worried that this administration is simply anti-science. It sounds like you are saying the opposite. Should this give people like Doug a little hope?

As of right now, we have no indication except every once in a while some words bubble out: “Oh, we are going to rebuild IES. We are looking for a future direction for IES.” But there is no concrete plan. So the proof is going to happen in the next several months. If the department says, “Yes, we are redoing NCER, we are redoing NCES,” which are the two biggest units that are most in need of repair, and they announce plans to rebuild them in a modern way, then we’re fine. But if nothing ever happens and we end up with three people at NCES and one person at NCER, we’ve got a problem.

You have no sense one way or another?

You probably hear the same things I do. I have no concrete information about any plans to rebuild. I hear rumors. But until concrete plans are announced and actions are undertaken, then we should maintain a healthy skepticism. That said, I still believe that if this administration wants to modernize IES, they have an opportunity that no one’s ever had before — since 2002.

Since they created it.

Congress created IES in 2002, and it was a brand new, innovative organization that radically changed the way education research was done. Well, 23 years later, that opportunity repeats itself. So my hope, and maybe this is naive, is that we grab that opportunity. We know a lot more about education research. We know a lot more about modern statistical data collections — and we learned a lot from NCES. For example, the lack of timeliness hurt them endlessly. So now it’s like an open field. Let’s build a better edifice now than what we had a year ago.

Let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of this vision. One of the first shocks to the system we got was in February when DOGE canceled all those federal contracts. And one of the hardest hit was AIR, where you spent 10 years. I wonder to what extent your views have been shaped by being an insider there. Is this a sector that needs a shock to the system?

There are at least two parts of that question. So there’s the question of the quality of the work. AIR does good work. I don’t think there’s any question. The big contract houses are capable of doing quite good work. However, people are really pissed off about the overhead rate [also known as indirect costs covering expenses] that these contract houses and universities charge. The overhead rate is just too high. When I was at IES after the pandemic, AIR got rid of their building on Thomas Jefferson St. [in affluent Georgetown] — a huge, expensive building. Many, many people ended up working at home, and the rest went with much less — and much cheaper — office space.

So after AIR shed that big office space, I called up [Contracts and Acquisition Management], the contracts management people in the department, and I said, “You know, the overhead is based on many factors, but office space and parking are major components. They’ve reduced the cost of their offices — they didn’t get rid of them, but they downsized and went to cheaper places. So let’s renegotiate their overhead rate.” [He imitates CAM officers]: “No, no, no, no, no, no.” I couldn’t get CAM to even consider reducing the overhead rate to reflect the lower cost.

Just to be clear: You couldn’t get the department to lower the cost?

The department had to reopen the negotiations. And they would not. I’m not sure what the right word is. It’s laziness, corruption. This was wrong. Why were we paying such high overhead rates when their costs went down? And you know as well as I do that many, many, many organizations got rid of office space and reduced their costs. So why wasn’t CAM renegotiating overhead rates? I never was able to get a good answer. 

But that’s a department problem, not an AIR or Mathematica problem.

Yes and no. Clearly the department had within its authority to reopen those negotiations. But the problem, of course, is that the agencies end up getting captured by the people they’re supposed to regulate, the people they’re supposed to monitor. [Test developer] ETS and NAEP are an even clearer example: How much money went to ETS to do things that they weren’t capable of doing? 

Such as?

Such as building the platform for NAEP. The software. This is not firsthand, so it could be hearsay, but the people from DOGE looked at the platform that ETS had built for NAEP, and they just said, “What is this? This is not the way modern software is built.” And I believe that’s because we used ETS, which is a testing company, not a tech company, to build the platform. And again, that has to do with the overly close relationship between NCES and ETS.

This is not just an Ed and contractor issue. We know this exists in other places besides education: the close relationship between the contractors and the agencies that are supposed to be supervising them. This is a well-known problem. The companies capture the government agency. [Editors Note: Asked to respond to Schneider’s comments, Christine Betaneli, an associate vice president at ETS, released the following statement Tuesday: “ETS delivers nearly 50 million tests every year across the US and around the world on robust technology platforms. We have consistently delivered innovations on NAEP suited to the specific requests of NCES. We’re incredibly proud of the unmatched quality we have provided to the American people in supporting the Nation’s Report Card. We will continue to innovate on behalf of America’s teachers, parents and children who rely on this critical data to improve access to quality education nationwide.”]

How do you prevent that from happening in the next iteration of this department? Is it just by bringing in totally new people? Is it by changing the contours of the contracts? Is it by doing things totally differently?

There are a couple of things. First of all, there’s a serious cultural issue. That’s clear. I will tell you another story, and this will give you some more depth to how bad this can be. When I first showed up at IES, we brought in [consulting firm] McKinsey & Co. to do an analysis of how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. They went around and interviewed people — staffers, program officers — to try to get some idea of what was going on. And remember, this is an outside consulting company we hired. They interviewed one of the program officers who said to this outside consultant, “I’m never giving up this contract. You will have to pry it out of my dead hands.” I mean, that’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s also illegal. This is a long-term project officer who admitted to an outside person that they had been totally captured, totally in bed with the contract shop. That a veteran project officer would say this to an outside consultant says there’s something really, really wrong.

So the culture is a problem. Is the scope of what the department does a problem as well? 

Yeah. 

Is a breakup necessary to change the culture?

Do we need to break up IES and move all these pieces around? If the goal is to shrink the department, or make the department go away, then we have to find homes for these activities. But when I wrote that last summer, I was not envisioning the disappearance of 90% of the workforce.

I believe if we don’t get congressional approval to end the department, it’s going to be around. But I keep thinking about both NCES and NCER, the two largest units, and there’s now an open field. I’ve always had problems with NCES. As a major federal statistical agency, like many other federal statistical agencies, they just kept falling further and further behind. But we can now imagine, we can actually execute, rebuilding NCES as a modern, lean and mean statistical agency.

For example, the state longitudinal data systems. I’ve written about a different vision of how to build that. The [Trial Urban District Assessments, NAEP tests given in 27 urban school systems] are incredibly expensive. Nobody can tell me how much they cost. I’ve asked many, many times how much they are, and the fact of the matter is, we don’t need them anymore, because we have other ways of getting estimates for these large cities. I’m talking about Tom Kane and Sean Reardon [who have developed an detailing achievement nationwide]. They compute the exact same statistics that TUDA does.

So that actually leads me to my next question: What is your vision for something like NAEP? Can a lot of it go away?

For me, the most important thing about NAEP is the state-by-state comparisons. They’re important because governors hold the keys to so much education reform, and they care about the comparisons. When NAEP came out several months ago, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, they all cared about these things. Virginia had a 50-minute release event with the governor, [Virginia Education Secretary] Aimee Guidera and the Superintendent of Schools [Lisa Coons]. That’s three of the heaviest hitters in the world of education, all lined up, talking about the importance of the state-by-state comparisons and what they were doing to address Virginia’s on NAEP. 

That alone is an amazing demonstration of the power of the state-by-state comparisons. Do we need a $185 million-a-year NAEP to generate the trend line and the state-by-state comparisons? 

I’ll give you another example: There are at least three different sub-domains in NAEP math. I’ve never seen anybody talk about those sub-scores. How much does that cost? Why do we keep doing it? We just need to bring some sanity to what we’ve built over 50 years that have grown up over time, the cost of those things, the backwardness of many of those things, and say, “Hey, we don’t have to keep doing this.” And part of the reason we don’t have to keep doing this — I mean, it’s a sad thing to say — is because the people in NCES who were committed to this are gone. 

I don’t want to leave that point without addressing institutional memory and knowledge. A lot of the people who are gone know how these things work. Getting rid of those people might have changed the culture, but it also might have hollowed out the agency’s ability to get the next NAEP report out. Does that keep you up at night? 

Clearly, that’s the horns of a dilemma. But where is the time, where’s the energy, where are the people to rethink this stuff? Part of the problem was that there was not sufficient rethinking. The machine worked. It got out on time. Many problems were solved by just raising more money. I attended NAGB [National Assessment Governing Board] meetings for 10 years. Every time there was a budget presentation, inevitably, the budget was in the red. And so then we have to cut this, and we have to cut that. And it was never like, “What is it that we need to preserve, instead of going to Congress and asking for another $30 million and getting $10 million?” That wasn’t the thought process.

So I went to OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and asked them to take the appropriation that Congress gave for NAEP and put 10% aside in a separate fund for R&D. I asked Congress to do this, and then OMB, because there was no commitment by the leadership of NCES and NAEP to spend that kind of money on R&D. Instead, it was always, “We need this money for the operations. We need money to do this other task.” As a result, NAEP lost its leading edge. The demands of running the operation are real. But if you never stop to think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to end up behind.

But to many, the way these agencies were trimmed doesn’t seem any smarter. There was a lot of cutting with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel. My sense is that’s going to require a great deal of work just to bring back basic functions. Am I right?

The years that I was at IES, I didn’t even have a scalpel. I had a dull butter knife. There are so many quotes about this: “Breaking things is easy, rebuilding things is hard.” From Hamilton: “Winning is easy, governing is hard.” All of that is true. And it’s just so much easier to just say, “No, no, no, no, no,” than to start rebuilding. Mancur Olson, a brilliant economist, wrote a book called . He had his finger right on the pulse. Over time, what happens is that you start accumulating all these lobbyists and all these interest groups and all this stasis, and it just builds up and builds up and nothing can get done, because you end up with this incredible superstructure of groups and people who are totally vested in the status quo. And he says, every once in a while, you just need to just blow the shit up and rebuild.

There’s a lot of concern about the rebuilding. How do you calm people’s fears that there is no rebuilding coming?

Look, there’s nothing we can do right now except wait and lobby Congress and the department that the rebuild is important. And I hope they know that the rebuild is important. Again, you can just give things away: Give NCES to BLS [the Bureau of Labor and Statistics] etc., but some of that stuff is going to require congressional action. Good luck on that. In some ways, again, we have an open field. Let’s take the opportunity to build that back in a much more modern, efficient way.

It seems like a lot of people, especially on the right, are talking in terms of the department reaching its sell-by date. But if you can change the culture and remove the barnacles, or whatever you want to call them, what’s the point of breaking it up?

As they say, that’s above my pay grade. [Laughs.] I’m writing a whole series of papers about what can be done and I think they’re all reasonable and in the realm of the possible. I have not had any contact with anybody in the department about any of my visions or plans. But there are ways to rebuild this so it looks like a modern science and statistics agency.

Would you like to lead it at some point?

If there’s anything there. [Laughs.] There’s nothing there. What do we have, 20 people left in that whole organization? NAGB is moving into [the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building, the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.] because it’s pretty much empty. And I assume IES will also end up moving into LBJ, but the fact of the matter is all of these places are ghost towns now.

Before the pandemic, we were trying to argue, incredibly, about creating 10 more desks for the growth of IES. And then, of course, after the pandemic, there was nobody left. Nobody came back to the office. The place was pretty much empty already. And then the executive order had everybody coming back to the office — and then everybody got fired. I don’t know what happened in between “You must be back in the office five days a week,” and “By the way, you’re fired.” I don’t know what it was like. I know from friends it was not a fun place to be.

If I’m reading between the lines correctly here, it sounds like you’d like to lead IES, but you’d like someone to rebuild it first.

First of all, I’m not answering that question. Many people have asked me if I would go back. But I have a lovely life. I live an eight-minute walk from AEI. AEI is a very generous organization. They’ve never said no to any reasonable request I’ve had, so it’s extremely pleasant, extremely easy. But I spent six years at IES. I tried really hard to modernize the place. For someone who wants to create the next version of IES, there are incredible challenges, but the rewards of doing it would be amazing. But they’ve already eviscerated the unit. Who wants to go in there and head a 20-person unit? But if there is a taste to rebuild IES to look like a modern organization, that’s a wonderful challenge. 

Could what you’re describing just as easily be done privately?

A lot of people are talking about that: How can philanthropy stand up and take over the role that IES used to have? Even the biggest foundations don’t have the kind of money IES had. IES spent over $100 million a year supporting education research, just from NCER. There’s no foundation that has that kind of money, and I’m not even sure if there’s a coalition of foundations that could come up with anywhere near that kind of money for research.

So there’s an indispensable role for research funded by IES or the Department of Education or some part of the federal government. But the return on that investment was not sufficient. I don’t know if part of the suspicion of IES was just a gut-level reaction to “Too big, too big, too big,” and how much of it was, “Hey, we have spent all these billions of dollars over the last 20 years and what have we got to show? We have declining NAEP scores. We don’t have any evidence of increasing achievement, etc, etc.” I’m not sure if the antagonism towards education research was because it wasn’t working or because it’s just that we were anti-science. I truly don’t know.

Years ago, we looked at how many math interventions have any evidence of success. It turned out to be about 15%. This was a very depressing number, until you start looking around at what the success rate is in any science: 10% of clinical trials work, 90% fail. And then of course, we’re learning that even among the 10% that work, there’s an incredible amount of dishonesty, lying, cheating. The “replication crisis” — we’ve glommed onto that term — says there’s a lot of stuff going on in the sciences that are not kosher. So at one level, the antipathy towards the Department of Education is, “This is not a function that the federal government should be involved in. This is all state and local.” O.K., I got that, and I believe a lot of that is true. But even in the most extreme form of federalism, there is a role for government support of research. There is a government role for statistics. And the question then is: How do we focus that to help states and local governments, parents, teachers, students achieve more? A lot of what happened was that that tight focal point just disappeared.  

If I’m translating what you’re saying correctly, you don’t know how we got to this point in terms of the mechanisms of the cuts, and you don’t know what people were thinking. But in a way, you’re saying it’s not really important, because we needed to get this done.

We needed to get this done. A lot of what was done was incredibly important and was needed. There’s no question about it. But we’re going to come back to the same theme over and over again: For six years I had a butter knife, and then these guys show up in a day with a chainsaw and they cleared out all the detritus and all the underbrush. But what do we do now? That’s what matters.

In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF’s program.

But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1.

Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute’s entire research portfolio, according to several sources. 

Last week, the NSF through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes by the administration.

The moves — as well as a broader of all federal aid, which a judge has temporarily reversed — have spread uncertainty, fear and anger through the education research community. 

“It is incredibly exhausting,” said the research director of a national nonprofit with several active NSF grants and contracts. She asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. “It’s definitely absorbing all of our time right now.”&�Բ�����;

Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding.

While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn’t comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health.

“It’s hard to believe this administration is serious about stopping the alarming decline of U.S. student achievement and competitiveness when it puts the kibosh on federally funded research and access to data,” said Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University. “How will policy makers and educators know the bright spots to replicate and what practices are harmful? How will parents make informed choices? How will teachers know the best ways to teach math and prepare students for the jobs of the future?”

CRPE currently receives no federal funding, she said, so the recent moves won’t affect it immediately. But its ongoing work tracking pandemic recovery, studying the impact of social media, AI and school choice rely on “a broad national infrastructure of data, subject experts, and rigorous field studies,” Lake said. “The broad-based destruction of this infrastructure will affect us all and will cripple our efforts to make American students competitive in the world economy.”

Ulrich Boser, CEO of , a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works in education research, likened the recent moves to remodeling a house to make it more efficient. “Would you just cancel all of your contracts with gas, water, electricity, and then just redo them? It’s not a logical way of doing things. It’s just haphazard.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The Learning Agency, which has contracts to, among other things, provide a that answers questions about IES’s What Works Clearinghouse, this week warning that GOP-backed plans to shut down the Education Department could mean the loss or delay of more than $70 billion in funding for students. 

Boser recalled that the recent debacle with college aid took place simply because the Education Department tried to . “It caused massive delays, most harmful to the kids we care about most.” Now take that dynamic, he said, and imagine what gutting an entire Cabinet-level agency could do. 

The recent NSF moves to review grant language are already having an effect: An academic dean at a leading graduate school of education said researchers at the institution are now reframing new funding proposals “in ways that allow them to ask the questions that they want” without being scrutinized — or eliminated altogether — “based on a ‘Ctrl-F review’ process.” Ctrl-F is a keyboard combination used to quickly search a document for keywords.

“I don’t think there’s an upside to the chaos and uncertainty that is being experienced in real time,” the dean said.

Likewise, the director of a research center that has long focused on K-12 education reform said the new administration has brought turmoil to a community that typically performs “non-ideological, empirical” research on issues like literacy and math.

 “I feel like every day there’s new confusion,” he said, adding that restrictions on DEI could also chill a basic function of education research: studying the results of interventions on diverse student populations — students of different races, ethnic backgrounds, economic levels and geographic locations.

“What ‘DEI’ means is really very ambiguous,” he said. “So if you are studying something and you look at differential outcomes between groups, is that DEI? I don’t know.”&�Բ�����;

A ‘Man-Made Disaster’

The federal government funds billions of dollars in research each year for K-12 and higher education, but rarely has it scrutinized practitioners to this extent, said the leader of a nonprofit that advocates for better education research. 

She described conversations with scholars who are operating via grants through NSF, IES and elsewhere who “just have no idea what’s going on — they can’t get through to program officers. Sometimes program officers have been put on administrative leave. It’s just a huge amount of chaos, and overall [it] just creates this chilling effect” for both current grantees and future ones.

“This is a man-made disaster,” she said.

Mike England, an NSF spokesman, said the agency “is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.” He referred a journalist to an outlining recent executive orders “and their impact on the U.S. National Science Foundation community.”

An Education Department official on Tuesday said any IES contracts required by law will be re-issued for new competition, but Mark Schneider, who served as the agency’s director in Trump’s first term, said in an interview that the current chaos represents an opportunity to “make something good” in the research realm.

“What we should really do is say, ‘We’ve fallen into a rut for decades in the way we go about doing business,’” he said. “‘We are not focused on the highest reward. We’re not focused on mission-critical work.’ ” 

Now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Schneider has already suggested breaking the Education Department up and distributing its work to other agencies. He said the new administration has the opportunity to refocus to provide “data that the nation needs.”

Schneider noted that the National Center for Education Research last year handed out 42 research grants worth well over $100 million. “If we look at those grants, how many of those are really mission-critical?” He predicted that few focus on improving literacy instruction, which recent NAEP results suggest is in crisis.

The department did not release a list of zeroed-out programs, but a document online indicates that they include research covering a wide range of topics including literacy but also math, science, mental health, attendance, English acquisition and others. Also on the chopping block: contracts for The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (), a test given to students every four years in 64 countries and a key indicator of U.S. competitiveness.

‘I just don’t want more asterisk years’

The long-term impact of research pauses could be devastating, said the senior advisor to a research advocacy group — comparable to the interruption of the COVID epidemic, which shut many researchers out of schools for months, diluting the effectiveness of their research and, in some cases, requiring them to insert asterisks for the years when no data was available.

“I just don’t want more asterisk years,” she said. 

Several researchers said an even bigger fear is the prospect of key education, labor and other data sets such as NAEP being made unavailable. While NAEP data collection was unaffected by the recent moves, contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled, to be offered to new bidders. So far, U.S. Education Department data haven’t been affected, but public health data — including guidance on contraception, a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people; and lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary students — have from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website due to President Trump’s order to strip “gender ideology” from websites and contracts.

Amy O’Hara, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School for Public Policy, cautioned that removing data from public websites would “have a chilling effect on what can be done, what can be measured, what services we deliver to our communities.”

Even if some research funds are restored and researchers can go back to work, O’Hara said, she worries about the uncertainty created at the collegiate graduate school level, as well as for researchers who are early in their careers. “If their funding is disrupted and their access to data is disrupted, they have an incentive to walk away,” she said. “And if they walk away and find other work to do, what is going to be compelling to bring them back?”

CRPE’s Lake put it more bluntly: “I’m a very pragmatic researcher and I believe the feds could do much better in how they fund and support research. But a wholesale end to federal investment in education research feels like a cop-out. The hard but necessary work is making smarter investments.”

The Trump administration’s gutting of the on Monday temporarily disables an essential source of data on a host of basic information — everything from high school graduation rates and school safety to which neighborhoods have the highest quality schools. At its most basic, it tells Americans how well U.S. schools educate young people, at a time when the public is more focused than ever on basic questions of achievement.

Advocates for a more focused and efficient federal education infrastructure view the move as an opportunity to rid the institute of old, inefficient and ineffective ways of doing research, even as researchers and industry leaders say the cuts will stop many key studies, trials and interventions in their tracks.

The move could also complicate Senate for Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, setting the stage for contentious questioning Thursday.

One industry insider called Monday’s actions “pretty devastating to the research infrastructure,” with several others saying administration officials canceled 189 contracts. But even that was unclear after Monday’s chaos. An administration official said the number totaled 89, citing from the Department of Government Efficiency that put the dollar total at $881 million. The department didn’t issue any official statements or breakdowns of the cuts. 

Most sources with knowledge of the cuts asked not to be named in order to speak freely about them — and in a few cases to preserve their ability to compete for future contracts.

DOGE, an informal agency led by billionaire Elon Musk, has spent the past few weeks slashing federal programs at President Trump’s direction.

“It’s apocalyptic, is all I can say,” said the director of one federal office who asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly.

DOGE workers for the past week have essentially U.S. Education Department offices in downtown Washington, D.C., accessing sensitive information systems. On Friday, private security personnel blocked a group of House Democrats from entering the building, setting up a videotaped confrontation that .

Several sources said Monday’s moves don’t affect what’s widely considered a key IES function: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known familiarly as the . NAEP will continue to be administered, sources said, but contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled and will be offered to new bidders.

An Education Department official on Tuesday told ����Ӱ�� that any IES contracts required by law will be re-issued for new competition.

On the chopping block: a host of programs including the What Works Clearinghouse, Common Core of Data, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database of colleges and universities, and many others. The programs provide Americans with wide-ranging data on school quality, effective school interventions and college data on finances, tuition, financial aid, enrollment, completion and graduation rates, among other indicators. 

Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the , confirmed that AIR had received notices of termination on multiple IES evaluation and statistics contracts. The notices, he said late Monday, “are still coming in.”

A person familiar with AIR’s work said the lost contracts amount to “millions of dollars.”&�Բ�����;

Tofig called the cancellations “an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars” already appropriated by Congress.

“These investments inform the entire education system at all levels about the condition of education and the distribution of students, teachers, and resources in school districts across America,” he said. “Many of these contracts are nearing completion and canceling them now yields the taxpayers no return on their investment.”

The terminated evaluation and data contracts, Tofig said, are “exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars, and which are not.”&�Բ�����;

One person who was not broken up about Monday’s events is Mark Schneider, a former longtime federal education official, who said his expectation is that much of the key research work will resume under new contracts. He couldn’t immediately confirm that, but said his understanding was that, with the exception of NAEP and one or two other untouched programs, “every other contract, as far as I know, has been canceled.”&�Բ�����;

Schneider, who served as an IES director in the first Trump administration and stepped down last spring after more than three years under President Biden, estimated that about three-fourths of the institute’s 100 or so employees would be affected. The move amounts to the temporary dissolution of two key Education Department operations: the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

One source with knowledge of the move described an emergency meeting on Monday in which IES employees heard of the contract cancellations. “I think they thought that IES’s independence was going to allow it to kind of squeak through,” he said. “And I think the leadership was just beyond shocked. I mean, they hadn’t been talking about any of this stuff happening.”

In some ways, the move echoes those taking place at other agencies — Trump has essentially dismantled the , putting most of its more than 2,000 employees on paid leave, though a federal judge last week paused the move until Friday. 

The administration on Saturday also ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to . The agency, created by President Obama after the 2008 financial crisis, has long been a target of conservatives.

In late January, Trump issued an executive order that directed all federal agencies to temporarily pause grants, loans and federal assistance, but 22 states and the District of Columbia sued, challenging the legality of the move and eventually blocking it. A federal judge on Monday said the administration with that ruling and ordered federal agencies to immediately restore any paused or withheld dollars. 

Schneider, the former IES director, said Monday’s developments don’t mean the end of the agency, but rather “an opportunity to clean out the attic” and revitalize essential research functions that the department has long neglected.

“There’s a bunch of stuff that’s been accumulating for all these decades and they’re built on old technology,” he said. “They’re not even measuring the things that we care the most about.”

‘How people decide where to buy houses’

News of the canceled contracts took education researchers and officials by surprise Monday afternoon, with at least two members of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP policy, saying they were just hearing about it through colleagues — or via the rumor mill.

An official at a trade organization that represents research firms said that in many cases, classroom interventions such as tech tools being studied in real time will also disappear.

The official also said shutting down the Common Core of Data will dramatically affect “every single real estate site” on the Internet that helps users probe neighborhoods on the basis of school quality. “That’s how people decide where to buy houses.”

Felice Levine, executive director of the , said the group was “deeply concerned” about Monday’s actions, saying NCES provides nonpartisan and unbiased information on important education indicators. “The robust collection and analysis of data are essential for ensuring quality education,” she said.

But another person with knowledge of IES’s inner workings, who requested anonymity to speak freely, agreed with Schneider that the nation needs “a different kind of approach to R&D to think about how we want to move forward.”&�Բ�����;

Data from many recent large assessments, including NAEP, suggest that “things are not going the way they need to in this recovery, and it’s time to start thinking about what a research agenda can look like — particularly if the department decides that they’re going to move in a direction where we’re going to have block grants to states,” as many state superintendents in Republican-led states have requested in recent weeks.

That, she said, will require a commitment to research focused on effective teacher practice, among other indicators. That won’t happen with the current system. “I think we’ve gotten to a point with the current IES structure where things have been done the way they’ve been done for so long that no one can roll it back. That’s a real challenge.”&�Բ�����;

Schneider, IES’s most recent director and now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative , has recently suggested breaking up the entire Education Department and moving its major functions to other Cabinet-level agencies.

He admitted on Monday that the changes are “pretty serious,” but said the agency needed “a full shake-up” to become more effective.

He noted, for instance, that IPEDS, “the premier system” for reporting on colleges, is “totally archaic,” costing about $9 million annually but is, in his view, based on old technology, hard to use and provides little value.

“What does a modern system look like, and how do we get that?” he asked. “To just throw everything away is easy. To try to imagine how to rebuild some of these essential data systems that the nation needs so that they’re modern, efficient, effective — that’s a much harder challenge, and that’s the challenge I hope that we rise to meet.”

In a broadcast Tuesday on LinkedIn, Schneider admitted that “given how much work I put into reforming IES with only marginal success, that they could do in one day … I’m a little envious.”

But he said DOGE’s technique of “moving fast and breaking things” in this case might be “dumb” for a few reasons: While he favors, for instance, getting rid of the IPEDS contract, he noted that the department can’t publish its College Scorecard, which it wants to protect, without it. The department also can’t effectively produce NAEP reports without the Common Core of Data.

“If you break X, you’re actually breaking Y and Z,” he said. “I mean, that’s a lack of experience, a lack of information.”

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Schneider wouldn’t immediately say whether he’d accept an offer to lead IES again.

An industry insider who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely said she has worked well with Schneider in the past and predicted that if he were once again in charge of IES, she might have faith that his leadership could start “a different conversation” about research. “But I just don’t see it yet.”

If she and her colleagues were dealing with “rational policy actors” in the Trump administration, she said, she might believe that improvement is possible. But the new administration doesn’t represent “a sort of regular Republican world,” she said. “We’re in a world in which they’re slashing and burning everything.”

Top challenges in more than half of the country’s schools were students being unprepared or disruptive in the classroom, according to the Department of Education’s research arm in . 

For 40-45% of schools, student learning and staff morale was also limited by students’ “trouble” working with partners or in groups and use of cell phones, laptops, or other tech when not permitted. In 75% of schools, students’ “lack of focus” moderately or severely negatively impacted learning and staff morale. 

Fighting and bullying were also pervasive: In about one in five schools, physical fights occurred about once a month, while weapons were confiscated at 45% of schools. Thirty percent report cyberbullying is a weekly occurrence; for 11%, it is daily.

Researchers say while overall, key adverse student behaviors have been on a downswing compared to prior generations, such as illicit drug use, violent crime and teen birth rates, several forces are compounding for students and impacting their wellbeing: High rates of trauma, a fraught political climate, and feeling they are being left behind, or unseen in school.

“Look what these students have gone through … not only the pandemic, through wars. Through a tumultuous, divisive political environment in the last six or seven years that’s only intensifying between right and left, between Black and white, between immigrant and non-immigrant. [Those separations] are filtering into schools and classes, perhaps with an awareness that we have not had before,” said Ron Astor, UCLA professor of social welfare and expert on bullying, school violence and culture. 

Students are also witnessing state legislatures and local school boards limit what classrooms can and cannot teach, leading them to question whether they belong in their school, he said. The atmosphere is impacting families across the political divide: “If parents and society see the school as teaching the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, if you’re not reflected in that school – that’s going to impact your attention, too.”&�Բ�����;

From coast to coast, districts are weighing phone bans amid rising concerns about bullying and distractions. But some researchers say solely nixing phones without boosting mental health supports or addressing overall school culture wouldn’t curb the negative attitudes students may be forming about school and the purpose of their education. 

Astor said some young people are experiencing conditions like ADHD, depression and PTSD, which can manifest in dissociation. Lack of focus can also stem from feeling irrelevance, either that the subject matter is not important to their future or that some part of who they are is not represented at school.

Framing students’ inability to focus as the cause for delay in learning recovery, “ignores the fact of why they’re maybe not motivated, why they’re not connected as they should be, why they don’t see themselves in the curriculum,” he added. “Why, when they did see themselves, they’re being taken out or not allowed to say or do things because they’re part of an oppressed group,” referencing book bans, history challenges, and restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion curricula and positions. 

Astor and Johanna Lacoe, research director with the California Policy Lab, point to several ways school leaders can address these behavioral concerns: stronger classroom management training for teachers and keeping counselor, nurse, psychologist and social worker roles filled. 

“Young people who are in the classroom and who are behind, frustrated and struggling are just so much more likely to check out,” said Lacoe, a commissioner on San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Commission. “For a teacher with 33 kids, who has maybe not that much experience managing a classroom, to teach to the range of abilities that present themselves with no support, is what we’re currently asking teachers to do.”

How schools handle disciplinary action after cyberbullying, violent behavior, and disruptions can greatly impact student perceptions of school. Lacoe pointed to several models that help students feel belonging after an incident such as in lieu of suspensions for low-level infractions, particularly as school leaders’ concerns about chronic absenteeism grow.  

In the , schools provide services such as healthcare, behavioral and housing support to children and families.

There are models at work where, “you’re always telling a student that they belong here even in the time of this [adverse] behavior – that they can make right what happened through a process, inclusive of the people involved,” Lacoe said. “You can figure out a way to resolve it that works for everyone and if possible, keeps the young person engaged at school.”

The vast majority of school leaders surveyed in late May by the National Center for Education Statistics – over 80% – agree the pandemic’s impacts are still lingering, negatively impacting the behavioral and socioemotional development of their students. At least 90% of public schools reported offerings for students since 2021. 

Students, including Astor’s own undergraduates, are asking, “‘Where do I fit in this world? How do I fit in society?’ … I think all of this impacts your ability to focus and your attention, including your motivation.”

The study followed 23,000 students starting with their freshman year of high school in 2009. Though 74% enrolled in college after graduating, almost half didn’t receive any postsecondary credential by June 2021. They are the fifth group the NCES has tracked for postsecondary outcomes, but the first cohort it began tracking in ninth grade. The studies allow researchers and policymakers to have a better understanding of students’ educational experiences beyond high school.

The previous group of 2002 graduates had a higher college enrollment rate, at 84%, and a completion rate of 52%. Though the study doesn’t include direct insight from students about why they may not have finished their education, it does give a snapshot of graduating seniors during that time. The 2013 cohort’s diverse set of characteristics such as their gender, race and income, paired with the economy, likely played a role. Additionally, students who were still in school at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 likely had their learning disrupted.

Elise Christopher, director of the NCES longitudinal studies, says the 2008 Great Recession could have influenced how this cohort thought about life after graduation and entering the workforce. She also points out that the No Child Left Behind Act could have had an effect.

When the study was being designed in the early 2000s, there was a lot of policy focused on degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering and math. But, Christopher says, No Child Left Behind strongly emphasized math and reading, which put it at odds with the STEM pipeline push. The new study found that students who attended postsecondary education in the 2013 cohort mostly pursued degrees in non-STEM fields. Over 80% of students who earned a degree were in an unrelated field. Of the males who completed their higher education, nearly 30% were in STEM fields, as were nearly 14% of females. By race, Asian students had the highest percentage of STEM degrees and certificates, at nearly 34%.

Among the students who enrolled in postsecondary education, more than half were female. Thirty-nine percent of them earned a bachelor’s degree and 32% attained no credential. Though male students had a lower enrollment rate, at 44%, 38% similarly earned bachelor’s degrees.

The study also examined students by race. Although white students had the highest enrollment rate (53%), Asian students were the top earners of bachelor’s degrees, at 56%. Hispanic and Black students had the second-and third-highest enrollment rates, though far behind white students, at 20% and 12%, respectively. Despite pursuing higher education, 46% of Hispanic students and 56% of Black students earned no postsecondary credential.

The NCES also looked at the income and education levels of the students’ parents. About 80% of those whose families earned more than $115,000 completed their degree or credential, in comparison to 49% of students whose families earned under $35,000. Of students whose parents had a high school education or lower, nearly 40% didn’t pursue higher learning after graduation.

“It’s very important to understand what’s happening in ninth grade,” Christopher said. “But we really don’t know the full measure of those impacts of those educational experiences until we get these long-term outcome data.”

Outcomes are starkly different for those who have that opportunity. High-achieving Black, Latino and lower-income students who do gain access to advanced math classes in high school have better academic outcomes across multiple measures: stronger high school graduation rates, higher GPAs and greater college admission and persistence rates. They were also more likely to attend a highly selective college and earn more STEM credits there, a pathway to landing lucrative jobs in those fields.

Just Equations and The Education Trust released their report Thursday. Together, they analyzed eight years of data following 23,000 ninth graders from 900 private and public schools throughout the country, information collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. The study group was tracked through high school and college starting in 2009. 

Both Ed Trust and Just Equations advocate for educational equality with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved. Earlier research cited in the report shows Black, Latino and impoverished students, regardless of their capabilities, are less likely to be assigned AP math courses, enroll in STEM majors or attend top-tier colleges than their wealthier, white or Asian peers.

“This study challenges the notion that access to advanced math courses is purely the byproduct of talent and academic achievement,” said Melodie Baker, national policy director at Just Equations. “Our analysis confirmed that all too often, factors such as race, wealth and privilege — rather than students’ aptitude and proficiency — can be hidden prerequisites for access to courses that lead to STEM and college opportunity.”

While 46% of high-achieving Asian students, 19% of white students, and 29% of students from high socio-economic backgrounds took college-level AP/International Baccalaureate calculus by the end of high school, just 10% of Black, 15% of Latino and 11% of lower-income high-achievers did the same. 

Race and income disparities in high school graduation rates appear to level off for this high-achieving, underrepresented group when they take advanced math courses: 99% of Asian and white students, 98% of Black students, and 96% of Latino and lower-income students graduated in four years. Four-year high school graduation rates declined among all high-achievers who did not take advanced math classes and gaps opened up along racial and socioeconomic lines, although the drop in graduation rates was starkest for Asian students and least-felt by affluent students.

“We know that it is so important for students to feel engaged and that their learning experiences are relevant,” said Ivy Smith Morgan, EdTrust’s director for P12 research and data analytics. “What this conjures for me is the anecdotes about students who are so smart but stop paying attention in class because they are not challenged. They are not getting the opportunities that align with their ability.”

Smith Morgan noted U.S. students’ performance in mathematics as compared to their peers internationally has been highly scrutinized for years, with last week’s release of the latest PISA scores showing unprecedented 13-point declines for American students and an average 15-point loss globally. The U.S., still reeling from COVID learning loss, along with other countries, now ranks 26th in its math scores. Smith Morgan said a failure to mine students’ talents will have dire economic implications. 

“What we are talking about is losing a future workforce with the skills, training and technical knowledge we need to fill all of the STEM jobs that will exist — not the ones we have right now, but the ones we have not even thought of yet,” she said. “We are shooting ourselves in the foot.”&�Բ�����;

The study notes the disparity in opportunity starts well before students enter high school: Just 24% of Black students, 34% of Latino students, and 25% of students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds took Algebra I or higher in eighth grade, compared with 39% of white children, 64% of their Asian peers and 57% of students from higher income backgrounds. 

“Anyone who is paying attention knows that our mathematics education systems are deeply inequitable,” said David Kung, director of strategic partnerships at The Charles A. Dana Center in Austin. “Black, brown and poor students get shafted when it comes to access, teaching and advising.”

The Dana Center, which seeks to ensure all students have access to excellent math and science education, has been working with several states across the nation as part of its to revamp mathematics curriculum, making equity and student interest a top priority.  

“This report is another reminder that whenever there are decisions to be made —  to take algebra in 8th grade, to enroll in an advanced math class, to apply to college, to choose a STEM path — equity gaps open,” Kung said. “We must reform our systems so those critical transitions are smoother, especially for students from groups we have historically under-supported.”

The new study found, too, that high-achieving underserved students who took more challenging high school mathematics coursework often had math teachers who established clear goals and school counselors who set high standards. Such positive influences may have aided in their success. 

Researchers say 74% of Black and 81% of Latino high-achieving students who were enrolled in advanced high school mathematics courses went on to follow a standard process of getting into and staying enrolled at college after high school. 

Not so for those who did not: Only 58% of Black students and 53% of Latino high-achieving students who did not take these classes had that same outcome. Results were similar for students from lower-income backgrounds: 77% of those who took advanced math courses experienced standard college enrollment and persistence versus 53% who did not take more challenging courses.  

The study showed Black and Latino high-achieving students who took advanced math courses in high school had better first-year college GPAs: roughly 0.5 points higher. Lower income students had a 0.6-point gain. 

EdTrust and Just Equations recommends Congress support and incentivize state and district leaders to greatly expand access to challenging coursework in all topics, including math. 

They said, too, that the government should increase funding for whole-child support services that would allow districts to hire an appropriate number of well-trained restorative justice coordinators, school counselors, psychologists and nurses. 

States and districts should also boost professional development efforts and coaching with the goal of reducing bias and incorporating anti-racist mindsets. 

They can also automatically enroll students in higher-level math courses, like the Dallas school system, which moved from an opt-in model to an opt-out policy in the 2019-20 school year. The followed that example: Gov. Abbott, earlier this year, signed that requires the automatic enrollment of children in advanced math based on their test scores, not on a recommendation. 

The Commit Partnership, a Dallas-based nonprofit focused on education, applauded the move. Chelsea Jeffery, its chief regional impact officer, said she looks forward to other districts doing the same, not only changing their policies but providing students with the support necessary to graduate high school ready for college and the workforce. 

“We celebrate Dallas ISD for their innovative approach to this critical subject area and to policymakers for passing legislation that will benefit our students and community,” she said. 

The study classified a student as high-achieving if they passed — with an A, B, or C — Algebra I or higher in middle school. Others who made the cut scored in the highest one-fifth on a math assessment given to students in ninth grade. 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations, The Education Trust, The Charles A. Dana Center and ����Ӱ��.

In the 2021-22 school year, more than one in four U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of school days. Before the pandemic, it was closer to one in seven, the Associated Press , relying on data from 40 states and the District of Columbia. 

In New York City, the nation’s largest district, chronic absenteeism , according to district officials, meaning some 375,000 students were regularly absent. In Washington, D.C., it . In Detroit, .

Data are just beginning to emerge for the most recent school year, but a few snapshots present a troubling picture:

• In Oakland, Calif., district officials said were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year; 
• In Providence, R.I., the district in September said of students missed at least 10 percent last year;
• And in suburban , near Washington, D.C., about 27% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 20% four years earlier. As elsewhere, high school students were more likely to be chronically absent. 

While many policymakers have cited disconnection from school as a key reason for the problem, others say it has different causes unique to the times we’re in — causes that educators have rarely had to deal with so fully until now, from the death of caregivers to rising teacher absences and even, for older students, a more attractive labor market. 

Here, according to researchers, school officials and parents’ organizations, among others, are six hidden (and not-so-hidden) reasons that chronic absenteeism rates remain high.

1. Worsening mental health

In a by the National Center for Education Statistics, 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health services at school since the start of the pandemic; 76% reported an increase in staff voicing concerns about students with symptoms of depression, anxiety and trauma.

And after modest declines in 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported during the pandemic. Suicides are rising fastest among young people, among other groups.

“We’re in the middle of a mental health crisis for kids,” said , president of the National Parents Union. She said mental health support, both in our public education system and larger health care system, is inadequate to deal with the crisis.

“Kids are literally refusing to go [to school]. That is a major issue that I hear from parents every day. ‘I can’t get my kid up. They do not want to go.’”

For many students, school has lost its value, she said, “because there’s not a lot of meat on the bone,” either because instruction has worsened or because many students feel they can do what’s required from home. 

2. Death of caregivers

As many as in the U.S. have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, researchers now estimate, with about 359,000 losing a primary or secondary caregiver, including a grandparent.

Those losses hit hardest in multigenerational, low-income households, since many grandparents and other relatives were playing caregiving roles, said , a research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “It now falls to the teenagers,” he said. Even those who don’t care for younger siblings may now need to do so for surviving parents or even grandparents, making school less of a priority.

3. Teacher absences 

Among the most politically charged storylines to emerge from the pandemic was the that of teachers and other school staff pushing to ensure their safety, often by keeping schools operating remotely or demanding generous COVID-related sick-day policies.

The result has been an explosion of teacher absenteeism alongside that of students. In Illinois, just 66% of teachers had fewer than 10 absences in 2022. In west of Chicago, it was even lower at just 54% of teachers.

A May 2022 found that chronic teacher absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year had increased in 72% of schools, compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased “a lot.”&�Բ�����; 

Simultaneously, it found, 60% of schools nationwide found it harder to find substitute teachers. And when subs couldn’t be found, 73% of schools brought in administrators to cover classes.

That makes school a lot less valuable for students, said Rodrigues. “What we saw in COVID is how little instruction many of our kids are actually getting,” she said. “And so it’s very hard as a parent to make the argument: ‘No, you’ve got to go. This is important for your future,’ when all you’re doing there is sitting and watching a movie because you have a sub again and again and again.”

4. Remote assignments

While many students struggled to keep up with schoolwork during the pandemic, the experience revolutionized schools’ thinking about remote learning. Most significantly, it gave students the ability to complete classwork entirely at home, without stepping into the school building. In many districts, schools have continued to allow students to, in essence, work from home like their parents.

Combined with looser rules around sick-day attendance, observers say, this has resulted in millions of students — and their parents — deciding that five-day-a-week school attendance is no longer mandatory. 

“Kids don’t see why they can’t ,” said Tim Daly, former president of TNTP and co-founder of the consulting firm . In a recent issue of his newsletter, Daly noted that when students miss a day of school, “all the work is available online in real-time, making it simple for a student to complete it all from home before the day is even done.”

Given the low quality of instruction that many parents saw during the pandemic, he said, parents now are less likely to worry if their child is missing a day. “Sitting in a desk for six hours a day,” he wrote, “is for suckers.”

Student testimonials bear that out, said Montgomery County’s Neff.

Students in focus groups now tell administrators that five-day-a-week attendance now seems optional, he said. “They’ve told us repeatedly, ‘We got so used to a year-and-a-half or more taking classes, sitting on our bed in our pajamas on our computer.’ And many of them are continuing a struggle to get back into school regularly.”

Students who learned reasonably well at home, he said, now wonder, “‘Why are you telling me now I have to sit in seven periods a day for five days a week?’ 

At one of the nation’s most renowned suburban high schools, New Trier High School near Chicago, the percentage of chronically absent students rose to more than 25% last winter, the Chicago Tribune . Absenteeism rose as students got older, officials noted, with rates of just over 14% for freshmen but nearly 38% for seniors.

By late May, even the student editors of the school newspaper declared that they : “While this trend isn’t unique to New Trier,” they wrote in an editorial, “it’s also not acceptable. We believe that both the school and students need to do more.”

Jean Hahn, a New Trier board member, last spring pointed out that many adults now work remotely. “So many of us don’t have to be at our desk 9-5 Monday through Friday anymore,” Hahn told attendees at a board meeting. “It’s challenging for parents to explain to our young people why they do.”

5. A higher minimum wage

Over the past few years, more than half of the 50 states have been in a kind of arms race to raise their minimum wage, tempting teens to trim their school hours or drop out altogether to help their families get by.

While the federal minimum wage since 2009 has remained $7.25, 30 states have set theirs higher, according to the left-leaning . While just four states and the District of Columbia now guarantee a minimum wage at or above $15, eight states are on pace to get there by 2026 or sooner.

In states offering $15 an hour, said Hopkins’ Balfanz, this likely made the absentee problem worse. 

“That’s real money to a 17-year-old,” he said, offering them both a bit of personal agency and the opportunity to help out their families. “Things that did not make sense at $6 an hour do make sense, then, at $15.”

Steven Neff, director of pupil personnel and attendance services for Montgomery County Public Schools, the suburban D.C. district, said students “are telling us that there is great value in being able to have a job that is paying reasonably well.” Minimum wage work, he said, now “has even greater financial enticements than when I think about minimum wage when I was their age.”&�Բ�����;

6. Better record-keeping

One reason why chronic absenteeism seems to be spreading may have less to do with actual attendance and more with better record-keeping by districts and states.

Until recently, researchers found that the problem was often confined mostly to high-poverty neighborhoods. 

But here’s the thing: A decade ago, few schools even kept track of chronic absenteeism. Most states didn’t actively track it until 2016, when new flexibility under the federal allowed them to choose indicators of school quality according to their own desired outcomes. That’s when about 30 states made it an indicator in their accountability systems — and on school report cards.

Before that, Balfanz said, school districts typically measured average daily attendance, which could actually mask high chronic absenteeism that lurked around the edges. It’s mathematically possible, he said, to have an average daily attendance of 92% “but still have a fifth of your kids missing a month of school. Different kids on different days are making up that 92%.”

So by 2020, when the pandemic hit, schools had only been tracking it for a few years and had few good strategies to address it, Balfanz said. “It’s relatively new. And then the pandemic spread it everywhere.”

Where do we go from here?

At New Trier, student pressure eventually paid off, resulting in a new plan this fall: In preparation for the 2023-24 school year, a school committee recommended for absences, including just five “mental health days” per year. It also bans students from participating in extracurriculars if they’re not in class that day. They’ll get an email by 3:15 p.m. notifying them not to show up to sports or other activities.

Simple interventions can also help: A found that offering parents personalized nudges by mail about their kids’ absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% or more, partly by correcting parents’ incorrect beliefs that their kids hadn’t missed as much school as they actually had — research shows that both parents and students underestimate it by nearly 50%.

That’s probably preferable to how many schools attack the problem, via “supportive” phone calls home, said Hopkins’ Balfanz. “Who’s going to make 150 phone calls a day in a school?” he said. “If you have that one person assigned to it, they literally would be spending the whole day calling.”

EdNavigator’s Daly says schools should reset the discussion around attendance, urging parents to let their kids miss school as rarely as possible and communicate honestly about absentee rates.

Neff, the Montgomery County attendance services director, said transparency “increases the urgency in all of us” and is essential if schools want to get parents on board.

“In order to fully have them understand the gravity of the situation, we needed to show them: ‘Here is our data. Here is where it was, here is where it is and where it is for certain groups. We need your help to fix this.’ ”

The Institute of Education Sciences turns 21 this year. After five years at its helm, Director Mark Schneider is hoping to shepherd its transition to maturity.

When he was appointed by President Trump in 2017, Schneider took over an agency designed to reveal the truth of how schooling is delivered in the United States. IES houses four research centers that measure the effects of educational interventions from preschool to university, and through the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the agency’s most recognizable research product, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — it delivers regular updates on the state of student achievement.

But Schneider sees a new role for federal research endeavors. Through the use of public competitions and artificial intelligence, the director wants IES to help incubate breakthrough technologies and treatments that can help student performance take a giant leap forward in the coming years. Rapid-cycle experimentation and replication, he hopes, will help reverse more than a decade of stagnation in K–12 performance.

Late in his six-year term, Schneider is candid about his status as one of the few holdovers from the previous administration still serving in government. In part, he quips, that’s because education research isn’t considered important enough for a Trump appointee to be fired. But he’s also labored to win the trust of Congress and cultivate bipartisan support for a vision of educational improvement powered by data.

Now he believes that vision could soon be realized. In December, Congress approved a substantial increase in IES’s budget to potentially fund a fifth national center that some have dubbed a “DARPA” for education research (based on the Pentagon’s ). Further legislation is needed to authorize a branch for advanced development in education sciences, but potential research strands are already being theorized.

Schneider — a political scientist who left academia for leadership and research roles at the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute — has a commanding perspective on the federal education bureaucracy, serving as the head of the National Center for Education Statistics in the 2000s. His sometimes tart observations about Washington’s research efforts, and the future of IES, can be found on his .

In a wide-ranging conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Schneider spoke with surprising openness about the Department of Education (which “operates like a bank” in its grantmaking capacity), the “horrifying” reality of university master’s programs (“It’s a money machine, and so you create more of them”), and why he believes some concerns about data privacy are overblown (“If I were really worried about this, I wouldn’t wear an Apple watch.”) 

Above all, he said, the task ahead is to develop a research base that can yield transformative educational tools on the order of COVID vaccines and ChatGPT.

“The goal, using this foundation, is to look at things that pop out, that would not exist otherwise,” Schneider said. “If we can do this with vaccines, if we can use it with chatbots, then what’s our foundation?”

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Tell me a little about what you’re anticipating this year in terms of legislation to establish a DARPA-type program for education.

Mark Schneider: There are two parts of the . The first is to set up the National Center for Advanced Development in Education, NCADE, and the other is for major reinvestment in . Most people focus on the first part, but the second is also really important because we spent a billion dollars building those data systems over the last 18 years. The whole thing is a great system, but it needs to be rebuilt.

What needs to be modified in those systems?

It’s old technology. I think the first round of money for them went out the door in 2006. [Gestures at iPhone sitting on the table] Can you imagine having a technology system that was built in 2006? So they need to be modernized, but the more important thing is that we now have a much more expansive vision of what they can do after almost 20 years of work. 

The example I point to is absenteeism. States have really good records on attendance because money flows based on average daily attendance, and they have to take counts. They know who are chronic absentees, but they don’t know why. It could be food insecurity, health, migration status, could be a dozen things or more. But if we use these longitudinal data systems as a backbone and then plug in information from criminal justice, health, Social Security, we would have a much better sense of what’s going on with any student in a given school. The strength of Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems [SLDS] has always been tracking students over time.

The biggest problem, of course, is that as you merge more data, the issues of privacy become more intense because it’s easier and easier to identify people when there’s more information. We’re nowhere near good enough at privacy protection, but we’re getting way better, and there are so many more ways of protecting privacy than there were 20 years ago.

Given the lengthy timetables of federal projects like the SLDS, do you ever feel like you’re painting the Golden Gate Bridge, and now that you’ve finally established these tools, it’s already time to overhaul them?

Well, we spent a $1 billion building this, and right now, we’re spending about $35 million per year on grants to states to do things with it. What percentage of $1 billion is going back into maintenance and expansions? It’s pocket change. So you always have to remember that this is a state-owned system, designed to help them do their work. And to take an example, Tennessee is surrounded by seven other states, and they end up doing their own collaborations and data exchanges.

Is the inherent federalism of that approach, especially layered over the archaic technology, difficult to manage? How did it play out during the pandemic, for instance, when real-time data was so hard to generate?

The trickiness had nothing to do with SLDS, though. It had to do with the world we woke up to in March 2020.

For me, SLDS is like an exemplar of a federal system where the states assume almost all responsibility. But again, we have more capacity compared with most states. There are states like Massachusetts that are doing an unbelievably good job, and other states are not. Our role there is providing the resources to enable states to a) experiment like Massachusetts and b) bring states that have little capacity up to speed. 

Probably the most alarming federal data coming out of the COVID era has been the release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed huge drops in achievement in reading and especially math. Did those results match what you were expecting?

By the time NAEP landed, we had NWEA results and others that suggested it was going to be a debacle. We knew the scores were going to go down by a bunch. But NAEP is NAEP — it’s national, it’s rock-solid in terms of its methodologies and its sample. So it’s indisputable that this was an awful situation, right?

To connect the dots with SLDS: One of the problems with the system is that it was conceived as a data warehouse strategy. And I tried and tried, but nobody caught that this was a stupid way of phrasing its purpose. I said, “We don’t need a data warehouse. What goes into a warehouse, a forklift?” We want an Amazon model where we also have retail stores, and you can go in and find stuff. 

I understand that states are very hesitant to let random academics and researchers have access to very private data. But as we rebuild the SLDS, we need to make sure that there are use requirements as part of the deal — always, always consistent with privacy protections, but we have to use these more. It’s a little tricky because some states have a history of opening up the doors and letting in researchers, and others just don’t. In the state of Texas, it can depend on who the attorney general is. 

It can be striking come out of, for instance, Wake County, North Carolina.

It’s because they’ve opened the data to more people. And that’s part of the deal, but Wake County is not the United States. We need more. 

My days of active research are behind me, but the possibilities built into these data are incredible. I thought I was going to be able to do a deal with Utah, where there’s an organization doing early childhood interventions; all the evidence is that they’re good, but we need to see if “good” sticks. Well, SLDS is perfectly designed to figure out if interventions stick. I thought this work in Utah would allow us to identify students in their early childhood interventions, work with the state to track those students over time, and find out if those very positive pre-K results — it’s a very inexpensive intervention with great results in the early years — stick. We have the means to do it. We just need to do it.

It seems like efforts like that would be complicated by the growing political salience of data security.

It’s everywhere, and for good reason. I’m not really a privacy hawk, but all the privacy protections need to consider benefits versus costs. In too many places, we’ve concentrated on the risk without considering the benefit. But that’s only half the equation. We have to be able to say, “This risk can be mitigated, and there could be huge benefits to come out of this.” 

This is what political systems do all the time — they balance risks against rewards. But we have to do it in a much more sophisticated way.

Why are you a privacy dove? There is something a little funny about how guarded people are about government intrusions when they so freely hand over their data to Amazon or whomever.

I have an Amazon Echo in every room in my house, and I know that they’re listening! Everyone has a story where they’re talking about something, and then they go on their Amazon account and see an advertisement related to the product they were talking about. It’s really scary, but I’ve only turned off the microphone on one of my devices because of the convenience of being able to say, “Alexa, turn on my lights, play the BBC.” For me, those benefits are worth getting a bunch of stupid advertisements.

If I were really worried about this, I wouldn’t wear an Apple watch or own an Apple phone. We all should be concerned about privacy, and especially when it comes to children. Obviously, the standards have to be high. But again, there are benefits to using a more comprehensive database, which is my vision of what SLDS would be. The technology issues are real, and it’s always a war of whether people hack it and we need to develop better mechanisms for protection. 

What are you trying to achieve, organizationally, with the proposed addition of an advanced research center?

IES is only 20 years old. My predecessor, , was the founding director, and he was brilliant. He set out to modernize the research and development infrastructure, and the coin of the realm. I was the NCES commissioner for three years, and I argued with him all the time about his model of RCTs, which are the gold standard. The way he saw it was — and he knew what he was doing, he’s really smart — “I can’t compromise this at the beginning. If I say, ‘Maybe we do this, maybe we do that,’ then nobody goes in the direction I want, and they just wait me out.”

The problem with the model was that RCTs, as they were originally introduced, were about average effects across populations. But to use a specific example, we’ve now moved into individualized medicine — it’s about what works for you, and under what conditions. So the mantra of IES now is, “What works for whom, and under what conditions?” Of course, we still have studies that look at main effects, but our work is all about identifying what works for individuals or groups of students. This requires a lot of changes about the way we think and how we do business.

My joke is that almost every science has . We don’t have a replication crisis, because we don’t replicate anything. Even if it works, we don’t replicate it! So a few years ago, we launched a replication RFA [request for applications]. IES was moving in that direction anyway, but we needed a much more systematic attention to replication. My mistake was we structured the replication this way: “Something worked in New York City, so give me another $5 million, and I’ll try it in Philadelphia.” Or, “It worked for some African American kids, let’s try it with Hispanic kids.” They were all big experiments, five years long. You can’t make progress that way.

Now we’re , which will be announced before the summer. I’m not sure how generalizable this will be, but the prize is based on using digital learning platforms to run experiments. The critical part is that you have to have 100,000 users on your platform to qualify. You run those experiments, you fail fast — that’s an incredibly important principle, fail fast — and the few things that work, you have to do multiple replications. The original plan was: experiment, replication, then another round of replications. At the end of which, the goal is to say, “Here’s an intervention that worked for these students, but not for these students.” Then you take what worked for those students and push it further. [On May 9, of the $1 million Digital Learning Challenge prize.]

It’s a systematic approach to rapid replication. Not everything in education research can be done in short order. Some things take a long time. But there are many, many things that last a semester or a school year, and at the end of that time, we have . This prize approach is just a different process for how we replicate. 

ChatGPT just opened up a whole world of discussion about the use of AI. But what happened with ChatGPT is like what we’re trying to do. The world has been doing AI for literally decades, but the last 10 years have seen increased computing power and more complexity in the models, and the foundational models have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. We built an incredible foundation: machine learning, data science, AI. And all of a sudden, boom! ChatGPT is the first thing that caught the public’s attention, but it was built on this amazing foundation. Nobody knows what the next thing is that will break through, but they’re all being built on decades’ worth of work that established this foundation. It’s the same thing — the COVID vaccine could not have happened without that foundation.

What I’m trying to do is use IES resources to build this kind of foundation, which includes the learning platforms, rapid-cycle experimentation and replication, transformative research money. And the goal, using this foundation, is to look at things that pop out, that would not exist otherwise. That’s the goal: If we can do this with vaccines, if we can use it with chatbots, then what’s our foundation? What I hope is that, when we get NCADE going, we move this activity there and let it consolidate and interact. Then we start doing new, innovative research based on that foundation.

What are the kinds of research projects and outcomes that perhaps seem fantastical now, but could be realized in the way that MRNA vaccines have been?

The telos, the North Star, is individualized education. The first thing that is popping from this work is that IES is launching with the National Science Foundation, and it’s designed for students’ with speech pathologies. There in schools, so the demand for them is really high. We also do something incredibly stupid by burdening them with unbelievable paperwork.

This AI institute is funded by $20 million, split between IES and the NSF, and it has several prongs to it. The first is to develop an AI-assisted universal screener, because it takes time to diagnose exactly what students’ speech pathologies are — whether it has to do with sentence structure, vocabulary, pronunciation. Medicine has been doing this forever, by the way. The second prong is to use an AI toolbox to help design, update, and monitor the treatment plan. In other words, we’ve got a labor shortage, we know we need assessment and a treatment plan, and AI can do this. Or, AI should be able to do this, whether or not we can pull it off with this group. It’s a risk, like everything we do is a risk. But to me, this is a breakthrough.

I’m very optimistic that they’re going to pull it off, in part because of the third prong, which relates to the paperwork. It’s a lot of work, multiple forms, and it’s routine. Well, guess what can now type up routine paragraphs?

It seems like school districts, let alone Congress, could be really hesitant about deploying AI to write up after-incident reports, or what have you. Some regulatory structure is going to have to be created to govern the use of this technology.

I’m sure, like me, you’ve been monitoring the reaction to ChatGPT. There’s an extreme reaction, “Ban it completely.” Another extreme would be, “This is amazing, go for it!” And then there’s the right reaction: This is a tool that’s never going back in the box. So how do we use it appropriately? How do we use it in classrooms, and to free teachers from drudgery?

At least for the foreseeable future, humans will have a role because ChatGPT is often wrong. And the biggest problem is that we sometimes don’t know when it’s wrong. It’ll get better over time, I don’t think there’s a question about that, but it needs human intervention. Humans have to know that it’s not infallible, and they have to have the intelligence to know how to read ChatGPT and say, “That doesn’t work.”

Of course, it writes very boring prose.

But so do students.

And so do reporters.

Touché. You mentioned that you ran NCES over a decade ago. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed a change in Washington’s ambitions around using federal data to spur school improvement, especially now that the peak reform era is long gone.

It’s true that the level of skepticism is much greater. But the technology has also gotten way, way better. We hired the National Academies [of Science, Engineering, and Medicine] to do three reports for us to coincide with our 20th anniversary. was the most interesting one. It talks about new and somewhat less intrusive measures.

NCES is old. There are lots of arguments about when it started, but the modern NCES was actually a reaction to [sociologist and researcher] , who was intimately involved in the early design of longitudinal studies. They’ve gotten more complicated — the original was “” — and they’re all based on survey data, just going out and talking to people. Well, you know the fate of surveys: Response rates are falling and falling, and it’s harder to get people to talk. 

That’s how bad it’s gotten?

We were forced — “forced” makes it sound like it was a bad idea; and it did turn out to be a bad idea — to ask schools that were participating for a lot of information about IEPs [individualized education programs] and students with special needs. This gets back to that cost/benefit calculation because they would not share the classification of students with special needs, and they just refused to participate. So we ended up canceling that data collection. That was a leading indicator of the problem.

Increasingly, the question is what we can do to get the kind of data that these longitudinal studies generated without having to interview 15,000 or 18,000 kids. It requires a modification in the way you think, and it requires an expansive view of where the data lie. How much of the data that we’re asking students and parents and teachers about resides in state longitudinal data systems, for example? Could we drive the need for human interviewing to 5 percent or 10 percent of what we do now? It actually calls for a different thought process than, “Well, we always do ‘High School and Beyond’ this way!” But federal bureaucracies aren’t known for their innovative thinking, quite frankly. 

This adaptation might also mean that some of the unique things we get from surveys are going to have to go because no one will give them to you.

What, if anything, is the effect of changes in government on a massive organization like IES? You were appointed under President Trump, so the Department of Education has already undergone a really significant change, and now Congress has changed hands as well.

We’re not massive. We’re pretty small, actually.

We’re a science agency, and we were created when the Education Sciences Reform Act was authorized in 2002. I think the vision was that IES would grow not to the size of the  National Institutes for Health or the National Science Foundation, but on a trajectory that would put it into that kind of group. If you look at the original legislation, it’s still there. We have a board that is almost populated now, and the ex officio members include the director of the Census, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and somebody from NIH. You don’t create a board with those kinds of people on it unless you expect it to be a big, major player.

It never got there. The budget is up to $808 million, in part because we got a pretty big chunk of money in the omnibus package. But $30 million of that was for DARPA-Ed, which we don’t have yet. Ten million dollars of that is for the . So Congress is interested in modernization, and we have to prove that this investment is worthwhile. 

What about the difference at the top? Are there notably different attitudes between Secretary DeVos and Secretary Cardona with respect to IES’s mission?

I’ve gotten enormous support from the department. We would not have gotten the money for NCADE, we would not have gotten the money for School Pulse without that support. DeVos’s goal was to make the Education Department go away, so this administration is obviously much more expansive. They’ve been careful in their support of things, but again, NCADE wouldn’t have gotten this far without the full-throated backing of the department, and of the Office of Management and Budget and the White House.

I’m reminded of the parties’ divergent positions on the federal government’s role in education, and how close the Department of Education came to never being authorized.

Jimmy Carter is a really good ex-president and a good human being, but was not a very effective president. As you know, the establishment of the department was in response to support that he got from teachers’ unions. So there is a philosophical debate about the role of the federal government in education, and it’s not a slam dunk. There are things that are worth talking about. A huge chunk of the money that the department manages is Title IV, so it operates like a bank, and it’s by far the smallest cabinet department in terms of workforce.

The other thing I’m not sure people fully understand is that the department isn’t just a grant-making operation, it’s also a contract shop. I taught public policy for decades at Stony Brook University, and when I decided that I was never going back, they asked me to give a talk to my former colleagues — almost all of whom I’d hired — and graduate students. My opening remark set everyone back on their heels because I said, “I taught here for 20 years, and every one of my students should sue me for malpractice.” Nothing I taught had anything to do with the way the sausage is really made. 

You hear this all the time, and academics pooh-pooh it. But I’ve been on both sides of it, and it’s really true: Academic research and the sausage factory are the same. In 20 years of teaching public policy, I never once mentioned contractors. And contractors run the whole show. It’s the way we do business, and it’s even more interesting than just: “I run this agency, but here’s what you, the contractor, should do.” All too often, it’s the contractors doing the actual thinking.

There’s been a long argument over the 20 years, on and off, that I’ve been associated with this stuff. We should, and must, contract out the work and the implementation, but we should not be contracting out the thinking. And that’s easy to articulate, but what’s the dividing line? When are we surrendering our intellectual capital — our control of the ship, if you will — to contractors who now design the ship, build the ship and steer the ship? 

Are there concrete examples from education research where you can point to projects that have gone off-course?

NAEP is $185 million per year, and it gets renewed every five years. Do you know how long Educational Testing Services has had the contract? Forty years. There are reasons why they get this contract — they’re good! But this is decades of either minimal or zero competition. And as the test has gotten bigger and more complicated, even putting together a bid to compete costs millions of dollars. People ask, “Why would we spend millions of dollars to compete with ETS when they’ve had the contract for 40 years and we see no indication that it will ever be different?”

To me, this is a serious issue.

Given that NAEP is the foremost product of NCES, there’s probably very little scope for reimagining it beyond, say, changing the testing modality from pen-and-paper to computers.

I agree on that, it’s largely the same technology that ETS invented 40 years ago. But the world has changed. It’s just gotten more and more expensive, but the amount of reimagining NAEP and its structure — whether or not we can do this cheaper and faster — is just lagging. It’s really frustrating. 

Even before COVID, there was a lot of pondering about the future of NAEP and the costs of administering it. The Long-Term Trends test was postponed between 2012 and 2020, right?

Yeah, but that’s an interesting case. The modern version of NAEP — which measures fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math — was authorized in 2002, I believe. It goes back to the ’70s, really, but we’ve been doing this version of it for 20 years. People love the Long-Term Trends test, but do we really need it when we’ve had 20 years of the main NAEP?

You’ve spent a lot of your career studying the value of higher education. Do you think we’re staring at a financial or demographic apocalypse for colleges and universities?

“Apocalypse” is way too strong a word. There are demographic trends such that the pool of students is shrinking, and there’s also incredible regional variation. The New England and mid-Atlantic states are experiencing much sharper declines than the South and the West. And of course, universities are not mobile; if you invest all this infrastructure in frigid Massachusetts or northern New York, and all the students move, you have to ask, “What do I do with all this infrastructure now?”

As to the value of a four-year degree, you and I operate in a sphere where everybody is highly literate. I read all the time, and I’m not talking about technical stuff. I read novels all the time because it’s an opportunity to live in a different world. But what’s the definition of literacy in the world we now live in, and what skills do we truly need? It’s still only a minority of people who go to four-year programs, but do we need to send even that many students to get four-year degrees? Most of them want jobs and family-sustaining wages, and do we need four-year degrees for that? The answer is obviously not, if you look at what’s happening in Maryland and Pennsylvania [where governors have recently removed degree requirements from thousands of state jobs]. 

The fact of the matter is, this is happening. To the extent that it’s happening, which I believe is necessary and important, the incentives for getting a bachelor’s degree start to decline. It becomes more of an individual question: “I’m going to spend five or six years at a four-year institution. It’s pretty much a cookie cutter, stamp-stamp-stamp experience, and I get a bachelor’s degree. Then, at a job interview, they ask what my skills are, and I can’t answer. Well, I can use ChatGPT!”

That’s quite grim. But is there a way to offer prospective students better information about the value they’re actually getting from college?

When I was at the American Institutes for Research, I ran something called , which was the first systematic attempt to crack all the work that had been done at the university level about what happens to students when they graduate. In the end, it’s the variation in programs that really matters — as soon as we started unpacking student outcomes, program by program, the programs that were technical were the winners. And the numbers were amazing. The first results we published came from and , and I swear to God, when I saw the results, I didn’t believe them. I thought we had an error in the data because associate’s degree holders were out-earning bachelor’s degree holders. 

We repeated this over and over and over again, in maybe 10 different states. It was always technical degrees coming out of community colleges that had the best earnings. In the state of Florida, I think the best postsecondary certificate was “Elevator Mechanic/Constructor.” There aren’t a lot of them, but the starting wage was $100,000! Then you start looking at sociology, English, psychology, and [gestures downward with his hand, makes crashing sound].

It turned out to be that these degree programs were increasingly becoming surrogates for skills. The worst outcome for all students was for those who went into liberal arts and general studies at community colleges. They’re doing that because they want to transfer to a four-year school, but only 20 percent of them actually transfer. They come out with a general education and no skills, and the labor market outcomes were a disaster. 

I was working with , which has employment records for millions of people and scrapes job advertisements, to start looking for what skills were in high demand. The beauty of it was that it was such good data, and even better, it was regional. Most people don’t move that often, so if I’m living and going to school in western Tennessee, it doesn’t help me at all to know what somebody’s hiring for in Miami. It basically asked, “How much money is each skill worth?” Things have probably changed since that time, but one of the highest-demand skills in almost every market was [the customer relationship manager software] , which was worth between $10,000 and $20,000. 

The other thing we did, which made me really popular, was look at the same outcomes for master’s programs. Colleges just create these programs, and the money goes to support everything that academics love: travel, course buyouts, graduate students. But the numbers are horrifying for most master’s programs. You create a master’s program, and they tend to be relatively cheap — and you don’t give TAs to master’s students, so it’s all cash. It’s a money machine, and so you create more of them. 

This brings me back to my previous question. If young people start seeing the value proposition of a four-year degree differently, and American fertility rates are producing fewer young people to begin with, it seems like the music eventually has to stop for the higher education sector. And if that happens, employers are going to have to rely on something besides the apparent prestige of a B.A. to distinguish between job candidates, right?

Both my daughters think I’ve become increasingly conservative because of what goes on in post-secondary education. Look at university endowments: All the money is hidden, but the subsidy we give to well-off students is humungous because their endowments are tax-free. Princeton has a huge endowment and a small student population; Harvard has a bigger endowment, but also a larger enrollment. When I was at the American Institutes for Research, we calculated the subsidy at Princeton per undergraduate student, and the subsidy was something in the vicinity of $100,000 per year. All hidden, nobody talks about it. Meanwhile the total subsidy for Montclair State University, which is down the road, was $12,000; the local community college was $3,000. This includes both state and federal money. What kind of system is this?

I testified at the Senate Finance Committee, and we got a small tax on endowments that was only for the very, very richest schools. I think it’s still on the books, but it was nowhere near as aggressive as it should have been. What I wanted was to take the money and set up a competitive grant program for community colleges because what they do is hard work, and they absolutely need the money. But what happened was that we got a much smaller tax that went into the general fund and didn’t go into improving anything. It was a disappointment.

This leads me to wonder what you make of the Biden administration’s student debt relief!

I’m not going to talk anymore. [Laughs] 

The other part of that same campaign was about property taxes. Georgetown and George Washington University, for example, don’t pay property taxes. Some universities acknowledge that they’re getting police services, fire, sewage, and so forth, and they negotiate something called a PILOT, a payment in lieu of taxes. One case was Harvard, which negotiated a PILOT with Boston that was way lower than what they would have otherwise paid, and ! A past college president told me once, “Your campaign to go after the endowments is never going to happen in a serious way. But if you start attacking our property tax exemption, that gets us worried.” 

Back when I thought some of this was actually going to stick, I . Washington, D.C.’s Office of Tax Revenue turns out to be a pretty good agency, and I asked them for a list of all the properties owned by Georgetown and George Washington. I just asked them to calculate the value of those properties, and what should be the payment given the commercial tax rate. It was a lot of money. The average residential property owner in Princeton, New Jersey, pays thousands of dollars more in taxes than they otherwise would because Princeton University doesn’t pay property taxes. 

Criticizing universities in the Washington Post doesn’t sound like a good way to make friends in your current position.

Well, I haven’t done anything like that in years. And of course, I was appointed by the previous administration, when none of this stuff was particularly poisonous.

So why did I survive when almost nobody else did? I don’t think education research is that important. I think I’m good at my job, and the reforms we’re pursuing — whether it’s establishing NCADE or revising the SLDS — are really strongly supported by the current administration, which I really appreciate. But I’m not important enough to be fired.

Isn’t that something of an indictment of federal policymakers, though? They should care more about education research!

Yeah, but then I would have been fired. [Laughs] 

I was affiliated with AEI [the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank], and I still have many friends there. But this NCADE proposal has Democratic backing in Congress. A lot of the work is still nonpartisan, or bipartisan. We work really hard at this, and some of the things we’re pushing are just so fundamentally important that it doesn’t matter which party you’re in.

Does partisanship make it harder to pursue the higher education issues you’re interested in, though?

I’m only the third IES director that’s been confirmed and served any length of time. Russ Whitehurst was totally focused on early childhood literacy, and John Easton cared the most about K–12. So even over these last five years, IES is predominantly still K–12 oriented.

My newest thing in postsecondary research is to collect data on , and I don’t think people understand how big that is in community college. A lot of it is people enrolling to use a swimming pool, or someone who takes three courses in musicology but isn’t interested in credit or a degree. But increasingly, non-credit activity is being used for non-credit certificates that are job- and career-related. Maybe you need three courses to upgrade my skills for auto body repair, or to upgrade your IT skills, but you don’t want a whole degree or to enroll in college. So you can do it on a non-credit basis.

We don’t even know how many non-credit certificates are being granted because we don’t collect any data on it. [the Integrated Postsecondary Data System, the federal government’s primary source of information on colleges and universities] is rooted in Title IV, and it doesn’t collect information about schools that don’t take federal grants or about non-credit activity. But it’s really big, and many people are betting time and energy and money to acquire non-credit certificates. We’re trying to do some work on that, and OMB is very hesitant to mandate any collections of data because of Title IV, but they’ve approved a voluntary data collection. I don’t do research anymore, but I’m trying to broker deals with researchers and states — Virginia has a beautiful data set, for instance — to find out what happens if you get a non-credit certificate. Indiana is another opportunity. 

Launching this stuff is hard because it’s pretty untraditional, and it requires strong state data systems and the willingness of states to work with independent researchers. And of the $808 million we’ve got, none of it is walking-around money; all of it is competitive, everything’s peer-reviewed. Which it should be, but I can’t just say, “Sure, sounds great, I’ll send you $50,000.”

The revelation comes from The Condition of Education 2023, the latest in a series of annual digests from the National Center for Education Statistics surveying the landscape of K–12 schools. Its contents offer a nuanced account of how COVID-19 affected student experiences both inside and outside the classroom.

But the report also represents the fullest record yet of the decade preceding that once-in-a-century jolt to learning, during which K–12 spending climbed, school choice blossomed and the teaching pipeline narrowed. Compiling surveys and other data collections from over a dozen federal and international sources, the report captures how trends dating back to the middle of the Obama administration were either accelerated or untouched by the emergence of COVID.

The number of pupils enrolled in charter schools leapt from 1.8 million in 2012 to 3.7 million in 2021, when they accounted for 7 percent of all public school enrollment. Over the same period, white students shrank from a narrow majority of the total American student body to a smaller plurality. Public school revenues grew by 13 percent — compared with a 3 percent increase in student enrollment — while the dropout rate (measured as the percentage of 16–24-year-olds who haven’t earned a diploma and aren’t attending school) fell from 8.3 percent to 5.2 percent.

“The condition of education, as one might expect, is a complicated picture for the United States,” Peggy Carr, the commissioner of NCES, told reporters. “The impact of COVID on our education system gives us…an opportunity to rethink where we were.”

One bleak and well-known phenomenon that came into focus in the 2010s was the worsening mental health reality for adolescents, many of whom have reported spiraling rates of depression and anxiety. Those problems were clearly aggravated by pandemic-related school closures, which separated tens of millions of children from friends and teachers for months at a time.

In survey findings gathered last spring, leaders at 70 percent of schools said that they were faced with higher proportions of students seeking psychological and behavioral support. But only 56 percent of respondents agreed (and just 12 percent strongly agreed) that their school was able to effectively deliver that support.

Overall, 72 percent of schools said they provided mental health trauma support during the 2021–22 school year, just one of the strategies employed to help children recover from pandemic-related setbacks to learning and social-emotional development. The same percentage said they were offering remedial instruction, while three-quarters said they had implemented summer enrichment programs before the school year started.

But such supplemental services were undoubtedly difficult to roll out during a time of spiking demand for school staff. Across a dozen varied academic disciplines and specialties, more schools said they had difficulty hiring for positions in 2020–21 than in 2011–12. In particular, during the first full pandemic year, substantial portions of public schools looking to hire said they had difficulty filling vacant roles in foreign languages (42 percent), special education (40 percent), physical sciences (37 percent), mathematics (32 percent), and computer science (31 percent).

Chad Aldeman, a school finance and labor market analyst, said in an email that the differences in hiring conditions between the two comparison years made it somewhat predictable that job candidates would be at a premium during the hottest jobs economy in decades.

“We were in a totally different economic environment in 2021–22 than we were a decade prior,” said Aldeman. “The ‘ was very low [during the Great Recession], and the unemployment rate was 8.3 percent in January 2012, compared to 4 percent in January 2022. It would be surprising if schools were bucking these trends and not struggling to hire in this environment.”

At the same time, however, a breakdown in the teacher training pipeline might have contributed to the apparent pandemic-era shortages in teachers and other school staff. Between the 2012–13 and 2019–20 school years, the report showed, the number of candidates enrolled in traditional teacher preparation programs shrank by 30 percent; the number of people completing such programs declined by 28 percent, from 161,000 to 116,100, during that interval.

On the heels of those developments, public school enrollment counts were profoundly changed by the impact of COVID and the switch to online learning. 

Longer-term trends show a steady increase in total students, from 49.5 million to 50.8 million, between fall 2010 and fall 2019; but over the next academic year, the entirety of that decade-long growth — 3 percent of all public school students — vanished as public school enrollment fell back to 49.4 million. (Notably, persistent growth in the charter school sector continued during the early stages of the pandemic, with charter school enrollment swelling by 7 percent between fall 2019 and fall 2020.)

As earlier reporting has indicated, drops in head counts were heavily concentrated among the youngest students. While 54 percent of three- and four-year-olds were enrolled in school in 2019, just 50 percent were in 2021. The percentage of five-year-olds in school also fell, from 91 percent to 86 percent, during those two years. 

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford who has carefully examined state enrollment figures during the pandemic, said the statistics were “a potent reminder” of the educational harms suffered since March 2020.

“The sustained declines in pre-K and kindergarten enrollment are important,” Dee wrote in an email. “Many of our youngest learners are missing important early learning opportunities, and it will be years before most age into conventional testing windows that will provide some indication of what this means for their learning.”

Posted this morning, results from last year’s administration of the nationally representative test — sometimes referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card” — showed history scores dropping by an average of five points on a 500-point scale. Average civics scores fell by two points on a 300-point scale, the first-ever decline in the 25-year history of the test. After modest increases over the last few decades, performance in both subjects has fallen back to levels measured in the 1990s, when the subjects were first tested. 

Taken together, the scores provide only the latest evidence of declining U.S. academic performance across a range of disciplines. Just last fall, the release of math and English scores showed severe damage inflicted during the pandemic, with years’ worth of academic growth similarly erased or massively reduced.

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters that the unprecedented reversal in civics was “alarming,” though not of the same magnitude as last year’s release. More disquieting were the history results, she added, which began their slide nearly a decade ago and are now nine points lower than in the 2014 iteration of NAEP. 

“For U.S. history, I was very, very concerned,” Carr said. “It’s a decline that started in 2014, long before we even thought about COVID. This is a decline that’s been [going] down for a while.”

Beyond the headline figures, the test also measured lower performance across all four of the sub-themes included on the NAEP U.S. history test, including changes in American democracy (minus-five points), interactions of peoples and cultures (minus-five), economic and technological development (minus-five), and America’s evolving role in the world (minus-three).

Equally noteworthy, Carr observed, was a phenomenon that has been consistent across multiple rounds of NAEP stretching back over the better part of a decade: Scores for the most successful test takers (those at 90th percentile in U.S. history and both the 75th and 90th percentile in civics) are statistically unchanged since 2018, while relatively lower-performing students did significantly worse.

Those diverging trends were reflected in the numbers of participants scoring at NAEP’s different achievement thresholds. The percentage of eighth graders scoring below NAEP’s lowest benchmark of “basic” in U.S. history (defined as only partial mastery of the requisite skills and knowledge in a given subject) grew from 29 percent in 2014 to an incredible 40 percent in 2022. In civics, the proportion of students scoring below the basic level rose to 31 percent from 27 percent in 2018.

By contrast, just 13 percent of test takers managed to score at or above NAEP’s “proficient” benchmark in U.S. history (defined as being able to read, interpret, and draw conclusions from primary and secondary sources) — the lowest proportion of eighth-grade students reaching that level out of any subject tested by NAEP. Only about one-fifth of students met or exceeded the proficient level in civics, the second-lowest proportion for any subject. 

Patrick Kelly, a 12th-grade teacher of AP U.S. government in suburban Columbia, South Carolina, said that the results, while disappointing, could hardly be called a surprise. In spite of their importance to the country’s social fabric, he continued, requisite attention and precedence has not been granted to either history or civics.

“When it comes to social studies instruction, we’ve marginalized it for quite a while nationally,” said Kelly, who also serves as a member of the National Assessments Governing Board, which oversees the construction and administration of NAEP. “You get out of something what you put into it, and we haven’t been putting enough in to get anything other than the results we’re seeing.”

A ‘neglected sphere of learning’

The new scores arrive at a period of contention around social studies, when both policymakers and members of the public allege partisan interference in classroom instruction. 

Conservatives, including a swell of newly emergent parent groups, have spent much of the past few years complaining that teachers and school district leaders are indoctrinating children through ideological instruction on topics like race, gender and sexuality. Progressives counter that Republican-led moves to narrow topics of classroom discussion and remove controversial books from school libraries constitute a more pernicious form of political meddling.

In a statement, Secretary Cardona echoed some of the latter claims, arguing that the lower NAEP scores reflect the disruptive effects of COVID-19. Restricting the autonomy of teachers “does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction,” he said.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Cardona wrote, adding that it is “not the time…to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes.”

But whatever the impact of recent disputes over lengthy school closures or district-led equity initiatives, the drop in history knowledge can be traced back to 2014. It was around that time that a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, replaced No Child Left Behind — a development that would reduce classroom focus on the core subjects of math and English and make more room in the school day for instruction in science, social studies, and the arts.

If that shift occurred, it can’t be detected in the latest NAEP results. , a renowned historian who serves as both a humanities professor and president emeritus of the University of Richmond, said that history education still languishes as “a neglected, de-emphasized sphere of learning” within the K–12 world.

The downward-trending performance “reflects 30 years of disinvestment in the teaching of social studies,” reflected Ayers, who recently launched to provide free learning resources to K–12 teachers. “It reflects the diminished amount of testing devoted to those subjects. We have emphasized STEM and reading and sacrificed this kind of learning in schools across the country.”

Recent findings from nationally prominent research and advocacy groups have sounded a similar note. A of the elementary social studies landscape was conducted by the RAND Corporation, warning of a “missing infrastructure” for the teaching of civics and history in elementary schools. Few states require regular assessment of social studies knowledge, the study found, and many rely on low-quality standards. While 98 percent of elementary principals reported evaluating their teachers on math and reading instruction, just 67 percent said the same of social studies. A of teachers said that the task of selecting curricular materials for social studies lessons fell to them, and just 16 percent said they worked from a textbook.

Survey responses from eighth graders who took the exam dovetailed somewhat with those findings. Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of students who said they were enrolled in a dedicated U.S. history course declined from 72 percent to 68 percent. Just 55 percent said they had a teacher whose “primary responsibility” was teaching U.S. history, compared with 62 percent four years prior.

Ayers said that the “diminished” focus on history endangered the development of civic skills and inclinations. Only a renewed push for more and better instruction in social studies could reverse that, he said.

“I care about people living in public, living with one another. And there’s nothing like getting outside of yourself — that’s kind of what the humanities do generally. To step outside your own perspective and imagine another time, another place, another gender, another skin, is the best way to foster a sense of common purpose.”

The law, passed by bipartisan majorities and in the closing days of 2022, includes a $70 million boost to the Institute for Education Sciences, the Department of Education’s arm for statistics, research, and evaluation. Within that 9.6 percent bump — which brings IES’s overall budget to $808 million — $40 million are allocated for research, development, and dissemination, including an unspecified amount intended to foster “quick-turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to improve education outcomes for all students.”

That initiative will be housed within the National Center for Education Research, one of , with the hope that it will eventually be spun off into a fifth such center. In an interview with ����Ӱ��, IES Director Mark Schneider described the infusion of money as a down payment toward “something the department’s been talking about for 20 years.”

“I will be pushing for a separate center,” Schneider said, adding that he and his colleagues were “ecstatic” with what Congress provided. “There’s no question about it, this is a major accomplishment. The department, IES, and many people outside have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get this established.”

The bill’s passage comes after what some in the academic community have called a decade of disinvestment in federal education research. In the wake of in the Obama administration, the Institute’s National Center for Education Statistics had to for administering the federal K–12 assessment known as “the Nation’s Report Card,” one of the U.S. Department of Education’s best-known products. 

More recently, the Institute announced that it would not be offering competitive grant programs in research methodology or systemic replication in education research in Fiscal Year 2023. Those technical-sounding competitions make up much of the federal government’s R&D infrastructure for K–12, contributing to the emergence of ideas and products that improve student learning.

In the hopes of reversing those developments — and spurring a nationwide recovery from COVID-related disruptions to school — Congressional Democrats and Republicans that would have created a “National Center for Advanced Development in Education.” That proposal would have authorized an organization with the specific intention of advancing scalable advances in teaching methods and technology, such as voice recognition software to assess dyslexia. While language authorizing the so-called “NCADE” was included in the House’s FY 2023 budget proposal, it didn’t make it into the bill that ultimately passed Congress. 

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat who co-sponsored the NCADE legislation last year, said in a statement that she would continue working to create a new center within IES in 2023. 

“The [IES] funding increase and language included in the omnibus is a win for innovation in education research,” Bonamici said. “This is an exciting opportunity to expedite the development and adoption of emerging technologies, helping more students and quickly closing learning gaps.”

The idea for a national K–12 center focused on research and development predates both the pandemic and the last few presidential administrations. President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal of such a body, invoking the example of DARPA, the advanced defense research agency that is credited with bringing about such technological innovations as weather satellites, GPS, and the internet. 

The comparative latitude granted to DARPA, which can contract with research partners across multiple sectors and maintains significant flexibility over project deadlines, differs somewhat from Washington’s existing K–12 research institutions. Felice Levine, executive director of the American Education Research Association, said in a statement that the funding offered in the omnibus bill would prove valuable to researchers, policymakers and professional educators at a time when millions of students have experienced setbacks to learning and social-emotional development.

The federal investment represents “a vote of confidence in the role high-quality education research needs to play in identifying and countering the devastating impacts of the pandemic on the nation’s students,” Levine said. 

Schneider added that he hopes to spend much of 2023 reorganizing the Institute — possibly by moving its work on prize competitions and transformative research, as well as the program into the newly established unit — before pushing Congress again to consider a new “NCADE” center.

“We’ve been pushing on this, we’ve been trying to increase the rapidity of our experiments, we’ve tried to make sure there’s replication, we’ve increased our demands for dissemination and scaling up,” Schneider said. “We have a really developed model of what a modern education R&D infrastructure looks like, and…I’m hoping this new unit will be a catalyst to continue to push that change, and ultimately the foundation for NCADE.”

Eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” fell by a jarring eight points since the test was last administered in 2019, while fourth-grade scores dropped by five points; both are the largest math declines ever recorded on the test. In reading, both fourth- and eighth-grade scores fell by three points, leaving them statistically unchanged since 1992, when NAEP was first rolled out. 

The findings comport with those of previous assessments of students’ COVID-era achievement, whether conducted by academic researchers or state and district authorities, which have shown undeniable evidence of diminished performance in English and especially math. Just a few months ago, the release of scores for 9-year-olds on NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” assessment — a different exam measuring today’s students against a baseline set in the early 1970s — offered similarly ominous results.

Even still, the education world has waited nervously for the unveiling of today’s data, perhaps the most important federal scores to appear since the pandemic began. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that while relative stability in reading scores across some of the nation’s largest districts offered a few “bright spots … amidst all the chaos of the pandemic,” the unprecedented reversals in math should spark serious concern.

“Normally for a NAEP assessment … we’re talking about significant differences of two or three points,” Carr said on a Friday call with reporters. “So an eight-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.”

A look at the results in their entirety show just how significant. There were no statistically significant gains in math, for either fourth or eighth graders, in any state in 2022. Instead, fourth-grade scores dropped significantly in 43 jurisdictions (either the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity) while remaining statistically unchanged in 10. Eighth-grade math fell in 51 jurisdictions while holding steady in just two, Utah and the DoDEA schools. The average eighth-grade score has not only fallen since 2019 — it is significantly lower than when the test was administered in 2003.

Translated into the exam’s performance levels, a massive downward shift can be seen. In 2019, 34% of fourth graders and 27% of eighth graders scored below the “NAEP Basic” level in reading — the most rudimentary threshold of English mastery classified by the test. In 2022, those groups had grown to 37% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders, respectively. The below-basic classification also swelled in math, from 19% of fourth graders and 31% of eighth graders in 2019 to 25% of fourth graders and 38% of eighth graders in 2022.

Beneath the headline numbers, differing effects among student groups also made an impact on longstanding achievement gaps. For example, gaps expanded in fourth-grade math performance between white and African-American students, white and Hispanic students, male and female students, and students with and without disabilities. Conversely, gaps actually closed between many of the same groups in eighth-grade reading — including by a surprising seven points between English learners and native English speakers. 

Brown University economist Emily Oster, who has studied the effects of COVID and remote learning on student achievement, said that trends in NAEP scores were dynamic and varied, making them difficult to distill. Big-picture phenomena, however, broadly lined up with the existing evidence, she argued.

“Every state has four numbers, so one can construct quite a lot of different narratives around that. But the general patterns are that the losses are big, they’re much bigger in math than in reading, and they’re much bigger in more vulnerable kids. Those seem like things that are very consistent with every other piece of information that we’ve seen in post-pandemic testing.”

Julia Rafal-Baer is a K-12 education expert who serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, a nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP. In a statement, she said the results demonstrated the existence of “an education crisis” that demanded new solutions.

“The latest data isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know,” Rafal-Baer wrote in an email. “COVID was exceptionally disruptive, and we’re running out of time to ensure that kids can indeed recover from this level of unfinished learning.”

State-by-state comparisons difficult

No state could be said to have defied the downward pressure exerted by the pandemic and its countless challenges to learning. But the national averages do conceal substantial variation across different areas of the country. 

Some of the states where scores dropped the furthest, for example, were clustered in the mid-Atlantic region. Delaware’s fourth-grade math scores dropped an astonishing 14 points — nearly three times the national average — while its losses in fourth-grade reading (-9), eighth-grade math (-12), and eighth-grade reading (-7) were also significant. Virginia (-11 points in fourth-grade math), Maryland (-11 in eighth-grade math), and the District of Columbia (-8 in fourth-grade reading) also saw some of the worst declines across various grade/subject combinations.

By contrast, a small group of states seemed to weather COVID reasonably well, experiencing less severe declines than most. Overall, while performance in eighth-grade math was weakened virtually everywhere, 10 jurisdictions, including Georgia and Wisconsin, saw no statistically significant decline in fourth-grade math. Another 22 were able to stave off declines in fourth-grade reading, while 18 did so in eighth-grade reading. 

A small number of states — Alabama, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa and Louisiana — kept scores from significantly falling in three out of four grade/subject combinations. Most impressive of all, Department of Defense Education Activity schools — 160 across 11 foreign countries, seven states, and two territories, each serving military families — saw no statistically significant drops in any subject or age group. Eighth graders in DoDEA schools, in fact, made the only statistically significant growth of any student group in this round of NAEP, improving in reading by two points since 2019. 

The differences between states will naturally raise questions about the procedures they followed to offer schooling during the pandemic. Among the states that saw the largest score declines, many stuck with remote learning far into the 2020-21 school year as a precaution against COVID spread. 

Oster, whose previous research has found that longer periods of remote instruction were linked with more severe learning loss, called the results “very consistent with what we’ve seen in state-level data, which suggests that places that had the most in-person learning lost less than the places that had more virtual learning.” Even so, she added, a state like California — where she would have expected student scores to fall especially dramatically based on that correlation — instead saw more modest declines.

NCES’s Carr argued that the release provided little scope for comparisons between states, since so many jurisdictions experienced “massive, comprehensive declines.”

“There’s nothing in this data that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and student achievement,” she said. “Let’s not forget that remote learning looked very different across the United States — the quality, all the factors that were associated with implementing remote learning. It is extremely complex.”&�Բ�����;

Megan Kuhfeld, a researcher at the nonprofit testing organization NWEA, said that the average NAEP effects dovetailed with her own expectations based on of post-pandemic learning loss. That said, she agreed with Carr that the huge diversity of COVID learning policies — where neighboring school districts sometimes took radically different approaches — made direct comparisons difficult.

“ has supported the idea that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps, but I think it is harder to make that sort of inference at the state level because district reopening policies often varied widely within states,” Kuhfeld wrote in an email.

Urban districts fared better in reading 

If a silver lining exists within the release, it comes from some of America’s biggest cities.

In addition to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., 26 urban school districts around the country participate in NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment program. The measure offers a unique look inside districts that collectively enroll millions of students and were subject to substantially different state-level public health policies.

Disappointingly, math results in these districts were no better than elsewhere: Fourth-grade and eighth-grade scores alike sank by eight points on average, matching or surpassing the declines for the nation as a whole. 

Performance in English, however, offered somewhat sunnier news: Average scores in reading held up in 17 cities, falling in just nine. Fully 21 of the 26 urban districts managed the same in eighth-grade reading, with only Shelby County, Tennessee; Jefferson County, Kentucky; Guilford County, North Carolina; and Cleveland, Ohio, experiencing statistically significant drops. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, eighth-grade reading performance even improved. 

Michael Petrilli, who leads reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, nevertheless took a dark view of the overall NAEP outcomes. 

“There’s no sugar coating these awful results,” Petrilli said. “Save for Los Angeles (which I honestly cannot explain), the only question is whether states and localities did bad or worse. These data tell us how big a hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Now it’s up to all of us to dig ourselves — and our students — out.” 

Others took a somewhat more hopeful outlook. Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said the urban districts’ results provided “a glimmer of hope in these otherwise dismal data.” Moreover, he added, both the NAEP data and state standardized test scores have already shown evidence that student achievement is bouncing back from its pandemic nadir.

Going forward, Loveless observed, state and school district leaders will likely view this round of scores as a kind of new student performance baseline. That could provide an accountability mechanism if things don’t improve.

“I think 2021 was probably the bottom, and we’re getting little shards of progress in these NAEP data,” he said. “But I’m expecting [the 2024 NAEP results] to look quite a bit better, and the state tests, too. If they don’t, I think people will start raising harsh questions.”

Dismal releases from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — often referred to as the “nation’s report card” — have become a biannual tradition in recent years as academic progress first stalled, then eroded for both fourth and eighth graders. But today’s publication, tracking long-term academic trends for 9-year-olds from the 1970s to the present, includes the first federal assessment of how learning was affected by COVID-19.

The picture it offers is bleak. In a special data collection combining scores from early 2020, just before schools began to close, with additional results from the winter of 2022, the report shows average long-term math performance falling for the first time ever; in reading, scores saw the biggest drop in 30 years. And in another familiar development, the declines were much larger for students at lower performance levels, widening already-huge learning disparities between the country’s high- and low-achievers. 

The results somewhat mirror last fall’s release of scores for 13-year-olds, which also revealed unprecedented learning reversals on the long-term exam. But that data was only collected through the fall of 2019; the latest evidence shows further harm sustained by younger students in the following years. 

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a call with reporters that the “sobering” findings illustrated the learning losses inflicted by prolonged school closures and student dislocation. 

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group of students,” Carr said. “We don’t make this statement lightly.”

Average math scores for 9-year-olds sank by a staggering seven points between 2020 and 2022, the only such decline since the long-term test was first administered in 1973. Average reading performance — generally by schooling than math, and therefore theoretically shielded from pandemic shock — fell by five points. 

Inevitably, that means that fewer students hit the test’s benchmark performance levels than two years ago. For math, the percentage of 9-year-olds scoring at 250 or above (defined as “numerical operations and basic problem solving”) fell from 44 percent of test takers to 37 percent this year; those scoring 200 or higher (“beginning skills and understanding”) fell from 86 percent to 80 percent; even the vast majority scoring at the most basic threshold of 150 (“simple arithmetic facts”) shrank slightly, from 98 percent to 97 percent, across the two testing periods.

No demographic subgroup saw gains on the test, but disparities existed in the rates of decline. For instance, math achievement for white 9-year-olds dropped by five points, but for their Hispanic and African American counterparts, the damage was even greater (eight points and 13 points, respectively). As a result, the math achievement gap between whites and African Americans increased by a statistically significant amount. 

In reading, scores for African Americans, Hispanics, and whites were all six points lower, leaving relative gaps unchanged. Scores for Asian students only fell by one point. 

Notably, the long-term trend assessment differs somewhat from the main NAEP test administered every two years. It follows student performance going back a half-century, and it is taken with a paper and pencil instead of digitally. For the most part, testing items are unchanged from the early 1970s, assessing more basic skills of literacy and computation than are generally seen on the main NAEP.

The broad trend-line has been positive over the life of the exam, and even in the most recent release, student scores on both subjects are far higher than when they were first measured. But Dan Goldhaber, a researcher and longtime observer of student performance, said it was striking to see that upward momentum evaporate so quickly.

“A bit of a hidden story in education, when you look at a swath of 40 or 50 years, is the progress that students have made — and the disproportionate progress that historically marginalized students have made,” said Goldhaber, the of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes. “We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years.”

‘Particularly bad’

One of the most consistent, and consistently worrying, findings of previous NAEP rounds has been the sharp disjunction of students at either end of the performance scale. For over a half-decade, high-scoring students have generally performed a point or two better with each iteration of the test — or at least stayed at the same level — while low-scoring students have seen their scores fall.

The phenomenon of growing outcome gaps is again apparent in the post-COVID results, though it takes a slightly different form. At all performance levels across both subjects, 9-year-olds experienced statistically significant declines in their scores; but even with the identical downward trajectory, struggling students lost so much ground that disparities still expanded.

In reading, 9-year-olds scoring at the 90th percentile of all test takers in 2022 lost two points compared with their predecessors in 2020. But students scoring far below the mean, 10th percentile fell by 10 points.

Consequently, the average reading gap between kids at the 90th versus the 10th percentile grew from 103 points to 110 points in just two years. In math,the divergence grew from 95 points to 105 points over the same period.

Goldhaber said that the trends visible in NAEP performance largely dovetailed with those using test scores from the MAP test, administered by the assessment group NWEA. In multiple data sources, he argued, it has become clear that the pandemic’s effects have been disproportionately negative for already struggling and disadvantaged children.

“It’s not just the drops, it’s where we’re seeing the drops in math and reading tests, and they’re disproportionately at the bottom of the test distribution,” he said. “So the pandemic is reversing a long-term trend of narrowing achievement gaps. That’s particularly bad, to my mind.”

The fact that losses are so heavily concentrated among the lowest-scoring segment of students may help explain what Goldhaber termed an “urgency gap”; neither states, school districts, or even families seemed driven to embrace the generational learning interventions — from dramatically lengthening the school year to implementing widespread one-to-one tutoring — that the scale of learning loss demands. As just one indicator, billions of dollars of federal COVID aid to schools remains unspent more than a year after it was first allocated.

That may change in the wake of the NAEP release. While previous studies have pointed to similar, and similarly inequitable, learning loss over the last few years by using data from the MAP and state standardized tests, the Nation’s Report Card is seen as the authoritative performance metric for American K-12 schools. As NCES Commissioner Carr noted, today’s release provides the first nationally representative results measuring achievement before and after the pandemic. Ninety-two percent of schools where the test was administered in 2020 were re-assessed earlier this year.

Tom Kane, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agreed that NAEP scores definitively affirmed what prior studies have already demonstrated. More observers needed to study the magnitude of the loss, he added, because the proposed academic remedies in most of the country are “nowhere near enough” to combat it.

Kane analogized classroom learning to an industrial process — the conveyor belt slowed in 2020 and 2021, but has resumed functioning since at roughly the same rate as before the pandemic. But to make up for lost time, he argued, it would need to be sped even further.

“What we learned…is that the conveyor belt is back on, but at about the same old speed,” Kane said. “Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to help students learn even more per year in the next few years, or these losses will become permanent. And that will be a tragedy.”

The report, released today by the National Center for Education Statistics, compiles data collected from the 2020-21 National Teacher and Principal Survey. Conducted annually as a series of questionnaires, the survey offers a comprehensive review of schooling in America. Some 76,000 teachers and nearly 13,000 principals were included in the sample for the “first-look” study on teaching and learning conditions during the tumultuous spring of 2020. 

The report’s most striking findings highlight the gap in home internet connectivity between students enrolled in different kinds of schools. While 58 percent of private school principals reported that all of their students had access to the internet at home during this period, only 4 percent of public school principals could say the same.

The flipside of that disparity was no less stark: At the same moment that schools were closing and classes migrating to Zoom and other online platforms, 61 percent of public school principals said they’d sent wireless hotspots home with students, compared with just 9 percent of private school principals. 

In a statement accompanying the release, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr commended the “extraordinary efforts” of school leaders to bring virtual learning opportunities to their students.

“Many principals sent hotspots and other devices to students’ homes, worked directly with internet providers, or offered spaces where students could safely access free Wi-Fi so that students had the opportunity to learn in this unprecedented time,” Carr said.

But in spite of the massive effort expended to ease the switch to online learning, the technological divide seems to have been reflected in the early weeks of COVID-era instruction. Although a slightly larger percentage of public school faculty told pollsters that their schools had transitioned to distance-learning formats (77 percent, vs. 73 percent of private school teachers), they were only about half as likely — 32 percent vs. 61 percent — to report having real-time interactions with over three-quarters of their students in the spring of 2020. 

While 9 percent of private school teachers said they had no such interactions during that time, 13 percent of public school teachers did.

Geographic distinctions were also clear in the data. Among public school teachers, those employed in urban and suburban areas were comparatively more likely (86 percent and 87 percent, respectively) to say that all or some of their classes had moved online that spring than those teaching in towns or rural areas (75 percent and 77 percent, respectively).

While about half of city and suburban principals said they’d worked with internet providers to offer more home internet access to families, just 42 percent of principals in towns and 36 percent of those in rural areas agreed.

Other key takeaways from the report:

• Private school teachers were also significantly more likely to agree, either “slightly” or “strongly,” that they had access to the resources necessary to be effective in their teaching (76 percent, vs. only 61 percent of public school teachers). 
• More than twice as many private school teachers “strongly” agreed with that claim than public school teachers (37 percent vs. 17 percent).
• Interaction gaps were also apparent between teachers at charter schools vs. those at traditional public schools. In the first few months of the pandemic, 55 percent of charter school teachers said they taught real-time lessons to students who could participate through video or audio interaction; only 46 percent of district teachers said the same. 
• Charter school teachers were also somewhat more likely to report holding scheduled sessions with groups of students, offering one-on-one sessions, and convening office hours than were district school faculty.

The scores offer more discouraging evidence from NAEP, often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card.” Various iterations of the exam, each tracking different subjects and age groups over several years, have now shown flat or falling numbers. 

The latest release comes from NAEP’s 2020 assessment of long-term trends, which was administered by the National Center for Education Statistics to nine- and 13-year-olds before COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring. In a Wednesday media call, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr told reporters that 13-year-olds had never before seen declines on the assessment, and the results were so startling that she had her staff double-check the results.

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“I asked them to go back and check because I wanted to be sure,” Carr recalled. “I’ve been reporting these results for…decades, and I’ve never reported a decline like this.”

The eight-year gap between 2020’s exam and its predecessor, in 2012, is the longest interval that has ever passed between successive rounds of the long-term trend assessment; a round that was originally scheduled for 2016 was for budgetary reasons. Given the length of time between exams and the general trend of increasing scores over multiple decades, observers could have expected to see at least some upward movement.

Instead, both reading and math results for nine-year-olds have made no headway; scores were flat for every ethnic and gender subgroup of younger children — with the exception of nine-year-old girls, who scored five points worse on math than they had in 2012. Their dip in performance produced a gender gap for the age group that did not exist on the test’s last iteration.

More ominous were the results for 13-year-olds, who experienced statistically significant drops of three and five points in reading and math, respectively. Compared with math performance in 2012, boys overall lost five points, and girls overall lost six points. Black students dropped eight points and Hispanic students four points; both decreases widened their score gap with white students, whose scores were statistically unchanged from 2012.

In keeping with previous NAEP releases, the scores also showed significant drops in performance among low-performing test-takers. Most disturbing: Declines among 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile of reading mean that the group’s literacy performance is not significantly improved compared with 1971, when the test was first administered. In all other age/subject configurations, students placing at all levels of the achievement spectrum have gained ground over the last half-century.

“It’s really a matter for national concern, this high percentage of students who are not reaching even what I think we’d consider the lowest levels of proficiency,” said George Bohrnstedt, a senior vice president and institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research.  

Tom Loveless, an education researcher and former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that the reversals in math performance were particularly disappointing because they defied NAEP’s recent trends. For roughly the last three decades, even as politicians and education policy mavens have emphasized literacy instruction, comparatively rapid growth in math scores have made that subject “the star of the show,” Loveless said. 

“Now it almost appears as if those gains are now unwinding, they’re going away. And I don’t think anyone has been able to identify why that’s happening.” 

Bohrnstedt who has followed NAEP for much of his career, said the declines in 13-year-old math performance was notable for another reason: The long-term trends assessment, which been administered by NCES for a half-century, differs substantively from from the content found on other versions of the test. Reflecting the way math was taught in the 1970s, the assessment features more naked math problems and less complex problem-solving than the so-called “main NAEP,” which is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years.

“For the most part, it’s a more basic kind of math than is being taught today, so it’s disappointing to see that we’re still seeing this poor performance by large percentages of our children,” Bohrnstedt said.

Overall, Loveless said, the combination of flat scores on the biennial “main NAEP” and significant declines on this version of the test indicates that American math instruction changed direction over the last decade in a way that may have stymied learning. While hesitating to blame the Common Core curricular reforms that spread during the Obama administration — he recently wrote on the oft-maligned learning standards — Loveless called for further research to investigate possible causes.

“To me, it suggests that beginning a decade or so ago, something went wrong with how we teach math to younger students,” he said. “My own hypothesis is that an emphasis on conceptual understanding has gone too far, that without computational skills to anchor math concepts, students get lost.”

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a defender of the Common Core standards, said that the results could reflect an alternative theory: That the social and financial overhang of the Great Recession profoundly disrupted skills formation for children who are now reaching their teen years. 

“Assuming that Common Core wasn’t implemented until about 2013, the 13-year-olds wouldn’t have been exposed to it until about second grade,” Petrilli wrote in an email. “The nine-year-olds, on the other hand, got it from kindergarten. So why are the 9 year olds holding steady?”

‘Very Discouraging’

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the release is the continued divergence in scores between students at the top and bottom of the performance distribution — a phenomenon that Commissioner Carr called “well-established” during Wednesday’s media session. 

Throughout all four age and subject configurations, when average scores for most students were stagnant, scores for the lowest-performing students were down; when scores for most students were down, scores for the lowest-performing plummeted.

In nine-year-old reading, where average scores remained unchanged from 2012 — and scores for the top-performing students ticked up a point — those for students scoring at the 10th percentile fell seven points. The same students lost six points in math, while 13-year-olds scoring at the 10th percentile dropped five points in reading and an astonishing 12 points in math.

Even comparatively low-performers at higher levels lost ground in some respects. Nine-year-olds marked at the 25th percentile dropped four points in math, while 13-year-olds at the 25th and 50th percentiles lost eight and five points, respectively, in the subject. 

“It’s very discouraging to see this steep drop at the 10th percentile in both reading and mathematics, but especially in mathematics,” Bohrnstedt concluded. “It also confirms what we’ve seen with respect to the high percentage of kids performing at the ‘below basic’ level in the main NAEP.”&�Բ�����;

The long-term assessment is a crucial piece of data for another reason: It was administered to students between October 2019 and March 2020, making it a final snapshot of academic trends before the emergence of COVID-19. Loveless said he hoped future analyses of how kids learned during and after the greatest disaster in K-12 history wouldn’t overlook the “deeper,” persistent stagnation that preceded it.

“These scores represent the last valid, national assessment of student achievement pre-pandemic. For that reason, they will take on historical significance as a baseline measure when future analysts attempt to gauge the impact of the pandemic on student learning.”

Today’s announcement of science scores from the 2019 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides more evidence for two ugly trends in the test often referred to as the nation’s report card.

As with other results from the past few years — including assessments in social studies last year and the core subjects of math and English in 2019 — scores for all age groups are either flat or down from 2015, the last time the test was given. And declines in performance are largely driven by students achieving at the lowest levels.

On the 2015 exam, younger students posted in physical sciences, life sciences, and earth and space sciences. Erika Shugart, executive director of the National Science Teaching Association, told ����Ӱ�� in an interview that “things looked like they were headed in a positive direction” at that time.

“What we see now is either a leveling off or a decline,” Shugart added. “I can’t speak to what’s going on there, other than it’s not in a good place.”

All told, eighth- and 12th-graders both achieved the same average scores as similarly aged students did in 2015. Fourth-graders saw a three-point drop in average scores, from 154 in 2015 to 151 in 2019. The performance of both fourth- and eighth-graders this year was slightly higher than that of the same age groups in 2009, but high school seniors’ scores stayed the same.

But those averages conceal much wider ranges of variation. In virtually every combination of the three age groups and three science domains, students at the lowest performance levels (i.e., those scoring at the 10th and 25th percentiles) experienced more pronounced downturns. This was particularly true for test takers in the fourth grade: While those scoring in the 50th percentile or above generally held their ground compared with fourth-graders in 2015 — and often performed significantly better than fourth-graders in 2009 — those falling below that benchmark saw decreases of as much as six and eight points compared with 2015.

Officials from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency charged with administering NAEP, said on a call Monday with reporters that the diverging results among children at different performance levels mirrored trends seen both on recent NAEP releases and other assessments, such as the international PISA exam.

While cautioning that the phenomenon was under ongoing study, and offering no empirical argument, NCES Commissioner James Woodworth remarked that success on such tests generally hinges on reading comprehension, and that pervasive literacy struggles among lower-performing students could lie at the root of the stagnant scores.

“Reading is a critical skill that’s needed to improve on all subjects across the board,” Woodworth said. “That is a critical part of this that could be — we’re working on ideas here, but could be — part of the cause of this split we’re seeing across all these subjects and all these different assessments.”

Data gleaned from survey responses provided more fodder for inquiry, as students and teachers gave relatively detailed descriptions of how much class time was devoted to science. In particular, nearly 80 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported that they spent four hours or less on science instruction per week. Thirty-nine percent of eighth-grade teachers said they spent “no time” or “very little time” on life science, while 30 percent said the same for earth and space sciences. Among 12th-graders, 43 percent said they were not presently enrolled in a science course (the same percentage as in 2015, and less than the 47 percent who said the same in 2009).

Recent research has shown that the amount of class time devoted to instruction may play a significant role in how science is taught. A by University of Vermont professor Tammy Kolbe found that teachers who spent five hours or more each week on science were dramatically more likely to incorporate forms of inquiry-based learning, a pedagogical method that encourages hands-on and collaborative approaches like group activities and discussions of engineering problems. Inquiry-based learning is recommended as a best practice by the Next Generation Science Standards, which were conceived and adopted by dozens of states over the last decade as a way of improving K-12 instruction.

Shugart said her organization advises districts to teach at least five hours of science each week, and that they use approaches like inquiry-based learning. Such practices are necessary to provide “a firm grounding” for students in the elementary grades, she argued.

“A lot of students are not being taught science in that manner. If we aren’t teaching students [for] enough time, and we’re not teaching students in the ways that we know are the best ways for them to learn science, how do we expect these scores to change?” she asked.