US math and reading test scores have fallen to their lowest point in 25 years, but the federal agency responsible for tracking and reporting on student achievement has been drastically cut, leaving the country with fewer tools to understand the decline.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a federal statistical agency that has for decades collected critical data on American education—including The Nation’s Report Card, which assesses student knowledge in math, reading, writing, science, and history—was among the hardest hit when the Trump administration reduced the Department of Education's workforce by nearly half and allowed the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to cancel nearly $900 million in contracts.
NCES data has historically helped shape US education policy and allocate funding for school districts. But nearly all of the agency's work was abruptly terminated, and its headcount dropped from about 100 to four. Some staffers were rehired, and the agency now has 12 employees, according to its website.
Cuts hamstring data collection
The cuts have hampered the agency's ability to collect and report on a range of data on K-12 and college students, including surveys on guns and violence in schools and studies on how students pay for college, according to former NCES employees. Most of the agency's ongoing data collections and reports now appear to be inactive or reduced in scope, according to a tracker published by the American Statistical Association.
Savannah Newhouse, an education department spokesperson, said in a statement that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research and statistics arm of the department that includes NCES, is still collecting some data, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress. “The Trump administration is committed to ensuring that IES delivers usable, high-quality statistics, data and resources for educators, researchers and other stakeholders,” she wrote. “NCES and IES were in need of reform – and that work is well underway.”
Researchers and advocates argue the cuts come at a critical time, given the decline in math and literacy scores. “Dismantling a statistical agency is just shooting the messenger,” said Carolyn Grim, who spent 15 years at NCES as an education statistician before retiring early in 2025. She is now founder and executive director of the non-profit Agora Education Research. “It makes no more sense than saying: ‘I’m going to just fire my accountant because I can’t control my spending.’”
Longitudinal studies terminated
Much of the data terminated by Doge were longitudinal studies that follow individual students over time, allowing researchers to see the effects of specific policies and understand trends such as declining reading scores. Peggy Carr, the former NCES commissioner who was fired last spring after nearly four decades at the agency, called the termination of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) “probably the most painful example.”
The ECLS followed thousands of students from kindergarten through fifth grade, evaluating their academic achievement and surveying parents, teachers, and administrators. Last winter, Doge canceled the $47 million contract in the middle of the third iteration of the survey. The contractor, Westat, was preparing to follow up with 15,000 first graders surveyed in fall 2023 when funding was cut.
This would have been the first survey of children born after Covid, including new questions on childcare arrangements and hybrid instruction. “We were going to study them into their first and third grade years to see how the pandemic influenced their development and their learning, but now we’ll never know because we’re not able to follow these children into the future,” Carr said.
Since 1998, the ECLS has been cited in nearly 3,000 academic papers, including research on early reading as a predictor of later skill, the importance of executive function, and the effects of full-day versus half-day kindergarten. “We as a country made huge investments in early childhood and we have all sorts of policies that get rolled out around introducing preschool, or Head Start, or different early interventions, and we basically don’t have a tool with which to say, OK, and to what extent did that work?” said Daphna Bassok, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies early childhood education policy outcomes.
Waste and legal challenges
Advocates say the cuts also wasted years of work and millions of dollars. Some longitudinal studies were canceled in their final years, such as the Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) study, which tracked over 30,000 students who started college in fall 2019 through 2025, and the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, which followed 23,000 ninth graders into their early 30s.
“These cuts were wasteful and didn’t really save taxpayer money because most of that work had already been done,” said Diane Cheng, vice-president for policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. The education department also had to pay several million-dollar termination fees to contractors, and a large portion of funding was spent upfront even for studies that had just begun.
“There’s a huge amount spent on development, like just setting up the sample, reaching out to the schools, reaching out to the families, the states, getting participation, setting up the questionnaires,” said one person familiar with the process. “All of that had to be done before any data was collected.”
Multiple groups, including Cheng’s, have filed lawsuits challenging the cuts to education data and research, part of broader opposition to the administration's goal to eliminate the Department of Education. Since then, several NCES data collections have been reinstated, including the national postsecondary student aid survey and the baccalaureate and beyond longitudinal study.
“We know that advocacy and litigation create important public pressure for the department to rethink its decisions and move forward with data collections that it canceled,” Cheng said.
