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The fallout from last week’s purge at the U.S. Department of Education has left a cloud of uncertainty surrounding what is perhaps its most basic job: measuring how much students know.

Among the hardest-hit offices in Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s elimination of more than 1,300 employees: the National Center for Education Statistics and the Institute for Education Sciences. 

IES now employs fewer than 20 people, down from 175 at the beginning of the second Trump administration, according to several sources familiar with the layoffs. And NCES, which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as The Nation’s Report Card, went from about 100 employees to just three. None of the three works directly with NAEP.

Mark Schneider, who served as IES director under both presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden — and as NCES commissioner under President George W. Bush — said the layoffs left just a single testing expert at NCES. 

“Somewhere along the line,” he said, “somebody’s going to have to decide: ‘We want to protect NAEP. What do we do? We can’t just run NAEP with one person in NCES.’”

Several experts said the layoffs put NAEP’s future in jeopardy, even as the pandemic’s aftermath has put a sharper focus than ever on deficiencies in students’ basic math and literacy skills.

A paper airplane or a 747?

Ten people familiar with the cuts, who asked not to be identified due to ongoing professional commitments with the department, said they have heard suggestions that NAEP could soon be administered by the National Assessment Governing Board, a 25-member, independent group of researchers, policymakers, testing experts and educators that sets policy for the tests and oversees dissemination of its results. It is co-led by former Democratic North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue and Martin West, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and its academic dean.

NAGB was spared in last week’s cuts, but it wasn’t immediately clear how the board, with a $7 million budget and a small staff of 11, would administer the massive assessments in schools nationwide. A few NAEP tests rely on samples of 10,000 to 20,000 students, and in years in which it runs multiple tests, the number of test-takers can exceed 100,000. 

The board typically creates the NAEP framework that lays out what’s assessed in each subject, sets achievement levels and approves assessment schedules.

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the department hasn’t publicly said how it will continue to shepherd a test it has administered since 1969 without a dedicated staff. In previous rounds of cuts, administration officials have said NAEP would not be affected.

“What folks don’t necessarily appreciate is that NAGB is basically the management, public relations and communications arm for NAEP,” said Frederick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The actual work is coordinated by a unit within NCES, and that subcomponent got wiped out.” While NAGB members can strategize and talk about big-picture issues, Hess said, “the people who handle relationships with the districts and states, those folks have been laid off.”

Even if educators like board co-chair West are intimately familiar with testing, Hess said, many others on the board “know little or nothing about assessment.”

He estimated that 30 to 40 people were employed in the NAEP unit of NCES before last week. That may well have been more than needed to run the program, he said. He’s not exactly sure how many it would take, but the correct number “is somewhere north of zero.”

Andrew Kolstad, a former longtime Education Department statistician who retired a decade ago, said NCES personnel must constantly review draft NAEP reports to ensure there are no errors, a “labor-intensive process with multiple stages of review.” 

If a state score rises or falls sharply, for instance, NCES staff talk to state officials about whether it’s a mistake or an actual improvement. And of course they keep the bills paid and contracts signed. “If the government doesn’t do its work,” he said, “then things can fall apart.”

A former Democratic Education Department staff member who is familiar with NAEP, and who asked not to be identified so as not to jeopardize future professional opportunities, was a bit more blunt, saying the board is too small to effectively oversee the tests and lacks the expertise to do so. “I mean, NAGB gets together at fancy hotels and talks about things around the periphery of the program. They are a bunch of people who are appointed to a policy board, and they think they’re doing important work — and the important work is actually done in the field.”

NAGB members, this person noted, ”don’t do any of the analysis of the data. They just take the analysis that NCES does, and then they communicate it as if it’s their own.”

Two NAGB spokespersons either didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment or said they couldn’t comment. Two board members also declined to speak.

But Schneider, the former IES director who served until 2024, said the “fancy hotels” criticism isn’t true. “I’ve been to many NAGB meetings,” he said. “They don’t stay in swanky hotels.” He recalled a recent meeting in Los Angeles. “The hotel was a true dump,” he said — NAGB members must abide by government rules on lodging costs.

Breaking up an oligopoly?

What could make a difference on costs is renegotiating the contracts that a few big testmakers maintain to keep producing NAEP, said Chester E. Finn Jr., president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. He described the situation as “kind of an oligopoly” among a handful of testing companies. The latest contract for NAEP with Educational Testing Service, approved in January, runs until 2029. NAEP tests typically cost $192 million annually. An ETS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it would continue administering the tests.

“They’re very expensive and very rigid, set in their ways,” said Finn, a former NAGB member who served for nine years — two as its chair. “And the NCES people have gotten set in their ways along with them, tending to think that only these contractors, doing things in the way they’ve always done them, is the only way it can be done.”

Finn noted that in the past, both NCES and testing firms “have said ‘Can’t change,’ or ‘Won’t change,’ anyway. And NAGB’s been wanting some of those changes. Mark [Schneider] has been wanting many more changes.”

In a recent interview with The 74, Schneider noted that the department last year handed out 42 research grants, worth well over $100 million, but that few efforts focus on improving literacy instruction, which recent NAEP results suggest is in crisis.

The new administration has already taken steps to trim NAEP, last month canceling the 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend assessment for 17-year-olds, one of three long-term studies that has measured student performance in math and reading since the 1970s. The assessment was set to begin in March and run through May.

Shaking up the system, Finn said, could be a productive move. Making NAGB not only oversee but manage NAEP “would probably loosen up some of the resistance to modernization.” 

But it could also raise questions about the statistical integrity and validity of NAEP data, since NAGB typically translates the highly technical results into easily accessible reports based on grade level proficiency, a move that has always made NCES statisticians blanch.

“On the other hand, you could raise those questions about a person who reports to Secretary McMahon making all the judgments too,” Finn said. “Somebody has to make judgments.”

He described a decades-long “awkward, but sort of fruitful, tension” between NCES and NAGB. “You put them all in one place, the tension goes away. But some of the integrity on each side might go away if there’s only one side.”

Andrew Ho, a testing expert and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, served on NAGB and doubts it has the manpower to handle the NAEP test on its own. He likened the task of maintaining statistical and psychometric rigor to maintaining an airplane: “It requires engineering and expertise,” he said. “If you think maintaining NAEP is as easy as ‘90% is an A,’ then you think folding a paper airplane qualifies you to design a 747.”

However the NAEP tests survive, Ho and others said, they must maintain a balance between policy relevance and statistical rigor.

Even before last week’s cuts, NCES and IES were under the cost-cutting knife: in February, the administration canceled 89 contracts with outside research firms totaling $881 million, according to a tweet by the Department of Government Efficiency. The department didn’t issue any official statements or breakdowns of the cuts at the time. 

Attorneys general in 21 states are suing McMahon and the department to reverse the cuts, saying Congress only gives McMahon authority to “modestly restructure” the agency. Without congressional approval, they say, she can’t “eliminate or disrupt” functions required by statute.

A D.C.-area consultant who has worked on higher education issues said there will likely be other layoffs, as well as calls to bring a few employees back. “I mean, that’s just the nature of where we’re at, is that the pace, or the speed at which these decisions have to be made, there’s some collateral damage,” said the source, who asked not to be named because they maintain professional commitments with the department. “There are going to be some decisions that need to be undone.”

Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, who served briefly as acting assistant secretary in the federal Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development in both the Obama and Trump administrations, called the cuts an “amputation of the research arm of the Department of Education.”

Bell-Ellwanger, now president and CEO at Data Quality Campaign, said many of the recent layoffs “are being made in the dark” without adequate transparency and planning. “Our families deserve better, and our students deserve better, and our states deserve better.”

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