Trump administration is gutting the National Center for Education Statistics: Here are five things we only know about schools thanks to the NCES

Reports indicate that the Trump administration has laid off nearly all staff at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as part of a massive number of staff cuts across the Department of Education. The NCES collects and analyzes crucially important datasets for researchers to use throughout the world. It’s likely that most Americans have never heard of the NCES, but all of us benefit from the work it does.

Here are five things we only know about our schools thanks to the NCES.

1. We know that 31% of public schools are using non-teachers in teaching roles because of staff shortages. The NCES School Pulse Panel tracks vacancies and needs across the country. It shows the breadth and depth of staffing shortages, which can best be remedied by increasing educator compensation.
2. We know that kids from poorer families enter kindergarten with greater skills gaps than kids from wealthy families—and exposure to schooling closes these gaps. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study tracks cohorts of children from year-to-year, allowing us to compare outcomes for different children across the country. Among other things, we know that contrary to right-wing propaganda, parental involvement in their kids’ education has risen faster for lower-income households in recent decades and this has actually reduced skills gaps between kids from different economic backgrounds even as continuing increases in inequality wedge these gaps apart.
3. We know that students are more likely to be targeted for harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity in majority-white schools. The School Survey on Crime and Safety tells us what kind of safety issues there are in schools, and how often they occur. It includes detailed figures on violent and nonviolent incidents, school safety practices, and the presence of law enforcement in schools.
4. We know that one-parent and two-parent households have the same trouble finding child care. The new National Household Education Survey is the first survey to systematically look at the educational arrangements of children not yet in kindergarten. From that report, we learned that 11% of parents were unable to find the child care program they wanted for their child, and that rate was the same regardless of household size.
5. We know that red states spend less on their students than blue states. While individual states track school district finances, the NCES gathers all this data in one spot, giving us a clear snapshot of the whole country. This allows us to see that Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Mississippi spend the least per pupil on education, while New York, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, Vermont, and Connecticut spend the most.

All of this comes from a department with fewer than 200 employees. The contributions of NCES staff are vital to our understanding of what makes schools work, and the removal of those staff is a loss for the whole country.