What the dismantling of the Education Department means for its data

The Department of Education under the Trump administration won’t be shut down completely, but it will be unrecognizable in function and capability — particularly from a data standpoint. 

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order announcing his intent to dismantle the agency and hand education authority over to states and local communities. He then told reporters that the Education Department’s jurisdiction over student loans would be transferred to the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services would take on special needs and nutrition programs. 

The Education Department has historically overseen several data and statistical resources for use by the public in the name of changing and improving programs and policies that impact all students. Not only can the public access data about education and civil rights issues from almost every public school across the country, but people can also view student achievement metrics through the Nation’s Report Card and all of the department’s data assets in one location.

Even before issuing the executive order, the Trump administration slashed the agency’s workforce by 50%. Now, terminated Education officials hold doubts about what’s coming next for data collection and dissemination, pointing to specific concerns with grant programs and information sources, as well as a lack of remaining talent for data stewardship and management.

Former Education Department officials spoke with FedScoop about those concerns, including the future of data collection, retention and dissemination; the lack of transition plans in place; disruptions to grant programs for minority-serving institutions; the potential for information transparency to disappear; and how these changes could be a step toward siloing data. 

Lost in transition

Without transition plans or a notice of next steps in the Education Department’s downsizing, officials like Sarah Newman — who served as a group leader in the agency’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) after eight years as a management and program analyst — believe systems and processes could see interruptions, or simply cease to continue. 

Few people would have a better sense of what Education’s data work could look like going forward than Newman, whose tenure at the agency dates back to April 2012. She began in an office managing the data collection for EDFacts, an initiative to “collect, analyze and promote the use of high-quality, pre-kindergarten through grade 12 data.” 

After nine years or so, Newman moved over to OESE, where she continued to work with the EDFacts collection, focusing specifically on data on graduation rates, statewide assessments, chronic absenteeism and more. Next came her most recent role leading a team that managed Ed Data Express, which provides public access to funding, performance and participation data from 2010 onward. 

Newman was dismissed from the agency in March. 

In her role leading the Ed Data Express, Newman and her team worked closely with the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal statistical agency “responsible for collecting, analyzing and reporting data on the condition of U.S. education — from early childhood to adult education — to help improve student outcomes.”

Without Newman and other professionals who have been dismissed from the agency, decades of data expertise have been wiped away. Newman said that since being let go, they have not been able to communicate with the contractor who manages the agency’s IT systems. 

“Hopefully, there are other people at the department that are stepping in to assist, but I was not asked for any information,” she said. “My guess is the system will be shut down at any given time — I don’t know how it could still operate without the folks that were working on it and without an actual [transition] plan in place.”

An ongoing goal of the department had been to consolidate systems that house data to make it more accessible, Newman said, but the staff working toward that “dream state” are no longer there. 

“The professionals that were working on that, that know the ins and outs of what exists and what does not are now not there,” Newman said. “[S]o there’s really a lot at risk and a lot that is potentially going to be lost.”

Newman said she doesn’t know how the EDFacts system could continue to operate properly without those staff or a transition plan. 

“There’s so much disruption, and so, again: Who is managing the series of systems that make up the EDFacts contract?” Newman said. “I don’t know, but I think folks should be concerned … about the security, about the systems that hold a whole lot of information, but also just the transparency.”

Grants, interrupted

Despite the challenges some data teams at Education have faced during the Trump administration, it’s possible that not all may be lost from a data perspective in the department’s strange new era. Jason Cottrell, former data coordinator for the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE), has confidence in his colleagues still at the department to make sure grant data remains safe and secure as it’s transported to another federal or state agency. 

However, in the short term, his “biggest concern” is how grants will be handled.

Cottrell’s team was responsible for grants administration for post-secondary institutions and community agencies, as well as international and foreign language education. They worked with Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) information — a dataset that provides information on colleges, universities and other vocational and technical institutions — that came out of the Institute of Education Sciences. 

Cottrell also worries about data collection for minority-serving institutions. These establishments have to apply for grants and be deemed eligible for grant funding, which requires IPEDS data to be collected and released before applying. 

OPE’s data work is primarily related to federal TRIO programs — a federal outreach and student services program that offers services to individuals from “disadvantaged backgrounds” — and Title III, V and VII grants, which Cottrell says often involve Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBUs), tribal colleges and universities, and other minority-serving institutions. 

HBCUs rely heavily on institutional service grants and tribal schools depend on formula grants. Cottrell doesn’t foresee any changes happening to those programs. 

“The minority-serving institutions is where I would primarily be concerned, especially related to the data collection,” Cottrell said. “The reason I say that is, as the institutions aren’t formula grants, they have to apply for those grants, but they also have to be deemed eligible. You have to have those IPEDS data collected and released in a certain sequence prior to. And in order to be deemed eligible, the IPEDS data have to exist.”

If the agency slows down or delays the data from being collected, “it makes it much more difficult for an institution to be deemed eligible first, followed by the application process, followed by the award,” Cottrell said.

Keeping in mind the Sept. 30 due date for grant awards, “you start running out of time to properly review those applications in a quality manner,” he added. “Add [that] into the fact that you’ve now gotten rid of half the department.”

Trouble with data collection

Along with potentially delayed grants, there is a reduced capacity for the agency’s Institute of Education Sciences to collect data, Cottrell noted. 

IES, the department’s research and statistics arm, aims to share “scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and to share this information in formats that are useful and accessible to educators, parents, policymakers, researchers and the public,” according to its website.

With the cuts to IES, “the national backbone of educational data in the country has been shut down,” a former agency official who was terminated said.

A former IES official, meanwhile, told FedScoop that they know of at least one of the agency’s major tools that hasn’t been updated because of data collection challenges: College Navigator. 

College Navigator is housed under the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within IES. The former IES official said it was “typically considered to be the most trustworthy data for students who were looking at applying to colleges.”

Updates to the navigation tool, which is required by the Higher Education Act, remain in limbo. A staff member volunteered to continue working to get the tool updated one more time before he was terminated from the agency, the official said. “And [they] were not allowed to do that.”

“It’s really hard for students to have a source, a federal trusted source of data,” they continued. “So it’s either, maybe there’s no data collection at all and there’s no data, or perhaps the quality of the data go down because there’s no one there to run the quality checks.”

Corinna Turbes, director of the Center for Data Policy at the Data Foundation, said the impact of ceasing data collections or compromising existing data is complicated to explain, but she noted that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” That’s especially true when sudden and sweeping changes to the department have left “people with a lot of unanswered questions about what’s next,” Turbes said.

She pointed to the states, which have looked to the federal level for resources to build systems around, especially for “cradle to career infrastructure.” 

“There were needs to innovate in these systems, and folks were doing some of that innovation,” Turbes said. “But with the suddenness of what we’re seeing happening, I just think there’s a lot of questions around what folks are just supposed to do at this moment.” 

New Hampshire’s Department of Education told StateScoop in December that it had begun planning for the dismantling of the federal education agency and it was evaluating potential impacts if grants and other administrative responsibilities were blocked. Similarly, education officials in Maine said they were worried about a lack of federal guidance and how it might impact digital equity efforts. 

Now, Turbes said it’s hard for states and institutions to know how to move forward. 

Back to the data silos 

The former IES official said the department’s imminent downsizing is a recreation of a problem that existed before the agency’s advent: “All of these different things were being done in so many different places that we bring them into one place so that they get done with fewer challenges working across offices.”

Cottrell agreed, noting that the dismantling of Department of Education functions will likely create a ripple effect. For example, if statistical units from the department are sent to another agency, and grant-making units are given to a different agency, interagency communication is suddenly a new and heavy burden on the entire process. 

“It’s now going to have to have a memorandum of understanding across these departments to get access to the data that they need,” Cottrell said. “I think that’s going to be the issue that is going to have the biggest impact, is the lack of communication that will exist across the necessary education units, because what they’re talking about is splitting them up.”

Making public datasets readily available to the public was a priority for the agency, Cottrell said, as data staffers rushed to comply with the Biden administration’s Phase II guidance of the OPEN Government Data Act. 

But if the Trump administration decides to reduce the federal government workforce even more dramatically than it already has, agencies could lose experts who can put information into public access, as it is statutorily required. 

“It’s going to take a long time to figure out what it is they’re missing, how they’re missing it and what the results are going to be,” Cottrell said. 

As for the Education Department’s data-focused future, the former IES source believes the staff reductions that have already occurred will only result in “recreating a problem that existed before” and “possibly making it worse.”

“It’s just irrational to me,” they said.