6

Summary of Recommendations

Education is changing in ways that create both challenges and opportunities. These changes have crucial implications for NCES, which is charged by Congress to take a key leadership role. However, critical factors restrain NCES from filling this intended role. For example, NCES has experienced a severe decline in full-time equivalent employees, operates under multiple constraints and unfunded mandates, is not entirely in control of its future, and lacks a unified strategic plan to guide it through difficult priority decisions.

The panel proposes a bold vision of NCES as a leader in the education data ecosystem. This report reflects the panel’s efforts to reimagine what NCES can be, with each recommendation playing a role in manifesting that vision. This report cannot take the place of strategic planning, which will require an intensive self-examination and review of the education environment by NCES, working together with consultants. Instead, this report provides a blueprint of key issues and ways that NCES may seek to resolve them.

The panel provides 5 conclusions and 15 recommendations, with the fundamental recommendations being the most critical for organizational transformation. While NCES is the primary actor, some recommendations require collaboration with other actors, such as the director of the Institute of Education Services (IES) and the secretary of education. A listing of recommendations and conclusions by theme follows (see also Figure 6-1).

The goal of this chapter is to provide readers with a single listing of all recommendations and conclusions. Readers are strongly encouraged to review the individual chapters in which the recommendations and conclusions

are discussed in detail. The first digit of each recommendation and conclusion indicates the chapters in which the evidence, context, and examples are provided (e.g., Recommendation 4-2 is discussed in Chapter 4). For example, Chapter 3 discusses those areas in which NCES provides strong measures relating to equity and those areas where it does not, and Chapter 4 provides example of how other federal statistical agencies can produce more timely results by incorporating fewer layers of review.

COMPLETE LISTING OF RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Fundamental Recommendations

Theme: Develop a Strong Strategic Plan to Make Tough Decisions

RECOMMENDATION 2-1: To direct its future, NCES should develop and implement a bold strategic plan that incentivizes innovation and creative partnerships and that will produce relevant, timely, and reliable

statistical products to assist education decision makers at every level of government. NCES should develop and begin implementation of the plan within 1 year of the release of this report.

This panel is not the first to recommend a strategic-planning effort, and NCES has, in many ways, acted strategically. However, the country faces important challenges, such as improving equity and navigating changes in the education system that include new technologies, a movement to education outside of the traditional system, and increased use of online teaching. New data are also becoming available, with the growing use of administrative data and other big data, and there is great demand for evidence for decision making. Meanwhile, NCES faces budgetary challenges that have contributed to the discontinuation of some of its surveys. These challenges are best addressed strategically rather than piecemeal.

Theme: Support and Empower NCES to Set Its Own Priorities

RECOMMENDATION 2-2: The secretary of education, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, and NCES commissioner should collaborate to ensure that NCES is independent in developing, producing, and disseminating statistics.

NCES’s role is somewhat ambiguous. As with many statistical agencies, it is situated within another agency, but it sometimes lacks the administrative authority common to those other agencies.

Theme: Maximize NCES’s Unique Value for Evidence Building

RECOMMENDATION 2-3: The secretary of education, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, and NCES commissioner should immediately take actions to enable the NCES commissioner to most effectively fulfill the responsibilities of the statistical official delineated in the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 and to support evidence-building needs across the Department of Education.

Given the position of the NCES commissioner as the Department of Education’s (ED’s) statistical official, the Center needs to exercise that role more fully, while working collaboratively with IES and ED.

Theme: Adapt to the Changing World of Education by Increasing Diversity and Awareness of Equity Issues

RECOMMENDATION 2-4: NCES should proactively embed diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in all areas of its work and organization, to adapt and serve contemporary communities of the changing world of education.

The country will best succeed if it makes full use of its available resources. NCES can play a valuable role in providing data on inequity that researchers and policy makers can use to find solutions. More fundamentally, as the nation’s premier education statistical agency, NCES has the responsibility of continually ensuring its collections, methods, and products accurately measure contemporary diverse populations and reflect their lived experiences. NCES should be thoughtful about diversity, equity, and accessibility considerations throughout the data life cycle, from data collection through analysis and publication. NCES will benefit from cultivating diversity within its own organization, supported by a culture of inclusivity.

Theme: Expand Data-Acquisition Strategies to Gain New Insights

RECOMMENDATION 2-5: To improve its efficiency, timeliness, and relevance, NCES should continually explore alternative data sources for potential use in data and statistical products, conduct studies on the quality of these sources and their fitness for use, and expand responsible access to data from multiple sources and linkage tools. Testing and adoption of new data-science methods for harnessing alternative data should be done in collaboration with other federal statistical agencies, as well as with other components of the Institute of Education Sciences that are actively exploring ways to strengthen the impact of these techniques.

Data science, along with the country’s movement towards digitizing much of its data, provides new opportunities for research, sometimes allowing greater depth, accuracy, and timeliness than survey research. Rather than choose between data science and survey research, each can complement the other.

RECOMMENDATION 2-6: For primary collections, NCES should modernize standard language on consent and planned usage, to permit secure secondary uses that enable high-quality follow-up studies, such as through privacy-protected linkages with other data sources.

Currently, NCES’s data are constrained by difficulties associated with its use. Maintaining privacy is critical, but NCES can still look for ways to make data more readily available for secondary uses, to expand the data’s value.

Additional Recommendations and Conclusions

Theme: Prioritize Topics, Data Content, and Statistical Information to Increase Relevance

RECOMMENDATION 3-1: NCES should conduct a top-to-bottom review of its data-acquisition activities, to prioritize topics most relevant to understanding contemporary education, and to discontinue activities that are disproportionately costly and burdensome relative to their value.

During this time of budgetary challenges, it is critical to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of which research activities are needed, and how they complement each other.

CONCLUSION 3-1: Congressional mandates constrain NCES’s data collection priorities yet may no longer reflect what is important for understanding contemporary education.

RECOMMENDATION 3-2: NCES should revisit priorities mandated by Congress and, where appropriate, make recommendations for changes.

Roughly half of NCES’s research topics are mandated by Congress, with some of the mandates having existed for decades. NCES should work with Congress to determine which mandates remain important.

Theme: Expand Engagement and Dissemination for Greater Mission Impact

Create engagement feedback loops to ensure relevance of products and services

RECOMMENDATION 4-1: NCES should deepen and broaden its engagement with current and potential data users, to gather continuing feedback about their needs and ways that NCES can meet those needs more effectively. This feedback will help NCES shape its efforts to develop and disseminate standards, provide technical assistance, and strengthen its user community.

NCES has several mechanisms for engaging with stakeholders, particularly with regard to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Working to build non-NAEP stakeholder outreach could make NCES more effective and its data more widely used.

RECOMMENDATION 4-2: NCES should actively collaborate with other data-holding federal agencies and organizations to develop useful products and processes, including those that utilize data from alternative sources, to provide timely, policy-relevant insights.

Other agencies often have data that are highly relevant to education, and working with those agencies could expand the usefulness of data that NCES already collects. Further, NCES might learn useful data-handling practices from other agencies, and the Center has its own strengths to share, particularly with regard to survey research and standards.

RECOMMENDATION 4-3: NCES should explore and establish creative models for a nimble, ongoing consulting body, supplemented by a pool of ad hoc consultants, to help NCES innovate and be accountable for progress on strategic goals.

A body subject to Federal Advisory Committee Act regulations would probably not exhibit the required nimbleness. Rather, NCES needs both regular members who are knowledgeable of the full scope of NCES’s activities and who can provide strategic advice and accountability along with periodic access to experts in specialized areas as the need arises.

Expand NCES’s role enabling data access to serve and engage stakeholders

CONCLUSION 4-1: NCES can expand its impact by providing leadership and expertise to facilitate responsible data use and access. NCES can help organizations develop capacity to integrate and analyze education data and other data, to produce actionable analyses.

By helping to set standards for collecting, processing, and analyzing data, NCES can advance the quality and comparability of data collected by non-NCES researchers, creating a larger body of education data and analyses.

RECOMMENDATION 4-4: NCES should strengthen state capacity to link data across systems, adopt shared data standards, and provide actionable information to state and local education agencies to help improve student learning outcomes. NCES can leverage its Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems Grant Program to achieve this goal.

One way to support the states is to create state NCES coordinators, as NCES has already done for NAEP. This would help states create shareable data that can benefit all states, while also lessening the development work within individual states.

Partner with external researchers and analysts for evidence building

RECOMMENDATION 4-5: NCES, in collaboration with the Institute of Education Sciences, should establish a joint statistical research program that includes matching internal staff with highly qualified external researchers, statisticians, and data scientists to develop new data analyses, tools, and publications.

By doing this, NCES can expand the use of its data while also creating a feedback mechanism that will help NCES remain current in meeting researchers’ needs and support education evidence building.

Improve dissemination, focusing on accessibility and usefulness

CONCLUSION 4-2: NCES can improve the accessibility and usability of its products, tools, website, and other dissemination platforms to allow a broader range of audiences to benefit from its products.

RECOMMENDATION 4-6: NCES should release data and data products that are useful, actionable, and timely for local and state education agencies and other stakeholders. To increase timeliness, NCES, in collaboration with the Institute of Education Sciences, should review and revise its internal and external quality assurance processes.

NCES is often slow to release data, and the many layers of review that NCES and IES require are one reason for this. NCES can learn from other federal statistical agencies who have shortened their review processes, staggered their data releases, or issued revised estimates.

Theme: Transform the Internal Structure and Operations to Align with and Directly Support the Strategic Plan while Incentivizing Innovation, Experimentation, and Continuous Learning

CONCLUSION 5-1: NCES’s current organizational structure, with statistical programs separated by data source type (sample surveys and administrative data), contributes to silos that limit innovation.

By creating mechanisms to increase collaboration, share multiple types of data, and align data collections to collectively meet NCES’s key priorities, NCES can promote greater cross-fertilization of ideas and more complete final products.

CONCLUSION 5-2: NCES’s current overreliance on contractors and its high turnover rate endanger the Center’s ability to retain institutional knowledge and build internal capabilities needed to meet its strategic goals.

Compared to other statistical agencies, NCES stands out in its great reliance on outside contractors, while its own staff has decreased in size. Though the use of outside contractors has often been useful, NCES has a diminished capacity even to monitor its contractors, let alone to provide leadership.

RECOMMENDATION 5-1: NCES should utilize contractors and creative staffing arrangements to work collaboratively with staff to build internal capacity. To enhance resilience, NCES should also explore greater use of flexible contract types, stronger incentives for contractors to adopt cost-effective innovations, and performance-based requirements.

Contractors bring valuable skills and knowledge, and NCES should make full use of contractors to strengthen its own internal operations, rather than becoming dependent on them. Employing various types of contracts may provide NCES more flexibility in how contractors are used.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This is an opportunity that should not be lost. There is a great need for more and better data about education, and NCES is in a prime position to address that need. Doing so will require changes both within NCES and in NCES’s role relative to IES and ED. In the panel’s opinion, NCES should be nimble, regularly reassessing its priorities, monitoring changes in education, and responding to changes in data availability. While NCES is already performing aspects of the recommended actions, the Center can push further to fully embody each recommendation. Realizing all the fundamental recommendations will result in the substantial organizational transformation needed to attain the vision. These changes will be challenging, sometimes painful, and will require readiness for innovation. Ultimately, the investments NCES makes into its organization in the coming years will result in the reestablishment of NCES as a leader in the education data ecosystem.