A Vision and Roadmap for Education Statistics (2022) / Chapter Skim
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2 Rise Up to Meet 21st-Century Education Data Ecosystem Needs
2 Rise Up to Meet 21st-Century Education Data Ecosystem Needs
Pages 33-62
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Finally, the panel envisions NCES as deeply engaged with stakeholders and a strong partner supporting evidence building within the Department of Education (ED)
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, which establishes the commissioner of NCES as the chief statistical official of ED, who is expected to work closely with the chief evaluation officer and chief data officer to build evidence. Thus, NCES has many stakeholders, including Congress, the President, ED, and other federal agencies, along with state and local education agencies, school districts, policy makers, nonprofit organizations, academic researchers, and, of course, students and their families.
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requested this study, demonstrating an interest and commitment to support a new vision for NCES. The Evidence Act is a recent mandate that highlights and supports the role of statistical agencies in developing and facilitating access to data for evidence building.
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The panel offers ideas and examples to illustrate implementation details, especially for projects conducted by other federal statistical agencies. The panel discusses its thoughts on strategic priorities, data products, services, and operations, yet understands that NCES needs to decide which options to adopt.
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NCES lacks an articulated prioritization plan for its products, services, and related improvements that is governed by a set of principles guiding the deployment of resources to achieve a vision. While the National Assessment of Educational Progress has conducted strategic planning, in recent decades NCES has lacked a routinized, holistic strategic-planning process covering the entire Center -- its organization, operations, and programs.5 The lack of such a strategy makes it challenging to understand how new or old initiatives contribute to the Center's mission and which products and activities to prioritize or discontinue.
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The Bureau of Transportation Statistics is an example of a small federal statistical agency with an up-to-date, short strategic plan (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2022; see Box 5-1) (see Appendix D for an overview of federal statistical agencies and their com parability to NCES)
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After NCES determines its vision and the strategic plan begins to congeal, the NCES commissioner should engage IES and ED leadership to ensure buy-in and alignment of the strategic goals of ED and IES and to advocate for sufficient resources. The National Board for Education Sciences7 could provide external backing for NCES's strategic priorities.
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is a key component of adaptability and resilience in the face of challenges. Moreover, continual improvement and innovation is a fundamental prin ciple of federal statistical agencies (NASEM, 2021b)
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Expand NCES's Presence in Education Evidence Building The Evidence Act has expanded NCES's mission in the absence of additional funding. In the panel's opinion, NCES's strategic plan should address how it wants to meet this expanded role and its relationship with other offices in the IES and ED, including its goals for data acquisition, sharing, provisioning data access for evidence-building purposes, and evidence 10 NCES document provided to the panel, "Relevant excerpts from the approved December 2021 IES reorganization justification."
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, to better reflect the experiences of the increasingly diverse student population and other contemporary education trends in its data designs, processing, and analyses. The plan should consider ways to embed DEIA awareness into other aspects of NCES's work, including stakeholder engagement, hiring, retention, and work culture.
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Expand Creative Partnerships and Engagement with Stakeholders In the panel's opinion, NCES's strategic plan should include goals, objectives, and milestones for establishing creative partnerships and increasing engagement with stakeholders. Areas for NCES to consider include creating engagement feedback loops; expanding its role enabling data access, particularly for state and local education agencies; and improving dissemination, focusing on accessibility and usefulness.
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55. 14 "Each Commissioner, except the Commissioner for Education Statistics, shall carry out such Commissioner's duties under this title under the supervision and subject to the approval of the Director [of IES]
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Such awards have the further benefit of increasing staff morale. Some relevant awards include the Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics, from the Washington Statistical Society, for dedication to the issues of measurement, efficiency of data collection, and use of statistical data for policy analysis;a the Links Lecture Award, from the American Statistical Association, for the advancement of official statistics in the areas of data linkage, privacy, researcher access, and reproducibility of results;b and other awards recognizing achievements in statistics, given by the American Statistical Association.c A small group of people within NCES who actively consider and prepare nomination packages for deserving Center staff could help increase vis ibility and improve staff morale.
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4 provides requirements on the release and dissemination of statistical products, by requiring federal statistical agencies to "adhere to data quality standards through equitable, policy-neutral, and timely release of information to the public [emphasis added]
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The Evidence Act, particularly in Title III, effectively expands NCES's mission by giving statistical agencies new authorities, duties, roles, and relationships for evidence building. The Evidence Act directs all departments to make government data open by default and to share administrative and other data with statistical agencies, upon request, for developing evidence.17 The statistical agencies are, in turn, directed to expand secure access to data (i.e., restricted, acquired, linked, etc.)
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. Regarding the current division of labor for evidence building, ED's EO notes that, when obtaining data for evidence building, he would expect the SO to facilitate access to data at a statistical agency, but would turn to the CDO to obtain data in general.21 ED's EO notes that the first serious test of the Evidence Act's presumption of accessibility of data for evidence building will arise when a roadblock is encountered when seeking external data, and how that challenge is overcome.
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Implementation of the Evidence Act is relatively nascent23 and this moment presents an opportunity for the secretary of education, the director of IES, and the commissioner of NCES to establish a vision and value proposition for NCES's role in ED's evidence-building activities. Together, the three entities are encouraged to determine how to best maximize the unique value NCES brings as a producer of credible and relevant evidence, a recognized leader in data standards, and a data-access facilitator.
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and related evidence building and evaluation. NCES collects data, acquires25 secondary data, provides access to restricted data, evaluates fitness for use, and has rigorous quality standards for its statistics and analyses.
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. The Evidence Act has immense potential for advancing education data and analytics.
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Resident population includes civilian population and armed forces personnel residing within the United States; it excludes armed forces personnel residing overseas. Race categories exclude persons of Hispanic ethnicity.
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SOURCE: NCES, 2021e, Table 204.30. Children 3 to 21 years old served under Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
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The challenge here, for any statistical agency, is that providing relevant and useful information on current education conditions requires addressing deeply embedded equity issues throughout the data life cycle, such as underlying assumptions in questionnaire design or imputation algorithms. Addressing such issues will require the sustained involvement of relevant communities, to decide which questions need to be informed by data collections, which data to collect, how to collect those data, how to organize and present data, and how to make meaning from data.
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Grappling with DEIA issues is critical for NCES's relevance and ability to adhere to these practices by: • Ensuring validity of survey instruments and measurements, not only for measures of demographic characteristics, segregation indices, or other direct measures of population diversity and e quity, but also for any concept or measure that may be interpreted differently over time and context by respondents with varying lived experiences (Box 2-3) ; • Ensuring that data processing and analyses accurately reflect the diverse perspectives and lived experiences of today's students and education workforce rather than reiterating historical and systemic assumptions, emphases, and absences in the data; and • Deepening engagement with a broadly diverse group of stake holders to understand their needs for data content, data products, and statistical information, to include equity (Box 2-3)
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To adequately measure and address DEIA issues in its data, NCES needs to embed DEIA considerations throughout the Center's workforce, not only via staffing decisions, but by creating a culture of proactive thinking about DEIA issues throughout its data designs, data acquisitions, standards, analyses, stakeholder engage ment, relationship building, partnerships, and contracts. The panel recommends infusing DEIA thinking throughout the data life cycle, starting with data design (e.g., standards setting, questionnaire design, construction of measures and indicators)
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This process begins with members learning how they see themselves, how their lived experiences may lead to interpretations of data collections that are different than those assumed or intended by researchers, and which life outcomes (e.g., earnings, health, social connectedness) are meaningful to them.
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NCES can collaborate with other centers in IES or can contract out this work, but permanent NCES staff need to be closely involved to assure that knowledge is retained and to develop a cul ture of DEIA awareness that can be applied to other areas of NCES's work. Instilling DEIA thinking into analytics includes not only responsible interpretation of statistics and analyses, but also consideration of data pro cessing and other structural features underlying the analysis.
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Following its strategic plan, NCES can then determine when and how to change its products and services to maintain the Center's usefulness and relevance. EXPAND DATA-ACQUISITION STRATEGIES FOR NEW INSIGHTS The education data ecosystem envisioned by the panel will incorporate data from three categories: probability sample surveys (traditionally used by many federal statistical agencies, including NCES)
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Likewise, new data sources may enrich education research by providing data that are unavailable via surveys or administrative data. These emerging data sources present enormous opportunities for NCES to advance evidence building.
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In anticipation of data linkage, NCES should reconsider the consent language and planned usage for all primary collections, to support ongoing uses for statistical activities. An extreme example is the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, in which participants were expressly promised
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The panel urges NCES to anticipate demand for data linkage by directing its contractors, who collect and hold PII from NCES's primary collections, to deposit PII linkage keys with partner federal statistical agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau.
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