We Can't Fix America’s Schools Without Data
Key Takeaways
- •The White House has sought to close the Education Department to the maximum extent allowed by law and has cut about half of its workforce, including most staff at the Institute of Education Sciences.
- •The Institute of Education Sciences produces the Nation’s Report Card, a key measure of U.S. student achievement and year-over-year progress.
- •The article says layoffs have left the NAEP reporting office with only a few employees and may have compromised state data collection needed for reliable national results.
- •It argues that data-driven reforms helped drive gains such as Mississippi’s reading improvement and New York City’s higher graduation rates and narrower achievement gaps.
- •The piece says the institute needs modernization and reform, but those changes require serious funding and stable leadership to succeed.
Opinion
We Can't Fix America’s Schools Without Data
Published Aug. 6, 2026, 9:40 a.m. KST
At a moment when both major U.S. parties portray the other as a threat to the country’s future, they are overlooking one of the most serious threats of all: abysmally low student achievement.
The worst outcome is not only failing to teach students basic skills. It is also not knowing how poor test results truly are, because without that information nothing changes. That is where the country is heading if the White House continues its efforts to shrink the Education Department’s research and statistics operation.
After decades of steady gains driven by bipartisan efforts to improve public schools, test scores plateaued in the 2010s as both parties stepped back from education reform. After the pandemic, scores plunged. Five years later, they remain dismal. The political neglect of this crisis is a disgrace, but at least the data has remained visible. That may soon change.
Last year, among a barrage of executive orders, the White House issued a directive to close the Education Department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” Half of the agency’s employees were fired, including almost 90% of staff at the Institute of Education Sciences.
Founded in 2002 by President George W. Bush as part of a broader push for educational accountability, the institute was designed to be an independent, scientifically rigorous center for education research, modeled after the National Institutes of Health.
Its importance to education policy is difficult to overstate. The institute produces the congressionally mandated Nation’s Report Card, or NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which helps measure how students are doing in the three Rs and whether they are improving or declining compared with earlier years.
The administration has defended NAEP in rhetoric, but not in practice. Layoffs have left the suboffice responsible for the report with only a handful of employees. According to one former senior official, the center is “running on vapors,” and there are concerns that state data collection, which is essential to producing reliable national results, has been compromised.
Weakening this office is deeply self-defeating. States need a functional federal data and research hub to determine what works and to measure relative performance. That kind of evidence is also what lets policymakers compare one state’s results with another’s instead of relying on anecdotes or slogans. How can states hope to replicate Mississippi’s major gains in reading scores without gold-standard guidance for teachers?
Politicians call it “the Mississippi miracle,” but the turnaround was not divine intervention. It was the result of data-based reforms. No data, no reforms. No reforms, no student turnaround. No student turnaround means no improvement in career prospects, and no progress toward reducing racial and ethnic inequalities across a wide range of measures.
A functional federal data and research hub is also necessary for education officials to spot troubling trends and adopt interventions, and for parents to hold elected officials accountable. Reliable data was essential to our efforts to transform New York City’s public schools. Without it, we would not have been able to raise graduation rates 42%, cut racial and ethnic achievement gaps by a quarter, or move from having none of the state’s 25 top-performing schools to having 22 of them.
The White House is right that the Institute of Education Sciences can be improved. Its data collection, grantmaking, peer review and testing processes are outdated. Its statistics are difficult to parse. Many of its now-terminated contracts were expensive and inefficient. Its research library is cumbersome.
Those areas are ripe for reform, and to its credit, the White House commissioned an independent review of IES that called for a major data-modernization effort. But unless the administration makes a serious, well-funded commitment, those recommendations are unlikely to be carried out.
The institute has not had a permanent director in more than two years, it now has only about two dozen staffers, and — like other core functions of the Education Department — it may be moved elsewhere in the federal government. It is impossible to do major work when leadership is absent and employees are focused on survival.
The White House’s appetite for disruption will end in failure unless it is paired with a commitment to the hard work of reform. Letting research and statistics deteriorate in the meantime would be a grave mistake that harms students and the future of the American economy.
Parents are rightly frustrated with the state of education, but change will come only when voters hold elected officials accountable for progress — and that cannot happen without reliable data.
Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and the founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies. This article was published by Bloomberg and distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
