“This is a quiet, devastating shutdown of a national institution.” So wrote Dr. Peggy Carr on July 14, describing the hollowing out of the National Center for Education Statistics and the dismantling of education data. With only three staff remaining, the agency’s collapse marks just the latest national education data provider to disappear or degrade since the Trump administration served the U.S. Department of Education an eviction notice.

Now, as the department boxes up its pens and pencils, key responsibilities are scheduled for scattering to unlikely corners, from Health and Human Services to the Small Business Administration. Amid this reshuffling of federal furniture, however, one critical detail has been neglected: Who will track student outcomes?

Educators and policymakers from across the political spectrum caution that data systems such as IPEDS and assessments like National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are essential barometers of America’s educational health. Even Project 2025 cedes that the federal government should maintain “statistics-gathering” abilities in education. As funding shifts to other agencies, it’s urgent that measurement moves with the money. Efficiency without evidence is mere guesswork, and America’s children deserve better than educated guesses.

Consider NAEP, which is written into federal law as a critical audit of whether our educational systems are serving students from all backgrounds well. In February, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled the test for 17-year-olds, bucking decades of uniform collection. This decision came just days after officials had assured the public that NAEP would not be impacted by budget cuts.

A few weeks later, the department pulled the same stunt with money: A March 28 notice suddenly ordered states to liquidate whatever was left of their pandemic-relief funds that very day, freezing nearly $3 billion that districts had already earmarked.

For now, pandemic relief funds have been restored, and for now, most of NAEP testing is back on schedule for 2026, with some conservative experts even proposing it be expanded to an annual schedule from a biennial schedule. But this cancel-then-revive whiplash has already forced states and contractors to scramble, burning scarce time and taxpayer dollars that could have gone toward students, demonstrating the costs of dismantling education data.

Read the full article about dismantling education data by Jason Godfrey at The 74.