Education Week - January 18, 2017 - 20

KEY STUDIES AND THEIR USES
Federal longitudinal studies have become ever more prevalent
in education policymaking in the last decade, and researchers
worry cutbacks to data collection, even those conducted by other
agencies, could have a strong impact on education programs and
budgets going forward. Here are three examples:
AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY
Budget: $230.9 million, fiscal year 2016
Who collects it? U.S. Census Bureau, Commerce Department
What is it? This is the second-largest study administered by the Census
Bureau, after the dicennial census. It is a mandatory long-form survey given to
more than 3.5 million households each year.
What is it used for? The data are used to distribute more than $400 billion
in federal dollars each year, including Title I and other U.S. Department of
Education funding. State, tribal, and local governments use the data to
plan school sites and other services. Business and nonprofit groups also
use ACS data to target distribution and targeting of services. The Education
Department's Common Core of Data uses ACS data for a variety of measures,
including demographics, student poverty beyond free and reduced-price lunch,
and information on public virtual and brick-and-mortar charter schools.
Researchers also use these data.

CIVIL RIGHTS DATA COLLECTION
Budget: $400,000, fiscal year 2016
Who collects it? U.S. Department of Education
What is it? This is a biennial survey of key demographic, discipline, and
academic data from all public school districts and schools in the country. It
has been collected in some form since 1968; the 2015-16 survey data is being
gathered now.
What is it used for? The Education Department's office for civil rights uses the
data to identify overall trends and local disparities in education for students
with disabilities, and those of particular ethnic or racial groups, genders, or
language backgrounds, as well as to investigate complaints of discrimination
in particular sites. Lawyers and groups interested in civil rights issues also
rely on the data as the most comprehensive sample of such trends in the
country. The Education Department also uses the data to identify teachers'
experience levels and distribution, school finance issues, and emerging trends
in education technology use.

NATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS
Budget: $149 million, fiscal year 2016
Who collects it? U.S. Department of Education
What is it? Often dubbed the "Nation's Report Card," this is a set of
assessments given to nation- and statewide samples of U.S. students
at grades 4, 8, and 12 in mathematics, reading, science, writing, civics,
economics, technology and engineering, geography, history, and the arts.
Different subject-matter assessments are given on different time frames and
to different grade ranges, but math and reading are the most frequent.
What is it used for? NAEP remains the only common academic assessment
across all states and is used to compare how students of different grades and
demographic backgrounds are achieving academically in various subjects.
It has also been statistically linked to the Trends in International Math and
Science Study, allowing states to get a more nuanced understanding of how
their students compare to peers worldwide. It includes background surveys
that help researchers connect practices in school and at home to students'
longterm achievement.

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 18, 2017 | www.edweek.org

Are Federal School Data at Risk?
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Representatives. Efforts to curtail
those studies-or in some cases,
stop them completely-have so far
been blocked by the Senate and
the Obama administration. So far
President-elect Donald Trump and
his nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, have given
no indication of support for largescale federal studies or education
research more generally in their
public statements or on the transition website, but they have voiced
concern over invasions of privacy.
"Ideological differences usually
don't matter all that much when it
comes to education research-there
seldom seems to be argument about
doing sound research to find out
what works and disseminating that
which we know evidence supports,"
said Max McConkey, the communications director of the research
group WestEd. "But the incoming
administration appears to be unlike
any other I've ever seen, so all bets
are off, for now."

Building on Legacy
The past decade has seen a major
expansion of both federal education
data and the infrastructure to use
it in policy and program design,
spurred under both the Republican Bush and Democratic Obama
administrations. The number of
regional educational research coalitions like the Chicago Consortium
for School Research have expanded
from a few to several dozen, in part
thanks to federal grants, and federal support also helped every state
develop a longitudinal student-data
system to track individual student
data from kindergarten through
high school graduation.
The Obama administration also
used administrative rules and evidence requirements in competitive
grant programs like Investing in
Innovation, or i3, to push the use of
data and evidence in program and
policy development. Both the evidence standards and the competitive grant program have since been
codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the newly contracted
regional education laboratories are
focused on building more local research and data alliances.
"I think that research and practice
being brought together in new ways
has staying power in the field. I'd
be very surprised if that changed,"
said Ruth Curran Neild, who recently stepped down as the designated director of the Institute of
Education Sciences, the Education
Department's research agency. "At
IES, there's a lot of strength at the
everyday civil-servant level. ... Now,
could someone come in and change
that? Yeah," Neild said, but, "those
cultures can last if they're really
built in."
Yet the data and evidence requirements in ESSA are only
strong if states are willing to implement them and the Education
Department under DeVos is willing
to enforce them, said Daniel Losen,
the director of the Center for Civil

Rights Remedies, part of the Civil
Rights Project at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
"There's information in the statute, but enforcement of reporting to
the public has always been a struggle," he said. "How do you respond
to schools and districts that thumb
their noses at reporting requirements? ... I am concerned that this
administration will not be supportive of research generally and data
collections in particular. It's easier
to say whatever you want if there
is no counternarrative that has evidence to support it."

Reporting Concerns
Enforcing data reporting will be
a particular problem for the Education Department's nearly 50-yearold Civil Rights Data Collection,
experts say.
Civil rights data significantly expanded in both scope and use under
the Obama administration, providing in-depth demographic, discipline-related, and academic information on every public school and
district in the country. Beyond being
used for investigating reported educational inequities, the survey is
also now the main source of more
basic school-level information, such
as teacher certification and chronic
absenteeism.
But "everyone would identify OCR
as potentially at risk," said Michele
McLaughlin, the president of the
Knowledge Alliance, which advocates for education research groups.
For most of the civil rights collection's nearly 50-year history, it included only a representative sample
of districts from each state. In 2000,
and then from 2011-12 onward, the
collection expanded to every public
school in the country that spends
at least half of each day on educational services. This includes charter
and magnet schools, juvenile justice
facilities, virtual schools, and alternative schools for students with
disabilities-but it does not include
public schools on tribal lands and
military bases or private schools.
The omission of private schools is
a concern for Losen. Trump made
expansion of private-school voucher
programs the center of his campaign platform for education, and
"from a data perspective, there's a
huge problem for civil rights laws
and data requirements for private
schools," Losen said. "Will they have
to report on civil rights or teacher
certifications?"
Education watchers are keeping the closest tabs on the biggest
federal data collections: the Census
Bureau's 2020 decennial survey and
the American Community Survey, a
more detailed study by the bureau
of 3.5 million households a year.
"Certainly the ACS is one of the
main areas where there is potential for there to be problems, because there have been threats to it
practically every single year," said
Laura Speer, the Annie E. Casey
Foundation's associate director of
policy reform and advocacy.
Trump's designated budget director-who would also oversee

the Census Bureau-is U.S. Rep.
John Michael "Mick" Mulvaney, a
Republican from South Carolina
and a fiscal hawk who repeatedly
voted and advocated for making
the ACS voluntary or eliminating
it completely in favor of privatizing
federal Census data collection. The
House has passed such amendments in three of the last four
years, though they were always
scuttled in the Senate.
While Speer doubts that the ACS
would be fully privatized, "the real,
more likely threat is to have it be no
longer mandatory. That would have
a major impact on the reliability
of the data," she said. The Census
Bureau has estimated that making
the survey voluntary would reduce
participation by 20 percent, increase
annual costs by $35 million to
$90 million a year, and reduce its
accuracy, particularly in rural areas
and communities of color.
That could hit census education
data particularly hard, said Speer,
because children are already more
likely to live in households that are
often undercounted in the decennial census, including highly mobile
or impoverished families or those in
racial or linguistic minority groups.
"Because we don't do the [decennial] census long-form [survey]
anymore, the data in the ACS has
become the go-to place to get information at a local level. If we were to
no longer have the ACS, the ripple
effects within government would be
substantial," said Speer, who manages the Casey Foundation's Kids
Count Data Book, which uses both
census surveys for research and to
target grants. "For us, it's a really
critical resource."

Budget Issues
Moreover, three years ahead of the
2020 census, the bureau is still operating on funding near 2010 levels.
Congress's continuing resolution for
the federal government, for example, provides $240 million less than
requested for the census.
"The census is a finely tuned
watch with a 10-year funding and
planning cycle, and it's been fairly
dramatically underfunded for several years," said Phil Sparks, a codirector of the Census Project, which
tracks policies and use on the surveys. (Sparks is not related to this
article's author.)
Census data, Sparks said, "are the
cornerstone of education policy and
funding. It is these numbers that
empower everything from Head
Start to higher education."
Speer agreed, noting "the lack of
support for the budget could become
very problematic very quickly."
McLaughlin, of the Knowledge
Alliance, said leadership on behalf
of federal education data likely will
have to come from the states and
Congress.
"This is where [Republican House
Speaker Paul Ryan] meets Trump,"
she said. "Ryan has always been
into better data, better outcomes,
more accountability. With the new
administration coming in, we'll have
to see where it stands."

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Education Week - January 18, 2017

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